Laptops are great, and I’d even consider them worthy of being desktop replacements. Well, almost. They’ve always been compromised in some way or the other — you can’t break the laws of physics, after all. All that heat has to go somewhere, and you’ll quickly find yourself choosing between efficiency and performance.
Gaming laptops are bulky, and your usual Ultrabook is nowhere near as powerful enough to handle something graphically expensive. Thanks to the magic that is a Thunderbolt (or USB 4) port, it is possible to hook up a dedicated desktop GPU to an otherwise unassumingly thin laptop and boost its performance by a huge margin.
I recently managed to snag a new eGPU dock, (after my weird hacked-up Oculink-to-USB-4 build) and the convenience has been rather remarkable.
An upgrade in all the ways
Ports, ports and more ports
My previous attempt at building an external GPU enclosure went off well, at first, that is. The contraption quickly grew even more convoluted and unreliable over time, ending in a dead GPU.
I needed a proper enclosure this time around and happened to stumble upon one from Amazon. A few days later, the kit was finally at my doorstep. The next step involved disassembling it and squishing in both a desktop graphics card and an SFX PSU, which I realized a bit too late).
It was time to connect the dock via Thunderbolt, and I ran into a peculiar problem. Even with the power cable plugged in, the dock wouldn’t turn on — I’d have to manually press the power button before anything else.
With that quirk out of the way, I was finally able to connect the dock to the laptop, and it was immediately recognized in my Linux install. The whole process was pretty much plug and play, but I did have to manually install the vulkan-radeon package for gaming.
Going back to the dock, it also has a USB 4 pass-through port, which means you could always daisy-chain another USB 4 accessory into it. I ran two external monitors across this port, along with some USB peripherals. The dock also has a single USB-A port, which could be handy for plugging in a game controller.
Making display hot plug work
A sneaky workaround
Not to be confused with actual GPU hot plugging, display hot plugging should, in theory, let me disconnect and reconnect the laptop to a series of external monitors without any fuss. In other words, it should preserve the workspaces and transfer them over to the laptop display once I’ve unplugged the eGPU.
In practice, though, it’s a mess. As far as I know, this whole process only works reliably on desktop environments like KDE Plasma and GNOME. Unfortunately, I happen to be using Niri, a tiling window manager which seemingly still lacks this feature.
Unplugging the eGPU causes a freeze, and this really wasn’t a viable setup in this way. So, I had to improvise. I ended up chaining a USB 4 hub into the extra USB 4 out port of the eGPU dock and was able to connect my displays to it (along with a few peripherals and wired internet).
Unplugging the GPU works, and the Thunderbolt rescan script automatically does the heavy lifting — as long as nothing runs on the eGPU.
Gaming and productivity
Massive leaps and a few problems
I went from a measly integrated Intel Arc GPU to a proper desktop-class AMD GPU (in this case, the RX 6800). As you can imagine, the jump was massive. The rig could handle whatever game I threw at it, without any issues. Crimson Desert and Pragmata both performed remarkably well — staying well above 60 frames per second while at the High presets with some upscaling enabled.
Gaming was my primary goal here, and so far it has been a breeze. Even for general desktop productivity, it’s a pretty impressive upgrade. The whole desktop has felt a lot more responsive, too.
There are a few gotchas though, and eGPUs can be very finicky solutions. GPU drivers, for starters. It’s pretty much plug-and-play on Linux (although it requires a one-time install), but on Windows it’s a nightmare.
AMD-AMD systems have driver compatibility issues, and Nvidia cards straight up refuse to work unless you use an “error 43” fixer script.
You’ll also want to temper expectations here — there is a significant loss of bandwidth when using Thunderbolt 4/USB4 v1, and this affects performance. You will also notice a drop in frame rates (when compared to a desktop running the same GPU), but compared to the integrated GPU it is still a massive step-up.
A glimpse into the future
eGPUs feel like a really cool concept. They certainly aren’t new, though. eGPUs have been here for a long time, and the tech has only started to catch up recently. Thunderbolt 5 and USB 4v2 solutions are finally being released into the wild, and the bandwidth boost compared to the last generation is staggering.
While they are still admittedly niche, eGPUs are amazing if you happen to have the need for a single, lightweight machine for work, play and travel. Without a dedicated graphics card, the laptop is expected to last longer throughout the day — and you could always dock it to the external graphics card when you want to game (and charge it simultaneously).
We’re clearly not there yet, but I’d hope to see this eventually go mainstream.