Any Chance of Desktop GPU Connection with Expansion Bay?

Thank very much for the this valuable information, I will definitely look into it!

I have pre-ordered the Framework laptop 16 and am looking very much forward to using it! Now, I would really like some extra graphical horsepower on my machine, but for me it seems to be that the only dGPU option offered by Framework is a little too underwhelming for me.

While doing some research on Thunderbolt 3/USB4, I saw that those protocols only support 4 pcie lanes. Later I discovered that the expansion bay has 8 pcie lanes available, which is awesome. How cool would it be to be able to connect an external GPU to those 8 pci lanes through the expansion bay?

I read a lot about some kind of expansion bay variant that holds two m.2 slots which can be used. M.2. slots have by themselves 4 pci lanes, but it is possible to directly attach an GPU to them with the help of a M.2 to PCIE riser. See these links: https://www.amazon.com/ADT-Link-Extender-Graphics-Adapter-PCI-Express/dp/B07YDH8KW9 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ovihMPo-q8.

This resulted in me wondering how hard it would be to make or design a variant of the expansion bay that has the ability to connect to an external GPU? I would love to spend some time to discover this myself, but I’m a software engineer, not a hardware engineer / machine designer :smiley: Anyone in the know here?

I learned my lesson, search first on a forum and then post if you can’t find it.

A thread on this already exists: Any Chance of Desktop GPU Connection with Expansion Bay?

2 Likes