Supposedly the BIOS needs to support it too, although there are ways around that. Also it’s tricky getting eGPU to work if the laptop has a discrete mobile GPU integrated, but you can get around that too.
Yes, TB3 is becoming much more common.
With the numbers these Pascal laptops are putting up, the need for one of these pretty much disappeared. Certainly at current prices.
Not at all. You can’t get a thin, light laptop with 10 hours of battery life that can also play games at maxed-out settings.
Not to mention the ease of upgrading the GPU in three years when you need a little more oomph again.
Here’s one from Asus. It has ethernet and USB ports, but bizarrely requires a separate cable for them to work, which kinda obviates the entire point. No price, but Anandtech put “not cheap” so I wouldn’t expect it to be reasonable.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10920/asus-rog-xg-station-2-egfx-enclosure-with-thunderbolt-3-launched
The process for getting my xps15 up and running with the core was fairly straightforward. The only issues is the extra I/O don’t seem to work and the core won’t show up in synapse so I can’t change the colors. Also it can’t go to sleep and wake up. But it works fine with my 960m and can be plugged and unplugged while on. Haven’t really stress tested it too much but got rock solid 60fps on titanfall2 on ultra at 1080p. (Except angel city attrition for some reason but that seems like it could be a CPU issue with ai?)
Overall very happy with everything. Would be happier if all I had to do was plug in 1 cable (as opposed to having to plug in various USB devices as well.
Sorry to hear it doesn’t work like it should. The one cable thing is really key to the whole experience feeling magical.
Fuck, I wish the ‘garish, gaudy neon gamer lighting with stripes and VTEC stickers’ aesthetic would die already so we could get some understated, subtle-looking hardware from ASUS ROG and Razer. Those Kai’s Power Tools-shaped UI abominations died in the 90s with Taiwanese mobo manufacturers.
I think the Razer Core looks very slick and understated, honestly. Pity it’s so expensive still.
The Bizonbox looks great too but is even more expensive, and the Akitio Node looks great and is $299.
I am thinking more and more that external GPU, if it can be done reliably, is a good long term solution. Because:
-
The main expense in a stonking gaming rig is the GPU, by far. $600+.
-
The CPU, memory, etc barely matters at all any more. The CPU and memory available today is so comically fast that you can buy the lowest end Core i3 (currently the Core i3-7100 which is all of $120) and it will make zero difference in real world gaming at 1080p or higher.
-
If you want a small system or a laptop, an external GPU makes it a hell of a lot more flexible. And since CPU/memory matter so little, almost every small device you can buy with a thunderbolt 3 port can magically transform into a potent gaming rig with a single plug.
-
An external GPU rig will probably be usable for a very long time (5+ years?) as PCI express is long established and Thunderbolt 3 is clearly here to stay.
-
The external GPU is not meaningfully bottlenecked by bandwidth, the impact is 10% or less.
The only downside, really, is cost. It’s more “stuff” to attach a GPU externally. But given the other pros, I think – at least for a large enough “I like my computers small, yo” segment of the gaming audience – this trend will continue to grow over time.
I found a crazy roundup of all the external GPU enclosures currently on offer:
I’m gonna go ahead and pull the trigger on the Razer Core, even though it is expensive. It’s the first so it has been out and debugged for a good while now, and it’s from a large company so it is well supported. It’s the most well known of the eGPU enclosures.
Then, once the 1080 Ti comes out, I can swap my 1080 into this box for my Skull Canyon rig …
Hmm in Linus’ video he was seeing more like 20-25% perf hit for the external GPU, compared to a desktop.
(not clear what happens when you switch to a higher resolution; would it be better, or worse?)
There’s also “loopback mode”, e.g. whether or not you run a primary display directly connected to the back of the Razer Core versus sending the graphics data to a laptop panel. That has a perf cost as well, 15%.
Also found these updated numbers showing Crysis 3 at higher resolutions on the Razer Core with 970, 1070, 1080:
I used to think that an external GPU was a good idea but I no longer think so. There seem to be a lot of hidden gotchas and they are just way too expensive.
Even with a 1060 you are paying $700 just to be able to play games at a desk (it’s a 12lb accessory so it’s not exactly easily portable). Meanwhile for $100 more you can actually build a better gaming build that can be further expanded. It also has much more uses in the long term (file storage, hosting plex, etc…)
It also has to be considered the processor in the thin laptop. For example, a lot of thin laptops have U series intel processors on them which have a high likelyhood of being the bottleneck for high end graphic cards.
It’s still a good idea, it’s just that prices haven’t come down enough yet to be really attractive.
Huh? None of those are U series mobile processors, which are made for very low TDP and are throttled under heavy load.
I hate to be the one to break this to you but a 2011 processor is often
bested by lower end 2017 processors. Even “mobile” ones.
Not when throttled, but only CPUs previously called core M and now rebranded to core i (with Y in the product code, like the core i7-7Y75) are intended to be passively cooled and suspect to severe throttling. U chips are ULV but actively cooled so throttling isn’t a major concern.
All of those CPUs you posted are for desktop processors. If you compare them to the i5-7200U (the CPU that the Razer Blade Stealth has) you can see the Mobile U processor is pretty significantly lags behind in performance.. It’s significantly lower base clock speed, only boosts to 3.1Ghz, they have lower single thread performance (which is more crucial to most games than multithread performance), and just to maintain peak performance you have to hope the cooling stays on top of things enough to maintain that performance (and many google searches show people complaining about it getting either too hot or throttling performance).
I really wonder if it’s something with TB3 that’s making these so expensive. Dell was able to debut a proprietary external GPU system doing their own R&D and making one (that supposedly works well) for $200. All the TB2 eGPUs are $200 yet for some reason every TB3 eGPU enclosures are $500. Maybe licensing the tb3 controller board is expensive.
Supposedly intel charges much less for TB3 than TB2, hoping to make it more popular. But we don’t have the BOM so that’s all guesswork.
Honestly I think it’s all profit margin.