EGpu's
they're cool imo

What is an EGPU?

It’s like a GPU but it’s External, which means you can plug it into any laptop and power up its (often shit) graphical power by 10x with a desktop level card.

I’ve replaced my PC with this setup, because there’s no reason not to. There are only advantages.*

First of all, I already bought a seperate laptop to untether my PC’ing from my house, sometimes we all need to leave the house with a laptop whether that be for Uni, School, Work, or just to go to a friends house. Why duplicate that hardware? New laptops have CPU’s with similar potential to desktop computers anyway, e.g. this is the performance comparison between my new laptop to my (at the time) 2 year old pc.

Single-Core Multi-Core 0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 Framework (Linux) Old PC (Windows) Laptops also tend to be more stable when it comes to things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, It may be a skill-issue but every desktop I've owned has had weird issues with bluetooth, when you have a laptop there are support forms of people who have the exact same setup as you, making diagnosing issues way easier. e.g. Windows showing bluetooth is disabled for no reason :<

The *

You do have to give up some GPU performance, you can make some of this back if you get video out directly from the GPU but personally this hasn’t been very stable for me, I can’t get it to work on Linux, and on windows if you boot with a HDMI plugged into the GPU it just boot-loops, (it works if you boot then plug in the GPU after). These issues don’t exist if you just eat the 10% performance loss and get video out from the laptop, I’ve found this to be stable and personally the loss hasn’t been noticable.

Why is there performance loss?

Some performance loss is just inherent* to eGPU’s the PCIe information has to be encoded and decoded on either side of the connection, this takes time and so you lose some performance, nothing you can do about it.*

Thunderbolt also has less bandwidth than jacked out fully-fledged PCIe. This can manifest as performance loss when;

  1. High-resolution information (e.g. detailed textures), may take up more bandwidth than is available, forcing the GPU to wait before rendering the next frame
  2. When your FPS is toooo good transferring rendered frames back to the iGPU for displaying will eat up some of the already limited bandwidth

Why idc

Now for some people e.g. professional GAMMERRRS who need 467fps and the lowest potential latency on valorant, these could be dealbreakers, personally however I never noticed the performance loss from switching, and the convenience by far outweighed the cost.