Thunderbolt 3 egpu or gaming desktop

[Hegzawy]

What do u think guys should iget a laptop with thunderbolt 3 and get egpu with it or should iget agaming desktop.....i move alot so the portability is good thing but i also need the maximum fps for my money and gaming laptops is very very expensive in my country...what do u think ?

 

[maxalge]

What do u think guys should iget a laptop with thunderbolt 3 and get egpu with it or should iget agaming desktop.....i move alot so the portability is good thing but i also need the maximum fps for my money and gaming laptops is very very expensive in my country...what do u think ?

anything decent would be bottlenecked by the slot speeds

 

[Hegzawy]

Ithought that there will be no bottlenecking with thunderbolt 3 ?!!!!! Imean cant i get the same performance of 970 on the laptop using thunderbolt 3 ??

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Gaming laptops in general are expensive regardless of the country. In any event, maxalge is right, while TB3 is a definite step up, it is still ultimately only roughly equivalent to a PCIe x 4 slot in terms of bandwidth (approx 40Gb/sec for TB3, 32Gb/sec for PCIe 3.0 x4).

While that wouldn't be too bad for a low end card (ie: 750ti, GTX950, R7-250/260), for anything over that (GTX960 or higher, or R9-270x or higher) it could be a choke point vs an integrated GPU in a gaming laptop which can use the full x16 via being on the mobo (or through the MXM connector) although some initial testing shows only a 10-20% loss of performance. The point then becomes the cost vs benefit. An external GPU (eGPU) setup isn't going to be all that cheap, as it will require not only the housing, but the PSU and then you still have to buy the GPU. Pricing for just an external HDD TB enclosure are $200-$400 USD (no drives), so something with a 400w PSU as well is going to be on the higher end of that range. Then a few hundred for a GPU.

And it's not portable - at least if it's not plugged in somewhere - like a gaming laptop. Yes, a full gaming laptop would only last maybe an hour max depending on the battery and the GPU, but it's still more portable than an eGPU.

What I see TB3 being useful for is more along the lines of docking stations where you can pair up external keyboards, mice, external drives, and wired ethernet through a single connector. Yes, an eGPU could be useful, but only once we see what the pricing is going to be for the housing/PSU assembly, and then get some real performance numbers.

 

[Hegzawy]

The prices of gaming laptops here in egypt are like 25-40% higher than the global price so the egpu looked better for me...and ithought that th3 is also good for high gpus like the 970...anyway thanks for the answer

 

[joshua jones]

Actually the performance hit is quite small between PCI-e x16 and thunderbolt 3.. ~5% at higher resolutions

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_980_PCI-Express_Scaling/22.html

so ignore the people who haven't done their research and flat out say 20% or more performance hit. thunderbolt 3 has just enough bandwidth to handle todays cards.. granted its not future proof since there's no headroom incase more bandwidth is needed in the future.