I’ve always been drawn to the One Cable Solution, where you take your nice long-battery-life laptop home and plug in one cable that transforms it into a battlestation with all your peripherals, enhanced performance, and charging. Nowadays this is possible with eGPUs. Unfortunately, I hate small laptops, so I really want to get a FW16, but it’d be a shame to buy both a GPU expansion bay and a separate eGPU. So I have some questions:
(If I have the empty bay plugged in,) is it possible to use the dGPU expansion bay as an eGPU plugged into an arbitrary TB port?
Same as above but for plugging into a TB dock?
If using the dGPU bay as an eGPU, is it possible to hot plug / unplug or would I need to turn my laptop off an on again to recognize the GPU? Would appreciate an answer on Windows and, if anyone happens to know, Linux.
And if anyone has any other ideas about a One Cable Solution (and ideally one that still involves a dGPU bay so I can take it with me when I travel), please do voice them!
Thanks all!
I probably wouldn’t use it for anything except expansion bay module development.
3: Unfortunately not.
As you have may have realized by this point, swapping out the dGPU module is too inconvenient for this plan to make sense.
Even if you only infrequently install the dGPU in the laptop (e.g. during travels), then you will be stuck with an overpriced mobile-tier GPU for your desktop workstation.
You should take in to account that:
The APU has totally sufficient graphics for occasional low-fidelity gaming on the go, it’s definitely better than you think!
The dGPU module doesn’t consume power unless you’re actively using it. Also, even without it, this laptop does not get impressive battery life.
I think either leaving the dGPU installed, or not buying it, could make more sense, depending on how often you’re away from your desk.
