One way to boost your laptop's performance is with an external graphics enclosure. Here are the best GPUs to give your laptop desktop-grade gaming power.
Sometimes you can get laptops with decent CPUs, but they only have onboard graphics
Sometimes you buy a system that physically can’t house the GPU you want, but the board/PSU is proprietary, so you can’t just change the tower/case.
Sometimes there are GPU heavy tasks that don’t really rely on CPU that much, and you are using a laptop.
But the vast majority of the time, sticking a new card in your desktop is the way to go.
Case design has come a long way, and I personally haven’t had an issue with case-temp since overclocking things in the early 2000’s,
But, if the desktop was built in a thin mini-ITX case, I could see case-temp being an issue, but I think you would most likely also being running into “can’t physically fit into the system” issue.
LOL, you can’t be serious. PC case design has largely been unchanged for the past 25 years! Same industrial metal cases. Giant ass cases because x64 like heat and power. Fat cables.
I have an old NAS from 2012 and it’s about as remarkably boring as a case from 2022.
All they did was add grills and screw holes to mount giant ass fans and a coolant block. The entire PC industry largely remains unchanged.
The whole point of this is to not have to buy a beefy notebook. You could connect a base anything and game. Most games bottleneck around the GPU, not CPU. In fact, most OSes leverage the GPU even for basic UI and desktop drawing.
And as others have said, it keeps the heat down so fans often don’t have to spin up much.
They became super popular with Apple fanboys because before they made the transition to Apple Silicon, they were effectively giant, expensive paper weights. In fact, the onboard Intel Iris GPU couldn’t even draw Launchpad’s animations without stutter when connected to a 4K display. This was a $2k machine with 1% GPU power. Literally. I think they were on par with Chrome Books.
The saving grace was the connectivity speed. Thunderbolt 3. Which meant you could eke out 60% of the card you’re using provided it was faster than the lane could handle.
The article is just ad bait, because it’s a pretty simple graph to calculate and graphic card makers have the industry (as is much of every sector) so price fixed that there are no “secret” finds anymore.
Laptops, or if you have multiple mid-range PC across the house (media center in living room, study PC in your room or working PC in your studio for convert video/3d render): you can move your portable GPU without reassembly.
Nowadays GPU are also kind of mobile AI, so you’re not just moving gaming graphics but also a little offline chat/drawGPT, video converter etc.
Can someone explain why you would use something like this?
Presumably it’s because you don’t have a desktop, but wouldn’t virtually any desktop-class card be heavily bottlenecked by a mobile CPU?
Sometimes you can get laptops with decent CPUs, but they only have onboard graphics
Sometimes you buy a system that physically can’t house the GPU you want, but the board/PSU is proprietary, so you can’t just change the tower/case.
Sometimes there are GPU heavy tasks that don’t really rely on CPU that much, and you are using a laptop.
But the vast majority of the time, sticking a new card in your desktop is the way to go.
What about for the purposes of heat?
Wouldn’t it be beneficial to keep heavy duty gpus out of your PC just to keep the heat away from your other components?
Case design has come a long way, and I personally haven’t had an issue with case-temp since overclocking things in the early 2000’s,
But, if the desktop was built in a thin mini-ITX case, I could see case-temp being an issue, but I think you would most likely also being running into “can’t physically fit into the system” issue.
LOL, you can’t be serious. PC case design has largely been unchanged for the past 25 years! Same industrial metal cases. Giant ass cases because x64 like heat and power. Fat cables.
I have an old NAS from 2012 and it’s about as remarkably boring as a case from 2022.
All they did was add grills and screw holes to mount giant ass fans and a coolant block. The entire PC industry largely remains unchanged.
The whole point of this is to not have to buy a beefy notebook. You could connect a base anything and game. Most games bottleneck around the GPU, not CPU. In fact, most OSes leverage the GPU even for basic UI and desktop drawing.
And as others have said, it keeps the heat down so fans often don’t have to spin up much.
It’s a middle ground.
Marketing it to the gaming segment sells more units, but realistically these are great for full GPU loads like rendering or machine learning.
They became super popular with Apple fanboys because before they made the transition to Apple Silicon, they were effectively giant, expensive paper weights. In fact, the onboard Intel Iris GPU couldn’t even draw Launchpad’s animations without stutter when connected to a 4K display. This was a $2k machine with 1% GPU power. Literally. I think they were on par with Chrome Books.
The saving grace was the connectivity speed. Thunderbolt 3. Which meant you could eke out 60% of the card you’re using provided it was faster than the lane could handle.
The article is just ad bait, because it’s a pretty simple graph to calculate and graphic card makers have the industry (as is much of every sector) so price fixed that there are no “secret” finds anymore.
Laptops, or if you have multiple mid-range PC across the house (media center in living room, study PC in your room or working PC in your studio for convert video/3d render): you can move your portable GPU without reassembly.
Nowadays GPU are also kind of mobile AI, so you’re not just moving gaming graphics but also a little offline chat/drawGPT, video converter etc.
Hmm, that’s a good reason except I’ve only ever seen these marketed at gamers…