I am moving out for a few months for education and am bringing my mini PC with me. It is fine for the most part when it comes to games but I will have an R9 290 sitting at home unused that would be nice.
I have seen then old PCIex1 eGPU adaptors for old laptops and the enclosures for thunderbolt 3 uGPUs and have been wondering…
Q: Does there exist a super basic TB3 eGPU dock that is basically just cables and a PCIe x16 slot? Super cheap like the old x1 style not a whole enclosure with charging and LEDs and all that jazz.
Edit: I found a couple on AliExpress but they are still 250-300 for bare board and wires and not sure if it is exactly what I want through the odd translations.
Oh yeah I know TB is x4 I just meant physically x16 to plug into.
That’s a shame, 200 is way more than I want to spend for a use every month or 3 sort of thing. I will probably just bring my tower with me after new years.
Yeah bring your rig, the cost of a core + laptop > a desktop build.
On top of the cost, your performance is 15% less than a desktop due to thermals and bandwidth.
I really wanted, for a long time, for thunderbolt enclosures to be more affordable. Not sure if there are too many moving parts (thunderbolt spec or laptop manifacturers).
Most likely there is little to no financial incentive to develop a good enclosure when you can get a user to buy a laptop with a new card every 2 years.
Still external enclosures have come a long way, I remember a time where the only way to get it working was to get a pci riser to mini pci and take the slot your wifi card would have taken.
Also semi relevant
Thunderbold it’s not a direct PCIe connection but since it’s a shared bus with USB is needs a device that tells the Thunderbolt controller to use PCIe. So I think that your dreams of a very cheap 50$ Thunderbolt dock need to be put to the side for now.
P.S. the controller to enable the Thunderbolt connection to use PCIe is what makes 90% of the cost of the enclosures. LEDs, power supply, fan are stupid cheap for the manufacturer.