eGPU or Intel NUC for gaming???

[Avi Assayag]

I need some help guys;
I work at a night job (I'm a M'urse- male nurse ;-) with tons of hours to kill and I love DCS.
I have a laptop that has X4 PCI lanes open and willing to connect to an external GPU with a Thunderbolt 3 port.

Some questions:
1. I have heard that regardless of the GPU ability, there is a PCIe or CPU bottlenecking.
2. Therefore, given my specific specs, what kind of GPU should I opt for? 1060, 70, 80… etc.'
3. I can also buy for the same price (through an intel employee) the latest NUC - which one would do the work better?
4. Can DCS even run on these alleged setups anyway?

Details:
• My laptop: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga 2nd gen specs: [20JD004UUS]
- 7th Gen Kaby Lake, 2 cores 4 threads, Intel Core i7 7500U @ 2.7 GHz, 4MB Cache, 15W
- 8 GB DDR3 SDRAM @ 1866 MHz
- SSD PCIe NVMe 512 GB Flash Memory
- two USB 3.1 Type-C ports, both supporting Thunderbolt 3 with 4PCIe lanes

• Possible eGPU's I can Buy:
- Gigabyte Aorus GTX 1080 Gaming Box for 700 USD
- Gigabyte Aorus GTX 1080 Gaming Box for 650 USD

• Possible Intel NUC I can Buy:
- Hades Canyon NUC Premium VR Mini Desktop Gaming PC for about 700-800 USD from an Intel employee benefit
(Intel i7-8809G, 16GB RAM, 2x500GB NVMe RAID, AMD Radeon RX Vega M GH, Windows 10 Home)

Any help from personal experience and benchmarking data would be immensely appreciated.

Thanks guys!

 

[k1114]

Your cpu could handle a 1060 and I wouldn't go higher with it but that nuc has a better cpu and the Vega M GH is close to the 1060. Pcie bottlenecking is minimal with x4 so don't worry about it. I would get the nuc if it costs even a little more as an egpu. That way you are getting a whole working pc and not just an egpu.

 

[Avi Assayag]

I see, but can the NUC connect to the thinkpad and it would show up as a gpu? or did you mean to go for the NUC and be done with it?

 

[k1114]

A nuc is a fully functioning pc by itself. The only thing that makes it a "nuc" is the small form factor. You can't connect 2 pcs except by networking and it won't be using hardware of another pc like it was their own.

 

[Avi Assayag]

thank you for the explanation. so, is there anywhere a bench test that was run on a thinkpad with egpu maybe?

 

[k1114]

Good luck with that but it's a waste of time to find it too. You can figure out performance just by specs.