Hi all, had my framework 13 (amd) for about almost 6 months now and am in love with the computer. I have 16 gb of ram and am happy with the performance on all key aspects of the computer itself.
I originally got the laptop for school (computer science) and it has been working very well and as advertised which is brilliant.
However like many i am also a gamer, so far i am satisfied with most if not all games however that with the likes of helldivers, ready or not and squad - very action heavy games the laptop just doesn’t seem up too scratch.
Ive looked into eGPU’s including on these forms however i do not have a clear-cut solution, I have a USB A expansion card and a USB C expansion card and have read about a thunderbolt 3 which i have no clue what that is (admittedly I have just discovered it’s a thing I need for an eGPU).
With a moderate budget too probably buy all of that which is necessary to set it up (not sure on a graphics card yet don’t know if it matters for compatiblilty) and was looking at a Razer Core X Chroma for a external habitat i was wondering if anyone had a similar experience and found a (ideally) no bug/software issue solution
As much input wanted as possible would be incredibly nice to have an epic portable set up for the summer as I live very rural with a very bad network as you can imagine so travelling to my friends in the city and setting myself up there without a full scale LAN party and just a good, powerful Laptop set up would be amazing - thanks all 
UT3G or some other asmedia based enclosure is going to be significantly better than a razer core or any other platform based on old tb3 chipsets. Also quite a bit cheaper if a bit messier (and you are going to need to plug in a separate power supply for the laptop as there isn’t an asmedia based enclosure with pd jet, good thing we got 4 charging capable ports on the framework XD).
Thunderbolt is an just a standardized interface for devices that usually uses the usb type-c connector.
Usually, a GPU communicates with the CPU through a regular PCIe connector. The exact ‘type’ of the PCIe interface is usually written as something like PCIe 3.0 x16. This means that this connector is the third generation, with 16 lanes of data. How much data can be transferred over this connector is effectively how ‘fast’ your CPU can communicate with your GPU. Each PCIe generation, the bandwith usually doubles. Lanes also usually scale linearly. (Note: this doesn’t mean that upgrading from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0 will double your performance; it just means that the CPU can send twice as much data over to the GPU) Arguably, this is the most important thing when choosing all the parts for an eGPU setup. Here’s why:
Let’s take a regular PCIe 3.0 x16 connector on a desktop PC. This results in roughly 128gbps of effective bandwith for the GPU. Meanwhile, a Thunderbolt 3 connection is essentially a PCIe 3.0 x4 connection, with a larger overhead, resulting in a theoretical bandwith of 22Gbps. Almost on sixth! In real-world gaming tests, this results roughly “only” in a 10-20% performance loss, as the GPU usually doesn’t need the full bandwith of a regular x16 link, but it is measurable, and, furthermore, some games respond much worse to this kind of bottleneck.
Note that Intel Frameworks after 12th gen have Thunderbolt 4, and AMD Frameworks have USB4, which can handle up to 32Gbps and 40Gbps respectively. Make sure your eGPU dock also supports the needed interface! As @Adrian_Joachim mentioned above, the Razer Core X only supports Thunderbolt 3. If you have an AMD-based machine with USB4, an ADT-Link UT3G will perform best; this is also the dock I have myself with a Framework 13:)
The egpu.io forum has lots of great resources to read up on this, and a great community that can help you with the smaller details while choosing and setting up everything. Some useful links: