Gyroscopic Investing

My wife does a lot of video editing on a Windows laptop and from what I’ve read, it would be a lot faster if she had an external GPU. When i type ‘egpu’, what pops up at Amazon is mainly just an enclosure for a graphics card.

So, I guess I need to shell out for an enclosure and a compatible card, which I’m willing to do.

Has anyone here bought a beefy graphics card and used it externally? Is it a pain in the ass to set up once you know it’s compatible?

I have never heard of such a thing for a laptop? I don't think that's possible. The card needs to be tied to the CPU through a really fast bus, PCIe, and that is not available externally on a laptop. You need to buy a desktop and then a PCIe video card to plug into the PCIe slot, usually x16, and enable external graphics.

Thunderbolt can definitely do it. If you have a USB-C connector with Thunderbolt capability, you can connect an external enclosure and run PCI-e lanes over Thunderbolt.

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Well, I had no idea! But now you are spending $250 to $1000 on a box nearly as big as a small desktop to tie in a GPU.

Thunderbolt 3 runs at 40Gbps (5GB/s), PCIe x16 is 32GB/s.

Not able to dig deeper into whether the available 6x bus speed of PCIe is used fully when graphic intensive stuff is being done, but that is quite a difference in bandwidth. Thunderbolt is meant to compete with USB3. While PCIe is doable over it, it is not nearly as fast as a native x16 slot.

This was an informative article on this topic:
https://www.tested.com/tech/457440-theo ... underbolt/

Everything down to x16 1.1 and its equivalents (x8 2.0, x4 3.0) provides sufficient gaming performance even with the latest graphics hardware, losing only 5% average in worst-case. [emphasis added] Only at even lower speeds we see drastic framerate losses, which would warrant action.

That's saying that 16 lanes of PCIe 1.1 is sufficient for all but the worst case. It also says that most systems when doing multiple graphics cards automatically drop the lanes assigned to each one to 8 or even 4 instead of 16.

Each lane of PCIe 1.1 is 2Gbps, so 16 of them is 32Gbps, well under Thunderbolt's 40.

Unless what's in the laptop already is a pretty supercharged GPU, adding an external one via Thunderbolt should provide a huge upgrade, even if it isn't PCIe directly.

...But I'm not entirely sure that video editing uses a whole lot of GPU. I would think that's more CPU than anything else.

Thanks, guys. I would have replied sooner, but I’m traveling.
Yeah, the first thing I noticed is that laptops with thunderbolt 3 can take these.
I am going to make this happen.

daulstow, do keep us updated on this! I've been curious about the whole eGPU thing for a while.

My current MacBook uses intel graphics. Boourns.

Will do