I love the idea of external graphics cards.
At their best, they allow you to have a super light
and portable laptop that you can easily convert
into a shockingly potent gaming system
when you have time to sit down
and you happen to have an outlet nearby.
But the main complaint we hear about them is,
come on you guys, you can get the same level of performance
with a PCI Express card for way less.
But how do you put one of these in one of these?
Ha, the answer is with one of these.
Meet the EXP-GDC or The Beast,
the cheap and dirty way to boost your laptop's gaming power.
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So there have actually been quite a few iterations
of The Beast, but the previous ones
never really appealed to us,
mostly because they connected to the system,
either to external ports like Express Card,
a dying, if not completely dead standard,
or to internal ports that couldn't be spared.
Most laptops only have a single mini PCIe slot
that is usually taken up by the Wi-Fi,
a fairly essential component of the mobile experience.
But thanks to NVMe, version 9.5 here has some big advantages.
So first, it gets four times the number of PCI Express lanes,
four of them here running at Gen 3 speeds.
And second, some mobile devices actually have
more than one M.2 slot, like this.
Like this one.
So you should be able to have both a high-speed boot drive
and an external GPU connected at the same time.
Furthermore, because there's no protocol overhead,
it should actually perform better
than Thunderbolt 3 enclosures like this one
at a significantly lower cost, in theory.
So, to put that to the test, we are hooking our Beast up
to the de-bottlenecker feature.
We've got a GTX 5,000 here, a powerful desktop
with all three of the connectivity methods
that we want to evaluate.
We also grabbed a GTX 1080.
So, this thing is obviously much more powerful
than any laptop on the market,
but we need this combination of a fast CPU
and a high-performance GPU to help us identify
which interfaces, if any, are causing a bottleneck
that will adversely affect
the performance of our overall system.
This is pretty trippy.
This is like, I don't know,
just having your graphics card like out here.
It's kind of like, it's like if you had like a human body
that's totally normal and then the heart is on the table
next to it and it's just connected
with tubes and wires and stuff, but it works.
So, in graphically intense games,
you can see the performance of the Beast
ends up about where we would expect,
between the Razer Core with Thunderbolt 3
and a graphics card running at full 16X speed
plugged directly into the motherboard.
Although it should be noted that in older CPU-bound games
like CSGO, the FPS was comparable for all three.
Okay, so that all sounds pretty great.
If you've got a laptop then with a spare M.2 NVMe slot,
like this one that we mentioned before,
you could get better than Thunderbolt 3, like I said,
and you could get a Thunderbolt 3 levels of performance
on the cheap-ish.
However, I still find myself asking,
who is this actually useful for?
Like, are you really gonna go out and buy a brand new laptop
then literally cut a hole in the bottom of it
for the Beast's cabling that will still need to be run?
But, consider something a little older, like this MSI GL62.
It packs a GTX 960.
It's got a 740 M which, I mean, is better than nothing,
but barely.
So, if you're looking to play modern games,
you're basically plum out of luck,
even though your CPU is still decent, unless...
Ah, yes, there it is.
Even though this is a couple of years old
and our config of it actually used a slow mechanical hard drive
the GL62 does feature an NVMe-capable M.2 slot,
which means that, thanks to that still-decent
quad-core CPU I mentioned, and the upgradable RAM,
remember upgradable RAM, you guys?
With a beast and something like a GTX 960,
you could turn the GL62 into a gaming-ready machine again
for just a couple hundred bucks, at least in theory.
We have tried everything with this machine.
BIOS updates, disabling the integrated graphics,
disabling the dedicated graphics,
newer drivers, older drivers,
older cards, newer cards.
It just won't work.
So the working theory, based on some discussion
over on the eGPU forums,
those guys are awesome, by the way,
is that passing a PCI Express signal
over a fairly long couple of HDMI cables here
leads to a fair bit of signal degradation,
which was fine on our X299 motherboard
because the M.2 slot is physically close to the CPU socket
and has a strong signal,
but might cause problems in laptops
where the PCI Express signal might be within spec,
but a little bit lower.
Now, some folks suggested that a shielded,
M.2 to PCIe 4X adapter might actually do better in this case,
and they might be right,
but at 70 US dollars plus the cost of power
and some kind of a mounting mechanism,
we don't consider that a viable solution
outside of rare edge cases,
like recycling an old laptop
as a no longer portable ghetto gaming desktop either.
With that said,
let's say that you were trying to do that.
What kind of compatibility could you expect?
As it turns out, not that great.
Even the Dell Inspiron Gaming,
a machine that this approach could make sense for,
requires a custom BIOS,
and the rest of our efforts basically went
a little something like this.
So yeah, we gave up because to get the beast to work
with the Triton 700, for example,
we'd need a custom BIOS with RAID disabled,
and PCI Express hot swap enabled
in order to get compatibility
with anything that would be faster
than what's already built into it.
So a 10th gen NVIDIA card.
So there are people out there
who will happily fork over 100 to 150 bucks,
like the owners of the aging laptops
that we alluded to before,
or I mean, another good example would be someone
with like a mini ITX desktop,
like a mini ITX desktop,
who wants to add 10 gig networking
or something along those lines.
But for everyone else, the compatibility,
both physical and in firmware,
the user unfriendliness, the general flakiness,
the lack of documentation,
the fact that you need to reboot
to plug and unplug it from the system,
and the fact that you'll probably end up
voiding your warranty are going to confine this product
to a niche within a niche within a niche forever.
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