External GPU for your Handheld PC [ONEXGPU]

[Music] hey everybody this is Ruster Metro gamecore today we're going to take a look at an external GPU this one is called the 1X GPU it's made by the same folks that make the 1X player handhelds now the idea behind these egpus is that essentially if you have a device that doesn't have its own graphics card for example a handheld PC or maybe a Mini PC you can plug this into it and it's going to give you a lot more performance power and I've covered this idea a couple times on my channel already and it's always a mixed bag sometimes it can create a very good experience but there are other considerations like the cost and the ability to use it with other devices down the line and so that's definitely a topic that I want to cover in this video but there are a couple things about this 1X GPU that I think are worth paying attention to for example it has its own internal storage option so you can add your own m.2 drive to expand your storage every time you plug it into this dock Plus this one's got a lot of functionality in addition to the usb4 connection you can also use it with ocul link and then also it has dual display port and HDMI port options too and of course it's got some sweet RGB lighting which everybody loves so in this video we're going to go over all the good and bad that comes with an external GPU solution like this and then see whether or not that balance makes sense for you at this price point we're going to have a lot of fun here so grab a snack and drink and let's go ahead and dive in [Music] okay let's start with the most important part which is going to be the pricing because I think this is going to be the big sticking point for most people and as you can see the 1X GPU starts at $700 if you want to have it preconfigured with additional storage it'll go up even higher but for the purposes of this review we'll stick with the $700 price point because that's the model I'm reviewing as well and I think the number one question throughout this entire video is whether or not this device in particular is worth those $700 and I think we should start by comparing this against similar products at least the best that we can so we'll start with the GPU itself this is a laptop GPU it's the AMD ryzen RX 7600 MXT now if you're thinking that's a bunch of numbers and letters I totally agree so let's put that into context if we go to the AMD website and look at their list of Mobile gpus you can see that the 7600 MXT that we're reviewing today is the second on the list so it's not the most high-end model that's the 7900 M but it's the second one behind that now logically when I think about one of these external gpus the first thing I think about is okay well it's using a laptop GPU so what are the cost of these laptops that are using the same GPU and that's where things get tricky because as of right now when looking at all of the big retailer websites there is no laptop that's using the same GPU that's available for purchase now you can find laptops with AMD graphics cards inside but they vary a lot for example at Best Buy you can find the RX 7900 M which is the high-end GPU but that's going to cost somewhere around $2,000 or more depending on how you spec it out meanwhile you can also find some lower spec gpus like the RX 6550m this one has about half the compute units of the GPU that we're reviewing today so I expect the performance will be quite a bit worse than what we're going to see here and it's a pretty similar story across all the major retailers like micr Center and newg they all have that really high-end laptop but there's not a lot in the middle the only laptop I could find with a somewhat Equitable GPU is this one this one has the Radeon RX 7700s now according to AMD there is a difference between the s and m models in the 7000 series the S models are more efficient whereas the mod models are more focused on gaming performance and so there may be some differences between the two but at least between the major components things like compute units and the memory size and type all those are the same even the GPU frequency is very similar so at the very least if we're trying to find a similar laptop that has the same GPU then I do think this Asus one is probably your best bet now this one is $400 more but bear in mind that it comes with all sorts of things after all it's a full-on computer so it's got a CPU and RAM and a display and a keyboard but at the very least you can see that if you want to get a laptop with similar performance you can get this for about $400 more than the GPU alone at least in this model but really this comparison just highlights the fact that the 1X GPU doesn't really have that same point after all this is an accessory to be used with something that's already established so instead let's kind of talk about the circumstances that would make the 1X GPU make a little bit more sense so in this scenario we're going to take the Lenova Legion go this is probably the most sold handheld right now that has a USB 4 Port so let's just assume in this scenario that you bought a Lenova Legion go like I did for around 700 750 bucks and let's also assume that you're enjoying it in handheld and tabletop mode but there's a part of you that also wants to be able to play it on a larger screen and maybe with better performance and this is where the 1X GPU comes into play it's the same price does the Len NOA Legion go itself but it improves the performance on something that you already own and so it's very circumstantial but the situation here is that if you already have a handheld or a Mini PC and you want to increase its performance without having to buy a new handheld or PC this is one of the ways you could do it and the way I see it it's kind of a halfstep measure so let's kind of follow this thread along we're going to take the 1X fly as our example this time this is a handheld that came out last year and it has the ryzen 7 7840 U inside and that's an excellent chip it's very simp ilar to what's in the Lenova Legion go and a bunch of other handhelds on the market right now and so really when it comes down to it there's no upgrade path for the 1X fly yes there's a new chip the 8840 U that's coming out but all the same the performance is going to be negligible between the two and because there isn't really an upgrade path for the 1X fly the next best is going