eGPU Solutions

Hey everyone,

I've been reading a lot lately about eGPUs recently but I haven't had any luck finding anything other than what was announced by Razer and Asus with their solutions at CES. Any idea if/when this technology will be released? Really looking forward to hooking one up to my new XPS 15 if possible. Would suck if it doesn't come out because otherwise I would've just gone with a cheaper Alienware 15.

 

If I'm you, I'd just return the XPS15 and swap for an Alienware 15 if it's within return period. The XPS15 will never have a practical EGPU solution.

 

Maybe you should return it, and get yourself a new AW 13, 15, or 17 late 2015 model. Those models can be used with a new Alienware amplifier which a desktop GPU can be placed inside it. I've seen where owners are using a Titan x desktop card

 

Just out of curiosity, why do you say that?

 

I wouldn't bank on having an eGPU solution available. At the present, cannot just go out and buy an eGPU dock, connect it to any random laptop (Dell XPS 15), install some driver, and expect it to work.

Today, the only ways to get an eGPU are to buy a very specific make / model of laptop that has eGPU support (Alienware, Razer, MSI), or go through some kind of DIY hack. The eGPU docks that are available to buy today (Alienware, MSI) are all proprietary connections.

Razer is coming out with a GPU dock that uses a non-proprietary connector (USB Type-C). But:
1) It isn't available right now.
2) It was designed to work with the Razer Blade Stealth. Nobody knows if it works with other laptops.
3) *IF* it does work with other laptops, nobody knows the requirements to get it to work. (e.g. does it require BIOS support? Just a driver? etc).

A lot of those questions will be answered once people can buy a USB Type-C eGPU dock, and start experimenting with it. But right now, if I were you, I wouldn't buy a laptop with the hopes that it will work with an eGPU dock some time in the future.

 

Don't forget the bandwidth limitation of TB3

 

What limitation ? TB3 is like 40 Gbit/s

 

I'd like to see what the latency is using TB with an eGPU. I mean it has to go through TB chip through a long external cable to GPU and back again. There's bound to be some latency involved with that.

 

I wouldn't worry about thunderbolt 3 latency or bandwidth limitations. Thunderbolt adds a controller chip between the eGPU and CPU, not unlike what a Southbridge chip would do.

As for bandwidth... Thunderbolt 3 operates at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds, which is equivalent to PCIe 2.0 x8 speeds. And we know from desktop GPU testing that there isn't any performance bottleneck between PCIe 2.0 x8 and x16.

What I'd be really interested in learning is just general compatibility and behavior of thunderbolt eGPUs. How compatible are they with a generic Skylake laptop with thunderbolt 3; and do they pass the video signal to the laptop display, or do they require an external monitor?

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What my understanding is (and I could very well be wrong!) that if the laptop has only IGPU, the eGPU can be set up as dGPU and optimus can be made to work with it on the internal display. But if it already has a dGPU and in worst case optimus disable, it is not possible.

 

As long as the laptop has iGPU, any dGPU can be made to work with Optimus. You need to disable iGPU only in case of SLI.

 

Oh my bad. I thought it was 4Gbps for some reason.

 

Do you have any kind of test results or article that confirms this?

Because until we actually get an eGPU dock available to purchase, so that people can run tests and experiment with it, I think it's premature to make any claim on how an eGPU dock will / should operate with generic Skylake laptops.

 

That's how it's been working for Haswell. I don't think it's gonna change for Skylake.

 

The proprietary GPU docks are not the only option; there will be 3rd party eGPU adapters.

 

There are already diy tb egpu docks available

Just hop over to tech inferno.

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