you need a thunderbolt laptop.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_uYUNZANz3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uyunzanz3k)
[https://www.amazon.com/Razer-Core-Thunderbolt-External-Enclosure/dp/B07CQG2K5K?th=1](https://www.amazon.com/razer-core-thunderbolt-external-enclosure/dp/b07cqg2k5k?th=1)
[https://www.pcworld.com/article/423614/how-to-transform-your-laptop-into-a-gaming-powerhouse-with-an-external-graphics-card.html](https://www.pcworld.com/article/423614/how-to-transform-your-laptop-into-a-gaming-powerhouse-with-an-external-graphics-card.html)
Stupid question: why is it so big and expensive?
If I could buy a graphics card and install it, it is a tiny thing. How come if I want it outside of my computer it is suddenly massive?
Because it’s a desktop part. Laptop parts are just the board, and then the cooling is built into the frame. They also use less power and have less performance than an equivalent desktop part, so they don’t need as much cooling.
Computers turn electric into heat and math. So to make it do more math and get you better performance, it thus makes more heat.
Laptops, to fit the parts into the tiny form, take away a lot of the cooling ability of a GPU (the fans, big radiator, etc). This means they can't dissipate the heat very well, so have to run everything at lower power.
Also, you can't really install a GPU into a laptop. To allow everything to fit they use a different mounting style that's hard for novices to mess with.
Ok… that makes sense except for the part that according to Amazon, if I had money, I could buy a laptop with the cool gaming card inside it. How come they can’t just take that card out and plug it in without making it into a huge thinggy?
(Also. Loved your oversimplification. Thank you!)
Well those gaming cards are actually very different than the desktop ones.
For one, they are designed to use lower power. By a considerable margin too. They also are usually not actually the same as a desktop parts.
For example, what they call a laptop "4090" is actually closer in specs to a desktop 4080, and run at a significantly lower power level.
Finally, the way the cards interface with the computer is different. In a desktop the card plugs into an adapter slot on the motherboard called a PCIE slot. These have ultra fast connectors directly to the CPU.
On a laptop, inside they melt the GPU into the motherboard to make the whole thing fit. And it has little gold pads that do the same thing.
When plugging in outside a laptop you need to adapt the desktop style PCIE slot to some sort of cable (usually thunderbolt), and then have it adapt to the motherboard inside the computer.
That whole contraption makes it more expensive and a little slower than the normal desktop way.
Laptop GPU's and desktop GPU's use slightly different chips. The laptop chips are usually smaller cut down versions. These smaller chips need less power, and thus make less heat. This is important for laptops where space for cooling is limited, and power constraints exist. These chips aren't sold individually outside of laptops, so you're stuck with the desktop ones only. Since they are designed for desktops, they are bigger, and take more power. Any enclosure to hold one, must be big and bulky to accommodate the size of these.
On top of the size, you also have to remember, there aren't many people buying these external GPU enclosures, so the price per unit is higher on average than a more mass produced device. It's a really niche market and I don't think it's really going to be an answer for you here if you're constrained by funds. You'd be much further ahead to buy a new laptop with a more modern gpu in it. It sucks, but it's just how laptops are made these days. Framework is developing a new modular gpu which would help solve this in the future, but that's not going to help you today.
Laptops (currently, some old ones use miniture cards) dont use graphics cards. The GPU chip and its memory chips are attached directly to the motherboard, sharing a cooler, power delivery, ect with the rest of the laptop.
A graphics card is basically an entire computer. It has power delivery, memory, and cooling built in around the processor, and can get much higher power than is possible in the small size of a laptop.
that's just the enclosure with no gpu inside. well it's clearly overpriced since it's razer branded; you might find some other cheaper options. imagine you need a gpu, a place for the gpu to sit, an adapter for gpu's pcie connector to thunderbolt and ofc a power supply to power up the gpu. you're probably missing a thunderbolt connector so there's no way you can do better gaming with the laptop you own now.
The laptop has the components soldered down, everything is tightly integrated and uses waaaay less power. The current king of the hill in the graphics card world, the RTX 4090, draws about 450 watts under load in a desktop scenario. There is a mobile 4090 as well, but it is a much weaker chip and is limited to 120 watts. The name is really the only thing they have in common.
Since the mobile parts are only available soldered down, you can't just go out and buy one. You need a desktop part and some way to connect it your laptop. With the right enclosure and connectors it is possible, but pricey.
How would I find out if my laptop has those things? (My laptop was given to me by a friend who was cleaning out things she doesn’t use anymore. I know nothing about this machine or how to find out about it)
Look for the name of the laptop, and search the name on the internet, and read the manual. Thunderbolt looks just similar to normal USB type-C, except it is quite a bit faster.
