Laptops with external desktop GPUs

Technology and Gaming Help and Support
#1

Been looking into this recently, and it looks like a really exciting concept, but it looks like there’s too many hurdles at the moment.

I probably need to buy a new laptop, but I just spent all my money on a really nice desktop and want something a little more portable on the laptop end. Discovered recently that you can run an external GPU through a thunderbolt port with an appropriate converter. The problem being, all products geared towards this expect you to use your laptop as a desktop when you come home and plug it in, but I’m more imagining yanking my GPU out of my desktop when I go on vacation and running my laptop as a semi-portable powerhouse.

The main problem of course being that AFAIK, there’s no way to take the GPU’s video output and plug it into a standard laptop in order to use the laptop’s screen. Alienware laptops so far are the only ones I can find with video in ports. Are there any other more reasonably priced laptops (or, best yet, an ultrabook) with video in ports? Or some sort of workaround such that a standard thunderbolt could be used as a video in port?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/7987/running-an-nvidia-gtx-780-ti-over-thunderbolt-2
Reading this forum and trying to figure out how feasible all this is. Supposedly people are getting the external GPU to power the laptop’s built in screen using Nvidia optimus, but it’s not really clear to me how the two are connected, can display information be transfered over PCIE? Or does Optimus somehow bypass this dilema?

Edit:
Doing a lot more research, found a solution that unfortunately looks a little out of my league in terms of DIY"
https://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/4570-%5Bguide%5D-2012-13-rmbp-gtx660-sonnet-echo-express-se-%40-10gbps.html#post63754
Think I might just try to get my current laptop to hold out long enough for more straightforward solutions to emerge.

#2

I tried it with an ASUS N61JQ. Pretty great laptop. It had a generation one Core i7, AMD 5770 with a Gig of VRAM and I upgraded it to 8GB’s of RAM. It was a perfect machine… back in 2010.

Eventually the Graphics badly needed an update and I was going to attempt the same thing as you, however, I eventually realized that it would be less expensive (especially in the long term) to buy a desktop for gaming.

Decided I’d build my own, got an amazing case slightly used off of eBay (it was in almost mint condition). I then bought an MSI Z87-G45 (since it was on sale at Microcenter), and I’ve actually been really impressed by it. Amazing mobo for the price I got it at.

I bought 8GB’s of RAM, and an NVIDIA Geforce GTX200ge something? I don’t remember. I was trying to stay under $700 at the time. But I did crack under pressure and buy an Intel Core i7 4770. I kind of jizzed in my pants when I saw it on display there and decided to spend the almost $400 for it.

Anyways, the Geforce Card was a piece of shit. So I sold it on eBay a couple months later and bought an XFX Radeon R9 270X for $210 at Bestbuy (amazing graphics card by the way. It outperforms the GTX770 and it costs around 60 bucks less if I remember correctly?). Anyways, I bought it at BestBuy purely because I was an employee at the time and you get an amazing discount if you work at BestBuy (you only have to pay 5% above wholesale on most items (this excludes the computers, game systems, and TV’s) so I also bought an addition 8GB’s of ram while I worked there.

So over the course of several months, I have put almost 2 grand into the machine, but it was overtime. (I bought 2 SSD’d and am currently running a RAID setup, forgot to mention that I spent $200 on a 2TB HDD. Why would I spend that much you may ask? Because of it’s 4GB sector size and the fact that it was also 7200RPM which gives me a transfer rate of roughly 6 Gigabits per-second. Plus I bought the Logitech G710+ Gaming Keyboard, and the Creative SoundBlaster Z since I have my 7.1 stereo surround hooked into my rig.

Anyways, my point is - don’t do this. In the long term it’s not cost effective and you’ll just end up spending more money in the long-term. I recommend buying a gaming desktop and scraping the laptop for gaming. Especially if it’s a Mac.

#3

My advice: don’t bring a gaming computer on vacation.
Use your desktop for gaming, maybe install some old games on your laptop.

#4

You could always figure out what type of connector the laptop screen uses internally. Then you can take the laptop apart a bit and unplug its screen from the board and plug it into the card, instead. That’s assuming that any laptop screens anywhere use standard connectors internally, of course; I’ve got no idea if they do.

#5

No they don’t. They use LVDS mostly, so you would need to completely tear apart the laptop motherboard and your external gpu. I recommend just get a business class laptop with a pci-e dock.

#6

I probably need to buy a new laptop, but I just spent all my money on a really nice desktop and want something a little more portable on the laptop end. Discovered recently that you can run an external GPU through a thunderbolt port with an appropriate converter. The problem being, all products geared towards this expect you to use your laptop as a desktop when you come home and plug it in, but I’m more imagining yanking my GPU out of my desktop when I go on vacation and running my laptop as a semi-portable powerhouse.
:fffuuu::retard::’(

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#7

it barely makes sense to use in a desktop scenario, but for battery power, even onboard GPU’s don’t always work that well, for example, on my 2010 HP laptop I have to keep the CPU at 933mhz and 60% max, with 3/4 cores always parked and the GPU forced at 100mhz max or else my battery instantly shuts down as soon as I unplug the charger due to massive current overdraw.

So to summarize the battery lasts 4+ hours on 933mhz CPU and 100mhz GPU, and it lasts exactly 0 seconds at 2.8Ghz CPU and 700Mhz GPU.

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