to be the 1X GPU now going along that thread even further let's say a few years from now you're ready to buy a new handheld PC I'm assuming at that point we'll see a bunch of new improvements to apus and so it might make more sense to upgrade your handheld and chances are that handheld will also be compatible with USB 4 that means that when you buy that newer handheld you'll also be able to use the 1X GPU with it to increase the performance so it's almost like going another half measure in the sense that you're now upgrading one of the two components and so this does give your external GPU a little bit longer of legs in the sense that yes you can upgrade your handheld and the GPU will also upgrade the performance on that as well anyway that's a rabbit hole I wanted to run down really quickly before we got further into this video because I think a lot of people are going to think what's the point of this thing and so that's what I wanted to explain first now that we have a better idea of the context of when this might make sense let's actually talk about the device itself and like I mentioned before this is a review unit but all opinions are my own and no money was exchanged in any way and of note I had about a month of playing around with this before I made this review anyway inside the box it's pretty simple we've got the egpu itself and so let's take a look at it first on the left side we have our exhaust vent and then on the opposite side we have a bit of IO on the left we have three buttons the power button turbo button and RGB when you power this on and then plug it into a computer the RGB will start and by default it's going to supply 100 watts of total power to the GPU and if you press the turbo button it's going to up it to 120 watts instead now in terms of RGB you've got a lot of variety if you tap on that button it'll cycle through all of your options and there are quite a few including single solid colors as well as different patterns but personally I just like your standard RGB Lighting in a rainbow pattern either way if you'd like you can personalize it and it'll remember your setting the next time you turn it on also on this side we have two usba a ports now let's take a look at the io on the back on the far left we have a gigabit Ethernet and we have two display port and two HDMI port so you have plenty of video out options further down the right we have our connectivity options that's going to be the UL link and the USB Type 4 and then finally on the far right we have our DC power plug now the bottom of the device has a slot for your external storage option and it's held together magnetically so it's very easy to take this off and this is designed to work with a 2280 m.2 slot now I'm filming with one hand right here so I can't really show you the installation process but I'm sure you probably know how this works either way I've put in one tbyte of storage that we'll access later in this video before that let's go through the rest of the stuff that's within the Box we've got a quick start manual that will explain all the different components of the machine and there are some quick instructions that basically say make sure that you turn it on and then download the latest drivers now the other thing I found interesting about the 1X GPU is the external power supply and this thing is a monster as far as power supplies go but it does pack a lot of punch this is a gan charger that is 330 watts and that's going to provide plenty of power for the GPU itself but then also whatever you hook it up to just bear in mind it is really big over half the size of the GPU alone one nice thing about it is the USB 4 Port can supply 100 watts of reverse charging which means that no matter what you plug it into it's probably going to be able to fast charge it and then finally also in the Box it does come with a 1 M USBC cable now one of the things that 1X player likes to talk about with the 1X GPU is how Compact and portable it is and to that point I think I would disagree because I don't find it to be very portable due to its weight now the GPU itself is not super heavy it's 853 G but you also have to consider that power supply which is going to be a necessary component and when you combine the two it's over 1.5 kg it's about 3 and 3/4 lb and personally I have been putting this in my backpack and taking it back and forth between my house and the studio and it has been significantly heavy as a comparison let's look at another GPU on the market this is the GPD G1 which I reviewed previously this one on its own is about the same weight it's 850 g but the thing about this one is the power supply is internal so it's already inside so at that point all you really need is your power cable and those combin is going to be 956 G or a little over 2 lb now bear in mind even though this has the exact same mobile GPU inside it does have a smaller power supply so this one only provides 240 WS of power and the GPU itself only gets 60 to 100 watts of total GPU power so from a performance standpoint just making sure you get the most power suppli to your GPU and the best gaming performance it does look like the GPD G1 is a bit of a compromise in that regard however there's a little bit more to this story which we'll talk about later when we do our actual game testing either way I did want to do a quick comparison between these two because they are so similar in addition to having the same laptop GPU the size between the two is not that far off either for me a major sticking point is the io these are quite a bit different the 1X GPU has more display out options and ethernet whereas the GPD G1 has more USB options and an SD card slot but I would say the major difference between the two doesn't really have to do with the amount of I/O but where it's placed one of my major sticking points with the G1 is where the Computer Connection ports are because they're on the opposite side and like I mentioned in the G1 review when you plug everything up it does not look very clean at all because you have wires coming out of both sides and so at least for me when it comes to having a cleaner look I prefer to have everything on one side or at least on the side as opposed to on opposite ends and so in that regard I do prefer the I/O layout of the 1X GPU okay now let's talk about setup and testing this is all fairly simple and straightforward first and foremost