A decent CPU and adequate graphics is usually all I need in a laptop while traveling, but it would be nice to be able to plug in a more beefy GPU at home to play games and drive more monitors at higher resolutions.
Frankly, most current generation laptops are more than powerful enough for most of the things I do. Adding a GTX 750 TI level GPU would probably be enough to cover the rest of my use cases (light 1080p gaming).
Some might pity you for not being able to add those beefy GPU-s into your setup. I know, external GPU-s exists, which is cool if you miss the Commodore 64 era of plugging a bunch of devices together.
Fast external GPUs are my dream. I can buy a convenient sized laptop with excellent specs in every category except for GPU. As soon as I want a good GPU, the laptop has to become a 10lb monster.
I want to just dock it at my home desk with the GPU and convert my laptop into essentially a desktop workstation. Then I can undock it and take it out to the coffeeshop when I want to work outside. Maybe the external GPU is tiny too, and I can throw that in my backpack with it when I want to do gamedev work outside the house.
Have you considered getting a laptop that lets you export PCIe lanes (i think they do that with Thunderbolt these days, not exactly sure) so you can use the external GPU of your choice?
They've had external GPU solutions here and there in the past, not quite sure why it didn't catch on more. You get the mobility of a laptop, and then when you're home docked in, you can get the GPU processing power in a separate form factor.
Have you considered one of those Thunderbolt-based external GPU enclosures? I've never had the money to play around with them, but have always been curious about how to integrate one into a setup. Theoretically, it would let you upgrade the laptop and GPU separately, while also making the GPU more readily available to be reused on some other machine.
If GPU manufacturers can make an eGPU that's standalone and connect to PC/Laptop via Thunderbolt3(USB-C), that'd be pretty neat especially if they can make it <$100 more expensive than the cost of GPU in PC version. I can see a large portion of people who doesn't want to spend $300+ on an external GPU box just to be able to upgrade the $200 card inside.
reply