4 reasons you should consider getting an external GPU for your laptop

4 reasons you should consider getting an external GPU for your laptop

The laptop market is riddled with compromises, even if you look at the best laptops out there. You either get a thin-and-light laptop that's easy to take anywhere, or a powerful gaming rig that's much harder to carry around. As a solution, the market has come up with external GPUs, which can give you the power of a gaming laptop on demand.

You may not have heard a lot about external GPUs, but if you haven't considered one before, there are a few good reasons why you might want think about it. Here are just a few of them.

Turn any laptop into a gaming machine

You don't need a bulky laptop

Right off the bat, the obvious advantage with an external GPU is that you get a lot more processing power than what your laptop can likely deliver. Most laptops have relatively weak integrated GPUs that aren't ideal for gaming, especially at higher resolutions, and an external GPU gives you that power in an instant.

While external GPUs do require Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 support, these ports are becoming more and more common, which means that a lot of laptops on the market today do offer support for external GPUs to some extent. Even if you already have a gaming laptop, the GPU inside it may age quicker than the rest of the components, so an external GPU can extend its longevity.

It adds a lot of versatility

Power when you need it, portability when you don't

While you could just buy a high-end gaming laptop and use that for the next few years, a gaming laptop is going to be a fairly heavy machine, especially if it's a more powerful model. if you're a student or someone traveling for work, carrying that kind of weight with you can get tiring and frustrating after a while, not to mention it will damage your back if you do it for a long time.

With an external GPU, you can set up your gaming rig at home with all the power you need, but when you need to take the laptop with you, you can just unplug the external GPU and carry a much lighter device with you wherever you need to go.

The same can be said for gaming handhelds to some extent. When you're on the go playing on a small screen, the weaker integrated GPU can provide a solid experience, but when you're at home, you can hook up your handheld to a large screen and play in much higher resolution and detail by using the external GPU.

More flexibility for upgrades

Upgrade different components at different times

A big advantage of desktop PCs is that for the most part, you can upgrade different components whenever you want without necessarily upgrading everything else. it allows you to save money by upgrading only what you need to, and external GPUs bring that same sort of spirit to laptops, at least to some extent.

Say your laptop can still play games fine, but it's been struggling in day-to-day use because it doesn't have enough RAM or the processor is starting to show its age. A high-end gaming laptop could cost over $2,000 or even $3,000, but if you have a standard laptop, you can get by spending around $1,000, and then you can keep using the external GPU you already have. Conversely, if most of your laptop is fine but you need more gaming performance, you can buy just a new external GPU for significantly less than a new laptop.

This is even more true if you buy an eGPU enclosure that supports swapping GPUs, because you have even more modularity, and you might be able to take advantage of more advanced technology over time. For example, if you eventually get a laptop with Thunderbolt 5 and a GPU enclosure that also supports it, you might be able to get more performance out of a high-end desktop GPU. More flexibility is always good to have, even if there is a higher initial investment.

Set up workstations in an office

Share power, not data

Another potentially interesting use case for an external GPU is providing workers with a powerful workstation but without the hassle of potentially sharing data between them, particularly in hotseating jobs. Instead of desktop PCs, you can equip desks with an external GPU, and workers can connect their laptop to make use of the powerful GPU, while keeping access to all of their data and files on the laptop itself.

This way, workers always have the data they need at all times and they can leverage that performance whenever it's required. At the same time, multiple workers can share that desk without information being shared between them, since each of them is bringing their own laptop with their own data.

Being able to share GPU resources while keeping each worker's data separate is a potentially great solution in many scenarios where work may requires more powerful hardware.

External GPUs have plenty of uses

Having the extra power of an external GPU you can connect to your laptop can make your experience much better for some workloads without sacrificing the portability of a thin and light laptop or a gaming handheld. It's not a solution that fits everyone's needs, but the potential is definitely there, and it's worth considering a solution like this.