CONCLUSION

eGPUS come close to offering a nirvana of plug-and-play portable 3D hardware. Connect one to any Thunderbolt-equipped kit and immediately it becomes a 3D-capable workstation, more or less.

We can now answer two big questions about the technology. The first is whether the expense, hassle and effort is worth it for the performance boost offered by a discrete graphics card sitting outside your computer.

Testing was a bumpy ride when it comes to stability and reliability. At one point we connected a second display to the EGPU, and Windows immediately blue screened. We had to reboot a few times to solve issues like this, where the EGPU didn’t immediately work, but actually problems were few and far between. A little patience goes a long way.

We expect stability to improve in the future, but certain combinations of host computer, enclosure and graphics card can cause issues.

We recommend two specific websites for more EGPU information: www.egpu.io and www.reddit.com/r/egpu.

If you have specific setup or configuration issues, that’s the first place to start.

In order to be certain applications will work, you can manually enable EGPU for them in Windows, otherwise it can get confusing. And performance can vary depending on the application.

We also found the bandwidth limitation of Thunderbolt 3 directly affects graphics performance. With an external 4K display connected to the enclosure, Specviewperf scores were 25% less than when accelerating graphics on the laptop display. On the Razer, with USB and Ethernet as well, that could affect performance further.

All four enclosures performed roughly the same in Specviewperf and Luxmark, with usually no more than 3% variance between them. Bear in mind though, a graphics card in an EGPU enclosure will always perform worse than when directly connected to a PC’S motherboard.

Despite that limitation and the relatively modest Radeon 5700 graphics card, we saw results up to 10x that of Intel’s 10th-generation integrated laptop graphics. Plus, we also found that the EGPU performed better on graphicsintensive tasks.

The second factor is considering what sort of enclosure is the best option and what it might have to offer.

When it comes to assembling and setting up the products, we were pleasantly surprised that build quality is generally excellent across the board. All four enclosures worked in the same way. The real differences are in the design, weight, size and the additional features that each has to offer.

Size and noise matter to many people, but for overall usefulness, the big old Razer Core X Chroma was our favourite, at least for use with laptops. It adds USB ports and Ethernet, has a beefy PSU and can be tinkered with more than any other enclosure. We do recommend replacing the fan though.

It’s unlikely that EGPU will ever replace desktop workstations. Despite the myriad of modern options available, the bulk of 3D work will always be done on PC workstations with standard desktop graphics cards.

But perhaps you’ve been eyeing up a pricey 3D-capable laptop to augment your rendering environment? Now, you have another possibility.

Anyone who uses a laptop for 3D knows that long rendering tasks can put a discrete internal graphics card under a lot of stress, generate a lot of heat and potentially shorten the lifespan of laptop components. Moving the demanding rendering hardware outside the rig seems quite sensible then.

And as we said before, the potential to upgrade your graphics card when new models are launched is something that is impossible on (almost) all laptops. It is now possible with EGPU, and that’s particularly pertinent given Nvidia’s Ampere generation of Geforce cards has just hit the streets, with new AMD cards, Quadro and Fire Pro products imminent too.