EGPU Group Test
We test and review a range of EGPUS and deliver a verdict on which you should consider investing in as a 3D artist
We test and review a selection of external processing units
The idea behind an external GPU (EGPU) is straightforward. Take any desktop graphics card, capable of delivering the kind of performance needed to run professional 3D applications, and put it into an external enclosure connected to a PC, rather than housed inside a tower chassis or shrunk down to fit into a laptop. It offers the freedom to use 3D software on devices where the option for powerful graphics hardware otherwise doesn’t exist.
An obvious candidate is small mini-itx PCS or the Mac mini, which usually have a decent CPU and plenty of memory but rely on Intel’s relatively weedy integrated graphics hardware, which definitely isn’t suitable for highend graphics tasks.
But it’s absolutely perfect for thin laptops that rely on puny graphics integrated into the CPU. An EGPU enclosure is like a dock on steroids, giving you high-end graphics performance, an external display, battery charging, and perhaps additional USB ports and wired network connectivity too, all through a single cable.
It’s made possible thanks to Thunderbolt technology. Thunderbolt exposes up to four lanes of the PCIE bus for use by external devices, and offers 40Gbps of bandwidth.
Even though this sounds like a lot, it’s still a bottleneck compared with the performance you get from a graphics card connected directly to a PC motherboard, which can use all 16 lanes of the PCIE bus. You’ll only ever get the best possible rendering performance from a traditional desktop tower.
That said, an EGPU has some attractive benefits of its own. Buy a laptop with discrete graphics and you’re forever stuck with that specification. But with an external enclosure you can always swap out the GPU and upgrade it. And you can spread out the cost too, perhaps first buying a nifty thin and portable laptop, then adding graphics later.
A number of manufacturers have now jumped on the EGPU bandwagon. They’re sold both with a GPU out of the box or as a barebones enclosure.
They vary in design and build, pricing and the options for extra connectivity they offer.
We’ve tested four external GPU enclosures this month, along with an up-to-date Dell XPS 1390, a light 13inch 2-in-1 laptop with a fast 10th-generation Intel Core i7 processor and Thunderbolt, but no discrete GPU, making it a perfect candidate to be paired with external graphics.
EGPU enclosures work with Nvidia or AMD graphics cards, but it’s an AMD Radeon 5700 GPU we’re testing here. We’ve assembled each enclosure and will report back on both the performance and experience of using an EGPU for 3D tasks, along with some general findings from living with this technology as part of daily life.