we're going to plug everything into the 1X GPU the power plug HDMI as well as ethernet and for our first example we're going to use the 1X fly it has the ryzen 784 U 32 gigs of RAM and a 120 HZ display and getting this all set up is pretty easy you just need to make sure that your handheld is running the latest AMD drivers and then plug the USBC cable from the USB 4 port on the handheld into the GPU from there it should export your display over to the external Monitor and then also give you access to that SSD that we installed earlier after that it's just a matter of making sure your drive is properly formatted then going into your steam settings and making Mak sure that you have Library access to that drive as well once you have that set up you'll be able to install games directly onto that drive to not take up storage space on your handheld and so you might be wondering why you would want to split your storage between the egpu as well as the handheld or Mini PC that you'll be plugging it into and it really comes down to the type of games that you want to play in the different circumstances for example there are going to be games that work better in a handheld environment and then others that you probably only really want to play in a desktop mode and my first thought when it comes to this type type of setup is going to be real-time strategy games for example I wouldn't really want to play Age of Empires on a handheld unless it had a really big screen and so that's something that you could have only installed in the egpu so that you could play it in desktop mode only that way you're not taking up space with this game on your handheld itself and I'm sure there are a bunch of other examples of games that you would only want to play on a monitor and not necessarily on a handheld and you can have the best of both worlds here anyway that's really about it when it comes to the setup and configuration it is pretty simple to get this up and running so let's go ahead and move on to our game testing and kind of talk about the experience and what it's going to bring in terms of performance to start in all of my testing I played it with the turbo mode on so we have the 120 wats power of the GPU so this should give us the best performance possible at least via USB 4 now the monitor I'm testing with is only 1080p so I can only push the resolution so far for most games so we're going to focus on things like graphical settings and FPS we'll start with control we're playing this at 1080p with the highest settings and and you can see here the average frame rate is about 75 frames per second and as a comparison when playing this without the GPU you can expect to get 1080p low settings and about 30 frames per second locked so we are getting well over double the performance with a higher graphical resolution with this egpu next up is Doom Eternal we're going to run this at 1080p but with ultra nightmare settings which is the highest that it'll go now the frame rate kind of goes all over the place depending on what environment you're playing in but it'll usually be at least 100 frames per second depending on where you are and so when it comes to a fast-paced shooter like this it seems to work pretty well if you wanted to get an even higher frame rate I would drop down the settings to something like high or even just regular nightmare now Final Fantasy 7 remake is one of those rare games where you can actually push the resolution regardless of what monitor you're using so for this game I did push it to 4K and high settings and you can see here we're getting a pretty stable 60 frames per second and also note this game uses the full power potential of the egpu you can see that the power draw at the top right is about 120 wats next up is H diverse 2 we're going to play this at 1080p in ultra settings and you can see here that we're getting about 48 to 52 frames per second now this is a newer game and so it's probably not been fully optimized and then also at the highest graphical settings it is quite power intensive so if you do want to have something that's more stable like a 60 frames per second experience I would recommend dropping it down to high or medium settings and also bear in mind I have no idea what I'm doing when I'm playing this game I went through the tutorial and then have just been playing quick matches and I have been getting my butt handed to me every time next we're going to take a look at Destiny 2 now this one is pretty interesting in the fact that the GPU doesn't actually pull the full 100 or even 120 watts instead you can see that the GPU is really capping out at around 50 Watts altogether of power usage to me this looks like a limitation of the USB 4 connection it's just not being able to push enough data to it and so as a result the GPU just doesn't get maxed out as much as it could and it's also a similar story with cyberpunk 2077 I'm playing this at 1080p with ultra settings and even with the turbo button on it never really goes past 100 watts and we'll dive into this whole bandwidth thing a little bit more here in a second but before that let's do a quick audio test overall I found it's definitely noticeable when playing a game but it's nowhere close to something like a desktop computer in the overall audio is very close to what the gbd G1 was so it's a very similar experience and for me personally I didn't find it to be overly loud either way okay next we're going to try a couple different connection scenarios to really get an idea of what kind of performance we're getting with and without the egpu for this test we're going to use the minis Forum 780 XTX this is a small PC that I reviewed previously on the channel but the thing about this one is that it has an oculink Port so that means we can test it in three different ways both with ocul link and just USB before and then of course without any egpu either and we'll start with the lowest performing category which is going to be without the egpu at all and we'll keep the settings the same across all three platforms so this is going to be with 1080p ultra settings again and you can see here that the average frame rate is somewhere around 2930 frames per second which honestly is quite impressive given the fact that this is onboard Graphics next we're going to do just the USB 4 connection so very similar to what we were doing with the 1X fly handheld and because