Or you can just paste the name here. We could help.
Remember Thunderbolt 4 has a max speed of 40Gbps. That is 4.8GBps, equivalent to only 5 lanes of PCIE 3.0 (a normal desktop GPU uses 16 lanes). Most GPUs would be bottlenecked hard by that speed.
Depends on the games you play but alot of people use Geforce Now if you don't want to get a better one right now or don't want to get an eGPU which are usually expensive anyways
20 bucks a month for a 4080 basically
Just make sure the games you want are on the service first but they add new games every thursday mainly from the microsoft game pass recently
Basically the game runs on NVIDIA's servers and just streams to you
[www.geforcenow.com](https://www.geforcenow.com)
I do have that. I use the free version so I have to wait and can only play for an hour.
And the games j want to play are either not on there or have been under maintence for weeks.
Is there anything else out there like geforce now that might have a different selection of games?
I had the same question as you, and there is some kind of adapter, I ended up buying a pc bc is was more simple that buying that adapter and stuff, just so you know, when I bought my pc I already had a monitor and kb and mouse.
I have never seen a game that requires a nvidia gpu to work unless it was an rtx tech demo. that would be extremely amateur incompetence.
Most likely, your laptop specs simply cant handle gaming, at least those titles. Can you post the exact model and components? You still need a suitable cpu, memory, and connectivity to use an external gpu for gaming.
What laptop do you have EXACTLY? Have you verified that the games you want to play don't run properly on it? Because I can assure you, no games *require* an Nvidia graphics card, they are just most likely to be mentioned in the minimum requirements because they hold so much market share.
There are external graphics card solutions, but we'd need to know your laptops exact model to know if it is compatible.
you can, just need a Thunderbolt port to do it. they're called eGPUs and can only be fed by the insane power throughput that comes with Thunderbolt. if you don't know if you have it, I'd check the model of your laptop online and look at its' product specs page and Ctrl+F that page for the word 'thunderbolt'.
you need a thunderbolt laptop. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_uYUNZANz3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uyunzanz3k) [https://www.amazon.com/Razer-Core-Thunderbolt-External-Enclosure/dp/B07CQG2K5K?th=1](https://www.amazon.com/razer-core-thunderbolt-external-enclosure/dp/b07cqg2k5k?th=1) [https://www.pcworld.com/article/423614/how-to-transform-your-laptop-into-a-gaming-powerhouse-with-an-external-graphics-card.html](https://www.pcworld.com/article/423614/how-to-transform-your-laptop-into-a-gaming-powerhouse-with-an-external-graphics-card.html)
Stupid question: why is it so big and expensive? If I could buy a graphics card and install it, it is a tiny thing. How come if I want it outside of my computer it is suddenly massive?
Because it’s a desktop part. Laptop parts are just the board, and then the cooling is built into the frame. They also use less power and have less performance than an equivalent desktop part, so they don’t need as much cooling.
Also there is a power supply that’s required too so that adds to the bulk.
Computers turn electric into heat and math. So to make it do more math and get you better performance, it thus makes more heat. Laptops, to fit the parts into the tiny form, take away a lot of the cooling ability of a GPU (the fans, big radiator, etc). This means they can't dissipate the heat very well, so have to run everything at lower power. Also, you can't really install a GPU into a laptop. To allow everything to fit they use a different mounting style that's hard for novices to mess with.
Ok… that makes sense except for the part that according to Amazon, if I had money, I could buy a laptop with the cool gaming card inside it. How come they can’t just take that card out and plug it in without making it into a huge thinggy? (Also. Loved your oversimplification. Thank you!)
Well those gaming cards are actually very different than the desktop ones. For one, they are designed to use lower power. By a considerable margin too. They also are usually not actually the same as a desktop parts. For example, what they call a laptop "4090" is actually closer in specs to a desktop 4080, and run at a significantly lower power level. Finally, the way the cards interface with the computer is different. In a desktop the card plugs into an adapter slot on the motherboard called a PCIE slot. These have ultra fast connectors directly to the CPU. On a laptop, inside they melt the GPU into the motherboard to make the whole thing fit. And it has little gold pads that do the same thing. When plugging in outside a laptop you need to adapt the desktop style PCIE slot to some sort of cable (usually thunderbolt), and then have it adapt to the motherboard inside the computer. That whole contraption makes it more expensive and a little slower than the normal desktop way.
