Any laptop with Thunderbolt 3 can support external graphics?!

Just watching a Dave Lee video on YouTube regarding the 2016 Razer Blade, and at 5:10, he says that any laptop with ThunderBolt 3 + supporting bios+drivers can support a dedicated, external graphics card. Is that correct? I’ve honestly never heard of that before. My thought was that you’d need some sort of special IC chip built onto the motherboard to allow for this.

Can I have some people confirm this? Theoretically, all laptops with ThunderBolt 3 CAN support a dedicated, external graphics card, with bios+driver support?

Bump

that is correct. but there are rumors some laptops may have white-lists blocking uncertified gpu docks. so you'll need to wait for thunderbolt 3.0 to go mainstream to find out for sure.

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USB 3.1 external GPUs will be a lot more prevalent, but with the cost of most of the laptops that support external GPUs you could just build a great desktop and get a decent laptop for the same price

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My idea was to just buy some shitty laptop with USB 3.1 (Rev 2) Type C, and install a graphic card into it via the dock, and then BAM, portable graphics render station. Of course I wouldn't be able to play games on some shitty laptop, but for tasks solely dependant on the GPU, it may be pretty cool.

Probably at least a year off from doing that though,

not all USB 3.1 (Rev 2) Type C ports will be thunderbolt ports. that said according to intel it only costs about $12 for manufacturers to add a thunderbolt controller/ports to their boards. so the odds of a new cheap laptop having it are good.

But imagine, you can take your laptop that is okay, than you can just buy a gpu + dock and then you can have the power of a PC, that would be cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP_8EYQ-2RA&index=6&list=PLJiObq_964eMvLdp2_LF77Yj7h2dSyXi0 try this!!!

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I remember reading about those about 2 years ago, and the problem with it is that Mini PCIE would become the bottleneck for higher end cards because of how slow it is. But yeah, still cool.