Instead they have their own proprietary cables, which essentially amount to long flexible PCIe x16 slots that achieve about 90 percent of the same throughput. Something that’s only cut out for gamers who are confident enough in their ability to take a laptop apart from the back to find the hidden mPCIe slot, but Alienware and MSI are looking to broaden that market very soon.īoth companies are currently offering up their own standalone eGPU “game boxes”, however neither of these use Thunderbolt 3 to get the connection linked up. Why Would I Need One?įor right now, eGPUs are still basically a fringe project. This output varies depending on the game and the amount of power your laptop’s processor has, but if products like MSI’s Thunderbolt Gaming Dock are any indication of the industry’s confidence in the new technology, the era of true plug-and-play external GPUs may finally be upon us. This in mind, early reports from basement tinkerers have posted that cards like the Nvidia 750Ti are still able to utilize about 80-90 percent of their performance over TB3, despite the bottleneck. The problem here is that even though the connection is twice as fast as its predecessor (20Gbps in TB2 compared to 40Gbps in TB3), it still doesn’t come close to measuring up to a standard PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (128Gbps), which could prove to be an issue for games that need all the power they can get out of the graphics card and then some. Several proof of concept eGPUs using Thunderbolt 3 have been on display at tradeshows lately, but these are still rehearsed tech demos that don’t push the technology past where it could theoretically go. See, in desktop graphics card setups, the GPU is connected to the motherboard through what’s known as a “PCIe x16” slot, which at its most current iteration (v 3.0) is capable of transmitting upwards of 15.75 gigabytes every single second.Ĭurrently, the great white hope for a truly plug-and-play external GPU lies in Thunderbolt 3, a part of the USB-C family that’s due to start rolling out on laptops from Acer and Lenovo sometime later this year. Long seen as the Holy Grail of universal connection capabilities, engineers at companies like AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have been working feverishly for years to find a cable that was both fast and small enough to handle the type of bandwidth that a graphics card needs to communicate with a standalone system. RELATED: G-Sync and FreeSync Explained: Variable Refresh Rates for Gaming This could all change very soon though, thanks to the advent of Thunderbolt 3.0. The problem with this dream scenario, however, lies in the details of the technology that’s necessary to make it work, which until recently has been hampered by the speed limitations present in older connection standards like USB 2.0, Thunderbolt 2, and FireWire. What an external graphics card does is act as a sort of surrogate powerhouse, one that you plug into while you’re at home and in the mood for a good gaming session, but leave behind when you and your laptop need to get on the road.
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The tech is predicated on the idea that even though most of the gaming laptops we love can handle simple games like League of Legends or Dota 2 on medium settings without losing a frame, when you really want to break out the AAA titles like Tomb Raider or Batman: Arkham Knight on ultra 4K resolution, that’s when you’ll start to hear the sound of cooling fans straining to keep up and see your graphics card drivers crashing for the fifth time in a row. RELATED: Choosing Your Next Gaming PC: Should You Build, Buy, or Get a Laptop?
Without getting too technical about it, the general concept involves hooking up a regular laptop to an external graphics card through a single cable, which can then take all of the load off your laptop’s internal GPU and put it on the more powerful extension instead. An eGPU, short for (you guessed it) “External Graphics Processing Unit” is an idea that has been floating around the ether of the Internet for years, and in the R&D departments of video card manufacturers for even longer.