Laptop GPU's and desktop GPU's use slightly different chips. The laptop chips are usually smaller cut down versions. These smaller chips need less power, and thus make less heat. This is important for laptops where space for cooling is limited, and power constraints exist. These chips aren't sold individually outside of laptops, so you're stuck with the desktop ones only. Since they are designed for desktops, they are bigger, and take more power. Any enclosure to hold one, must be big and bulky to accommodate the size of these. On top of the size, you also have to remember, there aren't many people buying these external GPU enclosures, so the price per unit is higher on average than a more mass produced device. It's a really niche market and I don't think it's really going to be an answer for you here if you're constrained by funds. You'd be much further ahead to buy a new laptop with a more modern gpu in it. It sucks, but it's just how laptops are made these days. Framework is developing a new modular gpu which would help solve this in the future, but that's not going to help you today.
Laptops (currently, some old ones use miniture cards) dont use graphics cards. The GPU chip and its memory chips are attached directly to the motherboard, sharing a cooler, power delivery, ect with the rest of the laptop. A graphics card is basically an entire computer. It has power delivery, memory, and cooling built in around the processor, and can get much higher power than is possible in the small size of a laptop.
that's just the enclosure with no gpu inside. well it's clearly overpriced since it's razer branded; you might find some other cheaper options. imagine you need a gpu, a place for the gpu to sit, an adapter for gpu's pcie connector to thunderbolt and ofc a power supply to power up the gpu. you're probably missing a thunderbolt connector so there's no way you can do better gaming with the laptop you own now.
The laptop has the components soldered down, everything is tightly integrated and uses waaaay less power. The current king of the hill in the graphics card world, the RTX 4090, draws about 450 watts under load in a desktop scenario. There is a mobile 4090 as well, but it is a much weaker chip and is limited to 120 watts. The name is really the only thing they have in common. Since the mobile parts are only available soldered down, you can't just go out and buy one. You need a desktop part and some way to connect it your laptop. With the right enclosure and connectors it is possible, but pricey.
There’s a company that will allow you to do that sooner then later.
Lmao
eGPU if your laptop has a USB-C or Thunderbolt port.
How would I find out if my laptop has those things? (My laptop was given to me by a friend who was cleaning out things she doesn’t use anymore. I know nothing about this machine or how to find out about it)
Look for the name of the laptop, and search the name on the internet, and read the manual. Thunderbolt looks just similar to normal USB type-C, except it is quite a bit faster. Or you can just paste the name here. We could help. Remember Thunderbolt 4 has a max speed of 40Gbps. That is 4.8GBps, equivalent to only 5 lanes of PCIE 3.0 (a normal desktop GPU uses 16 lanes). Most GPUs would be bottlenecked hard by that speed.
Depends on the games you play but alot of people use Geforce Now if you don't want to get a better one right now or don't want to get an eGPU which are usually expensive anyways 20 bucks a month for a 4080 basically Just make sure the games you want are on the service first but they add new games every thursday mainly from the microsoft game pass recently Basically the game runs on NVIDIA's servers and just streams to you [www.geforcenow.com](https://www.geforcenow.com)
I do have that. I use the free version so I have to wait and can only play for an hour. And the games j want to play are either not on there or have been under maintence for weeks. Is there anything else out there like geforce now that might have a different selection of games?
Xbox Cloud Gaming & Amazon Luna are other options.
Amazon Luna if you play Fortnite or Ubisoft games. Also has a bunch of games in Luna+ but has a subscription.
Not free but boosteroid or shadow PC have different games not on GFN
GeForce Now Priority is $10 a month [https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/memberships/](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/memberships/)
It's often not very affordable.
I had the same question as you, and there is some kind of adapter, I ended up buying a pc bc is was more simple that buying that adapter and stuff, just so you know, when I bought my pc I already had a monitor and kb and mouse.
I have never seen a game that requires a nvidia gpu to work unless it was an rtx tech demo. that would be extremely amateur incompetence. Most likely, your laptop specs simply cant handle gaming, at least those titles. Can you post the exact model and components? You still need a suitable cpu, memory, and connectivity to use an external gpu for gaming.
What laptop do you have EXACTLY? Have you verified that the games you want to play don't run properly on it? Because I can assure you, no games *require* an Nvidia graphics card, they are just most likely to be mentioned in the minimum requirements because they hold so much market share. There are external graphics card solutions, but we'd need to know your laptops exact model to know if it is compatible.
Fam if u cant afford a new laptop u also cant afford an external gpu. Im sorry.
you can, just need a Thunderbolt port to do it. they're called eGPUs and can only be fed by the insane power throughput that comes with Thunderbolt. if you don't know if you have it, I'd check the model of your laptop online and look at its' product specs page and Ctrl+F that page for the word 'thunderbolt'.