Laptop Gaming eGPU For Only $100? YES!

external graphics cards have been a popular way to get desktop PC performance on a laptop for a few years now you usually just need to plug in a singular high powered cable into your device via a thunderbolt port and you've unlocked a new world of performance but that can be a very expensive way to go about it as the external GPU enclosures generally cost a minimum of $300 and that doesn't even include the graphics card there are some budget versions of this where you plug your graphics card directly into your nvme drive slot in your laptop but that isn't really practical and it's just a little too Jank easy even for my likes and that's saying something but luckily I think I have found an affordable solution to this problem an external GPU enclosure that plugs directly into a thunderbolt port and only costs around $100 only one problem some assembly required so let's put this thing together and test if it's worth 100 bucks to turn my office laptop into a gaming Powerhouse right after 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AliExpress for about 100 bucks and it promises that I should be able to Simply insert the GPU give it some power and be able to use a single USBC Thunderbolt cable to my laptop and be able to unlock desktop level performance the package didn't come with any instructions but it was simple enough it's basically just two metal posts to mount everything together and provide a pcie lane for the GPU it only took about 10 minutes to assemble and that's without instructions so it wasn't too difficult I plugged in my power supply and all it required was the 24 pin ATX cable and the 8 Pin pcie directly into the graphics card now the graphics card I'll be using to test this thing is the RTX 360 TI it's a pretty mid-range GPU from 2020 and it's a good card in the system that can power it but since I'm using a cheap laptop top I doubt I'll be able to push this thing 100% anyway the laptop I'll be using is this old ThinkPad t480 which does not have a dedicated GPU and is definitely not designed for gaming the processor is an i5 8350u which is a pretty standard mobile I5 from the time and it has 32 gigs of ddr4 RAM running a dual channel so at least we have that but the reason I chose this laptop other than the fact that it's the only laptop I have on hand is because it actually has a dedicated Thunderbolt 3 Port so as long as we install the GPU drivers we should be good to go I'll only be testing three games on this machine not because there's any compatibility issues but only because this old laptop only has a tiny SSD inside and it can only fit three games at a time now this is the part where I would normally just show recorded Benchmark footage but I wanted to show live footage of this being recorded so you guys can see it in real time and kind of how ridiculous this setup is so I plugged in the Thunderbolt and the screen blinked and it said 360 TI detected so everything is working and it should be good to go I've got the drivers installed and everything seems to be working so uh yeah let's get a game going so ghost Runner is a game that came out a few years ago but it's still pretty powerful even to this day it actually allows DLS support but we're not going to be trying that out first we're just going to do some raw testing it it looks pretty good I mean right now we're averaging about 120 FPS depending on you know where we're going that looks good pretty good considering this uh this laptop could not even open this game beforehand like it we would barely play it at all it's pretty amazing I'm surprised the CPU isn't completely maxed out I mean this is uh you know not the most intensive game but it does look pretty good so I'm surprised that I5 CPU is able to keep up right now but I mean this looks pretty good I don't see a lot of stutterings even our 1% lows are only at 50 and that's I haven't really felt that like I knew this thing was going to work like I knew it was going to work but I didn't know it was going to be like good you know when you order stuff from AliExpress you just kind of you kind of uh expect the worst to be honest so so and since we got into combat recently our uh our average is around 990 5 to 110 so that's looking pretty good I mean this is a really fast-paced game things happen very quickly so I'm surprised it's keeping up with it it's looking it's looking very good so ghost Runner looks good let's try Hitman 3 so this is the Hitman 3 Benchmark uh running at 1080p no HDR no vsync no nothing just everything at 1080p medium and as you can see our CPUs are basically maxing out meaning this is a very heavy game to be it's trying to push it to its Max since this you know this is a benchmark luckily our CPU is not getting overheating it's not thermal throttling it's staying at a good temperature so that's good and same with a GPU this is getting maxed out it's looking pretty good this is like a very accurate representation of what we want in a benchmark and if we see our average FPS right now it's hovering around 103 that's amazing like you don't understand how underpowered this laptop is it's a ThinkPad from 2017 it's got a crappy I5 CPU so to see this using some AliExpress uh egpu is H pretty amazing to me halfway through the Benchmark our average FPS dropped to about 9091 which is to be expected uh it gets harder as it goes on I don't know how good this Benchmark would be if you used an even older laptop something with two cores would be playable but not great uh at least we have four cores and eight threads to work with here I'm not sure about people who want to try to use things from like 2010 or earlier uh I just don't think it's worth it at that point but so far looking at this this is looking pretty good totally playable and even at high frame rates overall score we had an 86 FPS that's for what we're working with I think that's pretty pretty dang good all right starting The cyberpunk Benchmark it's not looking good you see all of our cores are really maxed out right now they're hitting that 90 to 100% most of the time and they're not thermal throttling which is good but they are still very hot and just not they're pushing that GPU to its limit right like it's the GPU is more than the CPU can handle so it's pushing really hard but unfortunately it's not enough to get up into these super high frame rates at the start of the Benchmark we are averaging 53 for our FPS 54 55 it's going up which is good with a 39 1% low so you know having this between 50 and 60 is not 100% ideal but it would be absolutely playable all right end of The Benchmark with a 50 FPS average you know I don't think we're going to be doing any R tracing today while it did look good on screen I will admit it wasn't the best experience um I mean people play this on 30 FPS on their steam deck so I think 50 is totally playable on PC it's a single player experience you're not going to be going for super highy frame rates and uh yeah it's just the CPU just couldn't keep up couldn't handle couldn't push that GPU I think if we had an i7 from that generation it would probably have gotten up to that 60 FPS uh Benchmark but this is the best we could do and uh yeah I'm surprised it's uh doing that well and and it's pretty playable so let's go back to my final thoughts so we got some pretty good performance for a fraction of the price of the traditional external gpus but is all this worth it well honestly probably not there's a subsection of PC Gamers who might have a compatible lap laptop on hand that they want to add a graphics card to but still don't want to buy a desktop PC and they don't want to get a dedicated gaming laptop and for those people they already know they want this and they know they're going to love it but if you don't have a game PC or laptop at all I don't think you should go out and buy a cheap laptop and buy the egpu and a graphics card and a power supply it's just not really worth it for most cases but it's a fun experiment and honestly really cool to see that you can use old Hardware mixed with new hardware to create a palpable gaming experience if you do want to create any of this I'll drop links in the description below to everything even my laptop which only cost me like 100 bucks if you prefer to build out a full gaming PC at a budget price point check out these videos where we prove that you can get some great performance at an amazing price please like the video if you liked it don't forget to subscribe for more technology content my name is Jason thanks for watching

Channel: Jason Witmer

Views: 85,744

Keywords: Razer, Core X, Core X Chroma, Razer eGPU, egpu, graphics, thunderbolt, external gpu, GTX 1060, GTX 960, Ultrabook, Ultrabook gaming, jason witmer, cheap egpu, aliexpress, budget egpu laptop, external graphics card, best egpu, best external graphics card, budget egpu, cheap egpu laptop

Id: EjRhW8T9FzM

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024