*Note that I pretty much only use synthetic benchmarks for these things and then generally just see how games feel without benchmarks. This is just for fun.
I'm mostly just making this thread because for about a year now I've been using and playing around with eGPU's on my laptop and I thought the results were fairly interesting. At any rate, last year I upgraded my laptop from a Thinkpad T480s with a very baseline dedicated GPU, an MX150.
Here's the MX150 at stock speeds in Heaven benchmark. It's fine, I guess?
Always the tinkerer and looking for something a little better, I decided to see what I could do with this dedicated laptop GPU so I repasted it with Thermal Grizzly Kyronaut and started testing various overclocks on it. I'll spare you the details, but I did eventually land on a 250Mhz Core overclock and a 1000Mhz Memory overclock, which got me some solid gains in performance.
This worked great for a long time, but I eventually decided that my T480s at 14" and 3+lbs with charger was a bit too porky for me. I elected to sidegrade/upgrade to a 1st generation Thinkpad X1 Nano. I've had it for about a year now and I'm pretty damn satisfied with it as a general computing device, 13", under 2lbs, great keyboard, speakers and screen, a massive build quality bump over my old machine. I paid a little extra for more performant integrated graphics in the Intel Iris Xe 96 (versus less powerful 80). It's by no means incredible, but it was a decent sidegrade to what I had already been using:
Things quickly took a turn when I realized that this PC had a Thunderbolt 4 port and I realized that a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU was finally an option for me. I immediately went on eBay and started scouting around for something affordable in the space and eventually landed on a copycat of the Sonnet Puck for a mere $150:
This thing was pretty cool. It was packing a Radeon 5500XT, as well as an integrated dock, so I could attach it to a couple of external monitors (if I wanted, which I don't) and had a few USB-A ports, which was a nice little feature since my new laptop only has USB-C. It also was small and light enough to travel with me and I ended-up taking it on a couple of trips with me over the summer, including a road trip and a flight. I ended-up barely using it in either instance, defaulting instead to my Steam Deck most of the time, but it was neat to have the option. To top it all off, it added a pretty significant amount of performance to my computer:
Now having owned it for somewhere around 9-10 months, I've been overall pretty happy with it in every way. That said, I had started playing Elite Dangerous a few weeks ago and ended-up finding the performance pretty lacking. I could get 60FPS no problem out in space, but approaching a station, especially a large one, I saw my FPS dip into the teens and 20's and it ended-up being similar on foot in stations. Of course, this immediately got me thinking about ways to upgrade even further. I would love to have a similar eGPU to my puck, but the only option exceeds my grasp by a decent amount and is more than I paid for this computer in the first place. So I instead started looking at used GPU enclosures on eBay and ran across a lot of Razer Core X enclosures for fairly reasonable prices. It wasn't long before I found one that ended-up being a fairly solid deal at $240 with an included RX580.
Now the plan here was always to sell the RX580, as it's not as performant as the 5500XT I already had, though it later occured to me that it would be a solid upgrade to my kids computer, which is currently housing a 750ti. Unfortunately, it didn't pan out as the RX580 is slightly broken and has artifacting issues, so it'll go up for sale for parts only. It wasn't listed in the description as being busted, but I'm not going to cry about it given that it was a bonus and I would have paid more for just the enclosure alone from other sellers.
At any rate, this thing is a behemoth. Here's my old Puck sitting on top.
I don't think I'll be traveling with this thing. It also lacks the Dock capability of the old Puck, which will be a bit of a loss, but I never used it anyway and not having it will allow for (theoretically) more bandwidth through the Thundebolt port since it won't also be sending anything from the other connections.
Now that I had it though, it was time to figure out what to put into it. I spent several days researching my options but ultimately decided to go with a Radeon 6650 XT, primarily because they could be had at relatively affordable prices and because I wanted to stick with AMD so I could be lazy and not need to uninstall and reinstall drivers. After testing with my 6700 XT out of my desktop, I discovered I could just plug in the Razer Core X and the driver was the exact same one as for the 5500XT. At any rate, I picked-up a 6650 XT for $190.
But those gains:
At this point, I've already stopped playing Elite, but it's nice to have the upgrade. Transport Fever 2 is running better than ever, Cyberpunk 2077 runs great at Low settings and I'm sure I'll find even more to be happy with as I spend more time with it.
That said, it's not all roses. Thunderbolt is pretty limited as far as bandwidth goes so there is some periodic stuttering here and there and my lows are lower than they'd be in a dedicated desktop setup. To further that, I like to play on my laptop in particular, which is absolutely terrible for performance. The PC has to send data out through the Thunderbolt processor to the GPU, then back from the GPU through the same paths so performance loss is pretty significant. It can be mitigated some by connecting to an external monitor, but that's just not something I'm going to do right now; that said, it is an option for the future if I ever decide to get rid of my main desktop PC and then stick with just a laptop.
Here's a few tests I did with my 6700 XT
Going back into the laptop display:
Now to an external monitor:
There's almost a 30% difference in performance between using the laptops internal display and an external, so I'm essentially leaving performance on the table here. That said, I'm still happy with what I've got and I like gaming on my laptop itself, so I'll live with the sacrifices for the time being.
All told, I'm in for about $430 altogether, but I have the option to upgrade the GPU in the future if there's a need. Plus I'll absolutely be selling the RX580 and most probably selling my old Puck GPU, so I'm hoping to bring my overall cost down under $300, but we'll see how that shakes out.
