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if you've got a reasonably modern desktop pc upgrading your gaming
experience is no big deal take out your old graphics card slot in a new one and
shazam your games go from blurry slideshow to smooth and crispy like a
pringle but let's say that you enjoy portability
not only in your potato products but also in your computing ones so you've
ditched your desktop for a do-it-all laptop and you're wondering how to
upgrade the graphics card on that when you realize
oh wait you can't because assuming that
it has a discrete GPU at all the chips inside are soldered on
so wait then what you just have to buy a new laptop with the graphics you want or
go back to a bulky desktop actually do people even read the title no you don't
as long as your current notebook has a Thunderbolt 3 port you may be able to
use an external GPU enclosure these
devices look a little bit like a small form-factor pc but they are built solely
to contain a desktop graphics card
inside you'll typically find a full length pci express slot power cables at
least one case fan to help keep it cool and a power supply either on the inside
or on the outside nicer enclosures also
feature other creature comforts like usb and Ethernet ports that connect to your
pc through Thunderbolt internal drive mounts for your game library or even RGB
lighting which may or may not be welcome but back to the meat and potatoes of
this topic the reason these external enclosures are suddenly popping up for a
product that was thought of as exclusively for internal desktop use not
too long ago is because the Thunderbolt 3 controller in your computer can
interface with your system's pci express bus at very high speeds
though that isn't to say that external GPU enclosures offer the same
performance as a graphics card plugged directly into a motherboard or even a
desktop grade graphics chip that has been incorporated directly into your
laptop's main board a recent trend among notebook makers the Thunderbolt 3.0
connection is active this means that it has internal logic that processes the
signals that pass through it and it only supports up to four pci express
3.0 lanes rather than 16. so you could
easily see around a 20 or 25 reduction
in frame rates compared to an otherwise similar desktop potentially even more
depending on your exact hardware configuration and the games you're
trying to play and if you want to play on your laptop's
internal monitor with your external GPU
that GPU will be competing with the display data being looped back to your
system leading to yet another significant performance hit
topping it all off these enclosures tend to be expensive starting at around 300
us dollars when we shot this episode and going up to over 500 for premium ones
it should be noted however that the alienware graphics amplifier is a bit of
an exception here but it uses a proprietary pci express connection that
can only be found on alienware branded laptops
so then are external GPU enclosures just a waste of money for suckers well no
they can be a compelling option if you have an existing non-gaming laptop or
one with a weaker GPU and a Thunderbolt 3 port and they can even be useful for
non-gaming tasks adding GPU acceleration to productivity suites like adobe
creative cloud or even for plugging in non-graphics expansion cards like audio
interfaces NVMe ssds high-speed network
cards etc and helping matters some of
the smallest and lightest enclosures are actually being sold with graphics cards
included now at a net discount helping to offset the high cost a bit
now there are still a few gotchas to watch out for you'll need to make sure
that your laptop's Thunderbolt 3 port uses four lanes rather than two and it's
preferred that they come directly off the CPU rather than through the chipset
the latter can lead to bottlenecks but if your hardware setup looks good a
laptop plus egpu might make getting to and from your next lan party a little
bit easier unless you like to bench press full tower pcs in your spare time
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