eGPU setup that seemed to work for me

Framework Laptop 13
1

Hello,

I recently hooked up my Framework 13 Ultra Series 1 up to my eGPU and went through a bit of troubleshooting before I found a working setup for me. I just thought I’d share here my steps in case they could prove useful to anyone else.

Hardware and Software overview

  • Laptop: Framework Ultra Series 1
  • eGPU: Razer Core X Chroma with an NVIDIA 2060
  • Operating system: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

My first observation was that natively the screen would connect alright without anything done, but the GPU wasn’t recognized or used by the system. I first tried to install NVIDIA drivers through Additional Drivers which somehow I didn’t have great success with and I ended up uninstalling basically everything afterwards to get back to the situation where at least the monitor was just working. apt-get remove --purge ‘^nvidia-.*’, I read somewhere that this could potentially get rid of some desirable software too though and that reinstalling ubuntu-desktop was recommended afterwards apt-get install ubuntu-desktop. I can’t say if this is accurate though, … consider avoiding needing the purge if possible.

In my second attempt I did the following:

  1. apt-get install nvidia-driver-580

    to install the latest driver. This required a secure boot policy update.

  2. I managed to fail to apply the secure boot policy during the reboot, so I had to trigger it again using
    update-secureboot-policy --enroll-key

It actually just worked for me after this, running nvidia-smi seems to confirm this, but also ofc launching a game and seeing the message that shaders are getting compiled is a nice confirmation too.

It’s not all joy though, there are some issues to be aware of that I’ve noticed and keep in mind when I use the setup:

  • I’ve found that I need to connect the thunderbolt connection before login. If I connect after login then I get a system error. I can still move the mouse around, but everything else appears to freeze up.
  • Letting the laptop go into standby or similar appears to lock up the system.

These are only minor annoyances to me; since my old windows laptop I used to run with the eGPU I needed to always reboot the laptop to get it to consistently connect with the eGPU (not to forget the registry key entries that needed to be edited for the system to not just freeze up randomly).

Just wanted to share, hope it can help someone get their setup running.

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