Upgrading to my 4th Clevo (P870TM)

So my current Clevo WS355QQS is hitting its gaming limits when I'm on the road, she just can't keep up anymore, and going from my 4k 1080 desktop gaming PC to my 860m, is already tough. So I think I'm pretty sold on the P870TM (one expensive beats though), i do have a few questions. The main one is, how well is the support for Thunderbolt 3 working with an external graphics controller? I've had amazing luck out of these Clevo laptops, lasting forever with some TLC. I feel my current one could push beyond, if it had a TB3 port and I was able to use an external desktop graphics card. So with this technology available now, I'm hoping to extend the life of this next one even further, especially with what they pack into the P870.

I was going to buy from Sager like my last few, but on the forums I saw people being directed to HIDevo. Going through the options and stuff, I feel like they definitely offer pretty cool features. How is their support and quality? When spending almost 5k for a laptop, I just want to make sure I have the warm and fuzzies and know I'm going the right route.

Is there anything else I should be considering or should know ahead of time prior to purchasing?

I appreciate everyone's time in helping me along. Thanks in advance.

 

HIDEvolution is a good choice along with Eurocom. Both of them seem to be pretty well rated here.

I don't actually think there is much point using an eGPU with that thing (at least not for a couple of years). You can get upto two GTX 1080s in there which will perform almost identically to the desktop versions (as long as they can stay cool enough to boost). The laptop does have Thunderbolt 3 though so perhaps it will work, but I don't think anyone has tried it.

If you buy one of these, make sure you get the option for a delidded CPU with the unlocked BIOS, that will help keep the temps in check.

 

That's exactly what my future thoughts are. Right now I'll be happy to have a 1080 in both PC and laptop, but as I upgrade the desktop, I'd like the laptop to be using the card I replace. Especially since I really don't want to have to add a second desktop for the girlfriend to use when I'm in town. Obviously I hope for all this, and 2 years from now thunderbolt 3 won't be enough to run that gen card. Haha.

I don't think I'm ready to spend another $900 for a second 1080 card, when Sli is barely optimized for most games I play. But it's more planning for 3-4 years from now.

Appreciate the info!

 

A single 1080 could still be powerful enough in 3-4 years, unless AMD get back in the game I wouldn't expect GPUs to change all that much - similar to how Intel's CPU performance didn't really change much while AMD were mired with the Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture. It might be possible to upgrade the GPU to something better in the future anyway, depending on whether or not the next nVidia MXM cards are another non standard size.

I don't think anyone has tried an eGPU with that laptop, you may find more answers from @Donald@HIDevolution , @Mr. Fox , @Papusan

 

Thunderbolt 3 using the chipset pci-e lanes (as all current ones do) will likely limit the power of future GPUs.

 

@Julex the graphics card in an eGPU takes a severe hit in performance compared to an installed dGPU. I would be very careful of that for a good solution.

 

I’m sure @bloodhawk can share his experience with eGPU and the older Clevo P870DM1. Wasted money.

 

if you buy from eurocom , contact @woodzstack . he is an reputable eurocom reseller . he can help you delid and apply liquid metal too without voiding your warranty .

 

Yeah, even a desktop 1080 is a performance downgrade in an eGPU if you have a full powered Clevo 1080. It's totally pointless to bother with an eGPU unless you have something with a weak GPU that cannot be upgraded to something better or crappy Intel HD Graphics. It would be a lot better to just buy a stronger laptop than waste money on an eGPU. Especially so now that desktop GPU prices are retarded due to the demand of miners that are jacking the prices up to 200% of retail.

 

Thanks for the mention, I'm pretty much willing to tackle any sale or tech issue given a chance.
However, I will mention when I apply LM I do it properly, unlike some companies that seem to have started offering it recently but do a worse job then expected.
I usually take pictures along the way to show the work, to show it's clean and done right. I feel my customers like seeing thier laptops being worked on step by step.
I know, had DELL back in the day shown me every step of the way when my laptops like M17X-R4 were being assembled and worked on, I'd have taken a great interest in it.

 

I think Ferrari and Porsche started that sort of thing.

 

Pretty much what Fox said, ill paste the link to the thread when im on my laptop, but unless you have something like a 980 / 1060 or lower, its not worth it.

 

Here you go @bloodhawk. I was checking out your thread earlier. Top work.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-g-gtx1080-tb3-hdk-pe4c-v4-1-m-2-ngff.796773/

Just out of curiosity, assuming they work in latest TB3 eGPU boxes as of now, how much of a leap in performance would nVidia Turing/Ampere cards need to achieve (factoring in TB3 bottlenecks) to make a major difference in gaming/benchmark scores compared to Pascal dGPU on Clevo Coffee Lake TM platforms ( P7xx/P8)?

 

tbh. no matter what type of performance jump we see with Ampere/Turing, it wont matter till the time the TB3 signal conversion overheads are fixed. Which i think might be once Intel starts including the TB3 controller on the CPU itself. But its somewhat troubling to see none of the CFL boards even have a hint of TB3 connectivity for the most part.

 

What do you mean not even a hint?

 

I also looked at the egpu.io site but there are too many Mac and BGA fanboys over there. Lots of benchmarking as well. They showed a 20% drop on 1080 Ti on external monitor compared to Desktop PCI-e (and even worse on internal laptop display, but irrelevant to Clevo dGPU-only platforms). You were the only one I’ve found that actually tested on a top range Clevo machine runing desktop CPU.

So with the TB3 conversion overhead, am I correct to say, assuming a top end Turing card offers twice the performance of one 1080 Ti, using eGPU on a Clevo DM/TM machine (1080 dGPU only) would increase the margin by twice?

Link: https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs-thunderbolt-3-egpu-internal-display-test/paged/1/

 

Nope. Because the PCIe bandwidth is still the same. Unless those architectures are more efficient, in which it might still be marginal, dont expect any performance bump. Maybe at 4k, but definitely not at 1080p/1440p.

 

No once can say what the base performance is let along the exact factor it will be reduced by but it's likely going to get worse than the limiting on the current 1070 and up cards.

 

Do we have a heads up on whether the new Nvidia cards will fit a p870tm at all? Or still wait and see?

Also I’ve found better FPS with running 1 card PhysX dedicated over sli (clevo 370em with 970m sli).
Would the ceiling of tb3 still bottle neck a second card running PhysX only? (If I had 1x 1080 or whatever)

So many questions...

Ah now the reason dedicated PhysX works for me is coz my cpu is the bottle neck isn’t it? No I wouldn’t need dedicated PhysX gpu in a future rig would I? At least not til the 8700k started bottle necking...which would be ages away

 

The 970M is beyond the performance for scaling for Phys-x (past a certain point it makes no difference).

PhysX is mostly a niche feature these days and runs on the GPU.