I'm mostly just making this thread because for about a year now I've been using and playing around with eGPU's on my laptop and I thought the results were fairly interesting. At any rate, last year I upgraded my laptop from a Thinkpad T480s with a very baseline dedicated GPU, an MX150.
Here's the MX150 at stock speeds in Heaven benchmark. It's fine, I guess?
Always the tinkerer and looking for something a little better, I decided to see what I could do with this dedicated laptop GPU so I repasted it with Thermal Grizzly Kyronaut and started testing various overclocks on it. I'll spare you the details, but I did eventually land on a 250Mhz Core overclock and a 1000Mhz Memory overclock, which got me some solid gains in performance.
This worked great for a long time, but I eventually decided that my T480s at 14" and 3+lbs with charger was a bit too porky for me. I elected to sidegrade/upgrade to a 1st generation Thinkpad X1 Nano. I've had it for about a year now and I'm pretty damn satisfied with it as a general computing device, 13", under 2lbs, great keyboard, speakers and screen, a massive build quality bump over my old machine. I paid a little extra for more performant integrated graphics in the Intel Iris Xe 96 (versus less powerful 80). It's by no means incredible, but it was a decent sidegrade to what I had already been using:
Things quickly took a turn when I realized that this PC had a Thunderbolt 4 port and I realized that a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU was finally an option for me. I immediately went on eBay and started scouting around for something affordable in the space and eventually landed on a copycat of the Sonnet Puck for a mere $150:
This thing was pretty cool. It was packing a Radeon 5500XT, as well as an integrated dock, so I could attach it to a couple of external monitors (if I wanted, which I don't) and had a few USB-A ports, which was a nice little feature since my new laptop only has USB-C. It also was small and light enough to travel with me and I ended-up taking it on a couple of trips with me over the summer, including a road trip and a flight. I ended-up barely using it in either instance, defaulting instead to my Steam Deck most of the time, but it was neat to have the option. To top it all off, it added a pretty significant amount of performance to my computer:
Now having owned it for somewhere around 9-10 months, I've been overall pretty happy with it in every way. That said, I had started playing Elite Dangerous a few weeks ago and ended-up finding the performance pretty lacking. I could get 60FPS no problem out in space, but approaching a station, especially a large one, I saw my FPS dip into the teens and 20's and it ended-up being similar on foot in stations. Of course, this immediately got me thinking about ways to upgrade even further. I would love to have a similar eGPU to my puck, but the only option exceeds my grasp by a decent amount and is more than I paid for this computer in the first place. So I instead started looking at used GPU enclosures on eBay and ran across a lot of Razer Core X enclosures for fairly reasonable prices. It wasn't long before I found one that ended-up being a fairly solid deal at $240 with an included RX580.
Now the plan here was always to sell the RX580, as it's not as performant as the 5500XT I already had, though it later occured to me that it would be a solid upgrade to my kids computer, which is currently housing a 750ti. Unfortunately, it didn't pan out as the RX580 is slightly broken and has artifacting issues, so it'll go up for sale for parts only. It wasn't listed in the description as being busted, but I'm not going to cry about it given that it was a bonus and I would have paid more for just the enclosure alone from other sellers.
At any rate, this thing is a behemoth. Here's my old Puck sitting on top.
I don't think I'll be traveling with this thing. It also lacks the Dock capability of the old Puck, which will be a bit of a loss, but I never used it anyway and not having it will allow for (theoretically) more bandwidth through the Thundebolt port since it won't also be sending anything from the other connections.
Now that I had it though, it was time to figure out what to put into it. I spent several days researching my options but ultimately decided to go with a Radeon 6650 XT, primarily because they could be had at relatively affordable prices and because I wanted to stick with AMD so I could be lazy and not need to uninstall and reinstall drivers. After testing with my 6700 XT out of my desktop, I discovered I could just plug in the Razer Core X and the driver was the exact same one as for the 5500XT. At any rate, I picked-up a 6650 XT for $190.
But those gains:
At this point, I've already stopped playing Elite, but it's nice to have the upgrade. Transport Fever 2 is running better than ever, Cyberpunk 2077 runs great at Low settings and I'm sure I'll find even more to be happy with as I spend more time with it.
That said, it's not all roses. Thunderbolt is pretty limited as far as bandwidth goes so there is some periodic stuttering here and there and my lows are lower than they'd be in a dedicated desktop setup. To further that, I like to play on my laptop in particular, which is absolutely terrible for performance. The PC has to send data out through the Thunderbolt processor to the GPU, then back from the GPU through the same paths so performance loss is pretty significant. It can be mitigated some by connecting to an external monitor, but that's just not something I'm going to do right now; that said, it is an option for the future if I ever decide to get rid of my main desktop PC and then stick with just a laptop.
Here's a few tests I did with my 6700 XT
Going back into the laptop display:
Now to an external monitor:
There's almost a 30% difference in performance between using the laptops internal display and an external, so I'm essentially leaving performance on the table here. That said, I'm still happy with what I've got and I like gaming on my laptop itself, so I'll live with the sacrifices for the time being.
All told, I'm in for about $430 altogether, but I have the option to upgrade the GPU in the future if there's a need. Plus I'll absolutely be selling the RX580 and most probably selling my old Puck GPU, so I'm hoping to bring my overall cost down under $300, but we'll see how that shakes out.
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