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.
Here are our picks for the best eGPUs in 2020.Īn 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. Update: The eGPU landscape has changed a lot since we originally published this article back in 2015, especially with the advent of Thunderbolt 3. So what is an eGPU, and why should you care? Read on to find out.
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Lately however, as connection standards get speedier and PC games continue to demand more and more from the machines we play them on, both computer manufacturers and gaming hobbyists have realized that the reality of an eGPU on everyone’s desk may be a lot closer than everyone thinks. Imagine a perfect world, where you can buy the thinnest, lightest, and sleekest laptop around, but still get the same amount of gaming horsepower out of it that you’d expect out of a full-tower desktop. For years, the idea of supercharging a regular old laptop by plugging in an external graphics card was stuck in the realm of fantasy, a task that only the most hardcore DIY-ers would take on after a weekend in their garage and enough circuit board soldering to make anyone’s head spin.