Hi Guys, I’m getting an FW13 with Ryzen 9 ai 370 CPU and looking for the best eGPU dock and GPU combo to use with this machine.
Anyone use this type of set-up and have any recommendations or things to consider?
Thanks,
Adam
Hi Adam!
For about a year now I have had my AMD RX7800 (which I had from a slightly older, now dead desktop) connected as an egpu to my FW13 (w/ a Ryzen HX 370 as well since it was released; before that I had a 12th gen intel mainboard) via an ADT-Link UT3G pcie to thunderbolt/usb4 dock, and it has actually worked quite well and reliably! I do have a few notes from my experience:
- If you are using Windows, you cannot have the eGPU connected to the laptop while booting, as that upsets Windows Bitlocker. This has been fine for me as there is a convenient switch on the eGPU dock with a rather bright series of green status lights that I just remember to ensure is off before booting up. This hasn’t caused any issues with suspend for me, and haven’t had any similar issue on linux.
- Theoretically, the limited bandwidth of T4/USB4 hurts GPU perf somewhat — I haven’t experienced any massive degradations from this, but I have never had this GPU connected to an actual pcie 4.0 by 16 interface, as even prior to this I only had it in an older desktop with pcie 3.0.
- Every once in a while I’ve had what seems to be an AMD driver-related crash on Windows; I’ve not experienced this at all on Linux and it’s fairly rare (perhaps once a week and recovers in 30 seconds).
- On drivers — since I have both AMD card and an AMD CPU/iGPU, everything seems to Just Work^tm on both Linux and Windows, and beyond that random crash I experience every once in a while, I really don’t have much else of note w.r.t. drivers.
I hope this helps!
Hey Logan, thanks for the advice! I was only considerimg Nvidia before but makes sense from a compatabklity point to stick with AMD on both.
By degradation do you mean damaging the GPU? If so how would this be possible?
Oh, sorry — I mean performance reduction while the card is acting as an eGPU (if it were to be put in a desktop later, there would be no such reduction). This occurs because Thunderbolt 4/USB4 have only 40Gb/s of bandwidth and so can carry at most PCIe 3.0x4 (which is 32Gb/s). For comparison, if my RX7800XT were installed in a desktop, it would be able to connect with PCIe 4.0x16, which has something like 250Gb/s of (theoretical) bandwidth each way.
This can, depending on the specific workload, have anything from basically zero impact in the slightest to a massive (>30% some people claim) negative impact. For gaming, the impact is usually smaller so long as the card isn’t particularly VRAM limited — my card has 16 GB of VRAM, and so the impact (if any) is fairly small. For some non-gaming compute-heavy workloads it probably can also have an impact; for instance, I suppose if you’re trying to run an AI model on the card that does not fully fit in its VRAM (so long as it does it should be fine). I’ve never had much of an issue with this in my experience.
Also, if you are trying to display on the internal laptop screen rather than an external monitor (which is the only way I’ve ever used mine), that can supposedly have a large impact, as it takes away some of that limited bandwidth.
This sort of thing is probably either a deal-breaker or a non-issue for you depending on exactly what card you get and what you use it for; generally, though, if the use is playing GPU-limited games at higher resolutions on an external monitor, it is fine (in my experience at least).
If you do go ahead with it, I would advise you test that everything performs about as well as it should and that none of your use cases are severely impacted by it before the end of any return periods just to be safe!
As for AMD vs Nvidia, an AMD GPU might work better with the AMD CPU, though I mean this more in terms of convenience, as it means you only need one set of graphics drivers and such. Performance-wise it really shouldn’t have an impact, I believe. For Linux specifically, AMD cards can sometimes work better as eGPUs than Nvidia cards, I’ve heard (and experienced somewhat), but if you’re on Windows, that’s a null point. Realistically, both will probably work just fine, so just go with whatever you can get the best deal on in this economy or if you want NVIDIA-specific features. If you were only considering Nvidia before, then probably just stick with that.
From my research I was coming to a similar conclusion! As you mention, I’m only looking to get higher framerates in gaming when connected to my monitor at home. I used to have a dedicated gaming laptop but found I rarely game away from home anyway, plus the eGPU in the framework can hold up to decent framerates on most titles.
As you say, it’s all about value for money, and the additional VRAM in the RX7800 XT is a bonus, plus its roughly £80 cheaper than an RTX4070 so seems like a no brainer to me!
Thanks again for the advice