Dell had something near the millennium, I think the options were a Rage Pro or a slightly different Rage Pro though, nothing fantastic.... and that's about as far as it went really with anything I know about, when manufacturers had separate video boards they only seemed to last one generation and only seemed to have two choices of not all that far apart things to put in them. That probably makes your best bet finding the smallest possible regular PCI card and hacking a mini PCI connector on a ribbon cable to it.

But were they PCI cards, utilized a PCI bus (which I imagine most everything had in those years)? Was it an implementation of an actual PCI card, or something close, but with a physically different interface?

for instance:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/292661655897?ssPageN … 353.m1438.l2649

this is around 2005ish I think. This is why I asked for specifics about interfaces. There were pcmcia video cards, I'm pretty sure a few mini pci video cards. The chips are chips, but they're made to conform to some sort of interface, irrespective of actual physical connection.

The darn things are so cheap it seems worth it to grab a few. I'm looking for manuals specific to the G41 Thinkpad. At first glance the maintenance manual doesn't seem particularly helpful.

I actually have a mini PCI to PCI adapter card that came with a development system I bought on eBay quite a while ago.

From the bit of research I did, the main problem with using a higher powered video card is going to be the very limited available power of the mini PCI slot.

I have a usb2 to VGA adapter.

only mini PCI card I've ever seen were these rage XL or somthing like that. Back in the day al most all of that stuff was proprietary, except for the MXM standards. Most of the time they just soldered the vga to the main board and it wasn't up-gradable