the CPU is almost identical between the two we're getting a very similar performance about 60 frames per second on average and the total GPU power is about 100 WTS as well and so performance between the two with the 1X GPU seems to be similar between the 1X fly and then this mini for Mini PC now things get very interesting when we plug in the oculink port and this connection is a lot faster with much higher bandwidth it's basically pcie speeds and so there are two things to note number one is the average frame rate is about 90 frames per second so that's 50% more and then also the total Graphics power is at a pretty stable 120 watts and so this is what I mean when I say that there's a bandwidth limitation with the USB 4 Port it's not able to use the full processing power of that GPU and I think the 50% increase from 60 frames to 90 frames per second is pretty significant with oculink and so my main point here is if you want to make sure that you get the absolute best performance with the 1X GPU then the U link is definitely necessary because with a USB 4 connection alone you are are leaving quite a bit of performance on the table okay next up in my testing I wanted to try out one other handheld we're going to use the Lenova Legion go and I think among the USB 4 handhelds this one's probably the best suited for a docked experience and there's a couple reasons for that but the first is the fact that it has its own kickstand so it makes it pretty easy to prop up right next to your egpu also the fact that it has detachable controllers makes it pretty convenient to be able to just pull them off and then play them with an external monitor either way I did a bunch of testing with the legion Goat as well and the performance here was very similar to the 1X fly so I was getting an average frame rate about 48 frames per second in Hell divers 2 and I also got the similar 60 frames per second performance at 4K with Final Fantasy 7 remake and then of course to cap it off with cyberpunk 2077 it was also very similar the GPU was pulling about 100 watts of power and the frame rate was pretty consistently around 60 frames per second and so I think at this point you've got a pretty good idea of what kind of performance you can expect with the 1X GPU so let's start wrapping up and talk about what I like and what I don't like about it as always we'll start with what I like and I think number one is going to be the fact that it gives you a performance boost I love the idea of taking a handheld or a Mini PC and extending its life by using an egpu I also like that this egpu has a lot of power to it in addition to that 330 W power supply we've got a 120 W turbo option but just bear in mind that with many games in order to really unlock that full power potential you're going to need an oculink connection and that's actually the next point I like about it it is the fact that we have the choice between USB 4 and ocul Link I think the oculink connection is going to give you a lot more bang for your buck but if you only have a USB 4 handheld this will still work which is pretty cool I also appreciate the distribution of the io on the device in the fact that it's all just on one side it makes it have a very clean look and to be honest I like the RGB lighting as well it really added to the overall aesthetic and then finally I also appreciate the fact that they added an additional storage option it's not something that I think I'll use a lot but I appreciate that they added it nonetheless next we're going to talk about some of the things I didn't like about it we're going to start with that $700 entry point because as much as I love the idea of an external GPU that price point is about the same as many handhelds that you can buy right now and it makes it difficult to justify when the price of an accessory is the same as a full-blown computer next I wasn't a fan of the large and heavy power supply the thing is almost as big and heavy as the GPU itself and this overall size and weight does make it less portable of an option for me compared to its competitors another thing I found limiting was the fact that it only had two usba ports that means I had room to plug in a mouse and maybe an external controller and that's about it and given the fact that this works as a USB docking station I would just like to have more ports so I could use it in a desktop environment another thing that I consider to be a negative is the amount of data bandwidth that we are limited to with a usb4 connection and it seems kind of in congruent with the GPU itself this thing can go all the way up to 120 watts of GPU power but but the usb4 bandwidth with most games won't be able to reach that anyway and so it's a bit of a shame that you are going to leave some performance on the table if you only use USB 4 and it's also a bummer that there aren't more handhelds within oculink connection either in the end when it comes to the 1X GPU and whether or not I recommend it it is all very circumstantial when it comes down to it there are a lot of stars that have to align for this to make sense number one you're going to need a handheld or Mini PC something that doesn't have its own dedicated graphics card you're going to need the desire to be able to plug this into an external TV or a monitor something that you can play it on a bigger screen with better performance in addition it'll need a USB 4 port at the very least but an oculink Port if you really want to make the best of it and on top of that you're going to need $700 to kill to set this up in the first place and depending on what you're shopping for you might be able to buy just a whole new handheld or Mini PC at that price point so at the end of the day it's really going to come down to you are you in a position where an egpu makes sense and if so then sure I could see the 1X GPU being a good solution but for me personally I feel like there's a lot of check marks that have to be marked first before it makes sense so let me know what you think in the comments down below does spending $700 on this egpu make sense in your current gameplay kind of situation or do you think the money would be better suited somewhere else as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 120,566

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Id: I_eA_IbB-mo

Length: 22min 38sec (1358 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024