MrAcurite t1_j80f0vt wrote
Reply to comment by Kevo05s in Framework now sells 2TB Steam Deck upgrade drives. by SUPRVLLAN
I'm interested mostly in an internal dGPU, rather than an eGPU. I have a workstation/gaming desktop, and can offload the really computationally intensive tasks to it. So the dGPU is really if I want to do some light gaming, or more likely, make sure that some Torch code is talking to CUDA correctly before I bother getting out of bed to turn my workstation on.
I think, honestly, that eGPU enclosures are kind of inefficient, and only make sense for a very narrow range of budgets and usecases. The tech behind them is absolutely fucking cool as Hell, but given the choice between paying a few hundred bucks to hook up a graphics card to my laptop, or paying a few hundred bucks more than that to just have a second, separate computer that I can use for compute and Steam Play and such, I'd probably go with the latter option.
akeean t1_j815wb7 wrote
Once upon a time when an enclosure, m.2 to pcie adapter, used midrange GPU and semi-dodgy activation tool to play most games at high detail on the common resolution cost ~$200 together, it was a great option and the reduction in performance from the narrow bandwith & extra latency was surprisingly low.
A lot of the time you'd still be held back by affordable laptop CPUs being dual cores and the process being fiddly as hell provided you had the magic combination of good wiring, enough addressable memory to recognize the card, a card with a driver that would not forbit you this (I'm looking at you, NVIDIA) and no bios whitelisting on that m.2 port.
PCIe over thunderbolt made the process a lot easier, reliable and less likely to fry your laptops motherboard or set your dest on fire,, but $200+ just for the enclosure was just too much, esp since the fancy & slim laptops that'd you'd do this with still had very core and thermally limited CPUs most of the time.
Now it makes even less sense when a dedicated card makes up at least half of any decent builds cost & drivers are even more locked down, just people keep the buying the very lucrative, yet underperforming and misbadged mobile GPUs.
RSomnambulist t1_j84q6lw wrote
The efficiency loss can get as low as 8% on the last comparisons I saw. That may be even lower now. Also means you can have a much slimmer, cooler laptop. I nearly went this route last laptop I bought, but I ended up finding a steal when walmart refreshed their laptops to the 2000 series.
MrAcurite t1_j84zae1 wrote
Interesting. I seem to recall losses as high as 40%, so 8% is an improvement. I'm still somewhat iffy about the usecases though, where laptop + eGPU beats both laptop with dGPU and laptop + desktop. I'm sure it's good for someone, though.
RSomnambulist t1_j86somw wrote
I think 8% was not with a thunderbolt 3/USBC, but a direct line into the mobo with a pci-e extender.
40% is extreme though. That may be for TB2. It is a weird edge case regardless.
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