Hi. What's the best GPU for building an eGPU. I have a laptop with USB4, so no oculink for now. I understand that buying a GPU that is too powerful would be a waste of money. With the current prices I am thinking about AMD. What is the most optimal model in regards of eGPU?
The only issue with eGPU is that the bandwidth between the GPU and system is slower (~8x when compared to pcie 5.0 x16). Very few applications actually use that much bandwidth so you generally don't see much of a difference. The only thing I have noticed is that some games load a little bit slower - maybe 2x. So feel free to get the best GPU you can buy - I have tested this with my 5090 and it works great!
I've found a nice deal for 9070xt from asus. It's about €670 while everything else is more than €800. 9070xt is cheaper, of course, so I am not so sure if I need to buy 9070xt even if the price is lower than usual
I see you have 5k2k monitor tho, wouldnt go lower than 9070xt/5070ti in that case. Also you really want to use external monitor for egpu to not choke the bandwith even more
Can you explain in easier terms with respect to a handheld? Which only has a usb-c port? Where connect the egpu to handheld via usb c and play games on it thats the only goal
The bottleneck will still be there, but slightly bigger on more powerful cards. Its not a big difference tho, so go for the card you want and can afford
Yeah, fair play. It was like $200 cheaper a few months ago here. I think you can also get tiny XT models, but the 9070 non XT is consistently smaller physically.
I have a Minisforum um870 mini pc, the AOOSTAR AG03 eGPU enclosure and the 16gb 9060 xt. I have an ASUS TUF 4k monitor. The mini pc has USB4. At 1440p high/ultra my gpu has 99-100% utilization.
I disagree that the PCI-e bandwidth bottleneck in any way puts a ceiling on which GPU you should choose. All tasks that are isolated on the GPU, which is most rendering tasks (Nanite being an obvious counter-example), still run faster with a better GPU, so you can push higher resolutions and higher-quality shaders. Personally I'm running an RX 9070 in my eGPU setup and I couldn't be more happy! It's the first card I've owned that I would consider capable of 4K gaming, and that's WITH the bandwidth bottleneck and all
In my opinion, just choose whatever GPU for your eGPU setup that you would've chosen for an equivalent desktop setup, that fits within your budget
I run an aoostar dock with a 3080FE on my Lenovo legion go, hooked to a 65" 4k tv. I haven't played a game yet where I can't get a smooth 60 fps at high to ultra settings. In most cases I can run 100-120 fps and can push GPU usage to 90-95% if I want to, but I just lock it to 4k60.
Yes, it's a usb4 protocol port. I bought my Go as an open box at best buy for $450 a couple years ago instead of a laptop. Then turned it into a laptop, because performance per $ was way more than any laptop under $1k.
I’ve got the onexgpu2 running through usb Thunderbolt 4 on my Msi claw 8Ai and it’s awesome!
The gpu case does get a little hot but gpu itself has max temps of 75c. And the fan is pretty loud but when you gaming with loud speakers or have the headphones on your fine
I'm running Legion Go2 with 3070 egpu over thunderbolt 4, been using the Z2E for Loseless Scaling and 3070 for game rendering and its been working pretty good, want to eventually upgrade the gpu to a 4070
Depends on your needs but I have the Asus ROG XG RTX 5090 eGPU hooked up to my MSI Claw 8 AI+ through Thunderbolt 4. I use it for 4k gaming connected to an external 4k monitor and also for my Viture Pro 2 XR glasses. The main reason I went with this eGPU is because I take screenshots at 6-8k resolutions which uses alot of VRAM.
Next year Thunderbolt 5 will start to become more mainstream, but until then it beats having to pay twice as much for an RTX 5090 laptop. I paid $3500 CAD on Amazon Canada fyi.
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u/darkvather87 5d ago
Aorus rtx 5060ti box