How To Upgrade your Laptop with an eGPU.

If you’ve purchased a laptop with thoughts of future proofing, in other words, bought the most powerful processor, the biggest hard drive and the largest chunk of memory you can afford, plus of course the best mobile graphics your budget will stretch to, your pretty well est for a few years.

Right? Wrong!

If you’re a gamer or avid media buff, the very first thing to hit dinosaur status is your graphics card. The super fast GPU that came with your shiny new Laptop could feel antiquated within 18 months.

Plenty of life left in the processor, but your new games are running like a dog.

So what to do? Well, in theory, the GPU on your notebooks motherboard is upgradeable, but in practice, its not a standard any manufacturer has adopted.

So your only alternative is an External GPU or eGPU. Now there are some mainstream OEM’s who have their own eGPU, MSI, Alienware, and the Razer Blade with the superb Razer Core. But these have proprietary interfaces so what if you want to upgrade your nongaming rig to the latest Desktop GPU heaven?

Well, the answer to your prayers may be here with the EXP GDC Laptop External PCI-E Graphics Card, or our choice, the Akitio Thunder2 PCIe Box. Now, warning, neither are just plug and play, but right now until a smart mainstream manufacturer like Nvidia fills the gap with a USB-C eGPU, this is what we are stuck with

Its no secret that upgradeable notebook graphics are a bit of an oxymoron. Despite the fact Nvidias MXM modular graphics card technology has been available to notebook designers for over a decade, few have fully adopted the standard. The lack of a universal solution for upgrading notebook graphics has left notebook owners at a significant economic disadvantage relative to desktop PC owners.

In the gaming world, and other graphics-intensive usages, the graphics card is usually the primary performance-limiting factor. Extending the life cycle of a gaming desktop or a professional 3D rendering workstation can be as simple as swapping in a new graphics card. On the notebook side of the equation, even if its processor, memory, and storage are up to the task (and they usually will be for many years after the fact) the lack of a powerful-enough graphics card means your old laptop is now obsolete. It can make the purchase of a gaming notebook or a mobile workstation a hard sell if youre interested in a longer-term investment.

Although not a new idea, using an external graphics solution has only recently caught on in the mainstream. These solutions allow you to plug in an external enclosure to your notebook, and enjoy the power of a desktop graphics card. The original DIY solutions, as well discuss in the next section, werent all that elegant, but they paved the way for the elegant plug-and-play solutions now being produced by mainstream notebook makers. Lets take a look.

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