I’d like to put together an eGPU for my surface pro. It seems like you just buy the chassis and add a GPU. Is this true? Can you use any GPU?
I am also interested in an egpu but not for gaming, just for running local AI models. Has anyone had any experience with this?
No, but if your concern is just that you personally want control over the model and you don’t have to be able to operate it without an Internet connection and don’t need high bandwidth to the thing being run, I would at least give consideration to sticking a regular GPU into a desktop that you control and using it remotely from your laptop. This is what I’ve done.
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I just linked to a new eGPU above. I noticed that it was the “RTX 5090 Laptop GPU”. Note that the (desktop) RTX 5090 and the RTX 5090 Laptop are not the same hardware; the former is a lot more power-hungry and performs better. It may be that a desktop GPU is available as an eGPU, but I’d be aware that there is a difference and you may not be getting what you are expecting.
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At least the software that I’ve used is specifically designed to be used remotely – like, you typically fire up a web browser and then talk to Automatic1111 or ComfyUI or KoboldAI or whatever. I’ve had no problems with that.
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This is power-hungry. Even if you can carry the hardware with you, using it without a power outlet handy is probably going to be a little annoying.
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It’s probably going to have fans spun up on reasonable hardware. I’d just as soon have the fan noise and heat not right next to me.
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While the desktop probably costs something, so does the eGPU.
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At least some software – depends upon what you want to do – does a pretty good job of queuing up tasks and churning on it, which means that you can, remotely, just look at your output and then fire up more work and then put your laptop to sleep or whatever. That’s not very useful if you want to run an interactive LLM-based chatbot or something, but ComfyUI can queue up a bunch of image-generation jobs with different prompts or something.
Now, all that being said, that does have some drawbacks.
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It means a desktop, if you don’t already have one (though really all it needs is that beefy GPU).
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It means that your laptop has to have some form of Internet connectivity. I can comfortably use it on a tethered cell phone for what I do, but it’s something to keep in mind.
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I am sure that there is probably some sort of software out there where you really want the GPU to be local to where you are.
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You can’t also use your beefy GPU for 3D games on your laptop, if that’s something that you want to do. I imagine that for some people, this is a major point.
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You need some way to reach the desktop remotely over the Internet.
This is not to ding eGPUs – they’re a good option for certain use cases – but just to encourage people to at least consider the “use desktop with desktop GPU remotely” approach if their main interest is in running AI stuff.
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The most important consideration is your laptops ports and it’s cpu. You will need Thunderbolt 3, 4 or 5 or USB 4 to get high enough transfer speeds and bandwidth between your eGPU and the laptop. You also need a decent CPU to get the full benefits - an eGPU paired with an old or low powered CPU may mean you dont get the full benefits of the eGPU as your CPU is still a bottleneck in running the software or games that would make use of the eGPU.
Then the eGPU chassis you choose will have specific limitations in terms of size of card that will fit. You need to check these carefully to ensure the chassis can fit and support the card you want. The bigger and better the chassis the more expensive it will be. Were talking a couple of hundred pounds / dollars on top of the card price.
But in theory there isn’t a limit on the cards you can use. Any GPUs that fits the chassis would work as its a standard pcie slot. However i would contend that if you want to use a top end card like a 5090 youre better off getting an actual PC to enjoy the full performance. If youre spending 1000s on a GPU it should be paired with a high end laptop or far better in an actual desktop to get the benefit. You also need to ensure the chassis can provide enough power to the card you want.
You lose about 10-15% of the cards functionality in the overhead of the eGPU. Thats because as fast as thunderbolt and usb4 are, you are transfering that to/from a pcie slot in the eGPU chassis and also transferring data over an distance via a cable compared to a gpu plugged directly into pcie on a motherboard for a PC, with direct connection to the CPU and rest of the motherboard. Newer thunderbolt and newer chassis might have lower overheads but they will never be able to completely match direct plug into a motherboard.
So yes eGPUs work, if your device can support it, and you can get big performance boosts. There isn’t a limit on the GPU but you should probably not go too high end as you’d be wasting money. A low end GPU would likely out perform any integrated card or graphics for most laptops and a mid range card would likely give excellent performance if paired with a decent specced laptop. But any eGPU set up cannot match the Max performance of the card in a dedicated desktop set up.
Edit: I know you have a surface but in case others read this and have a Mac - eGPUs wont work with Apples M1/M2 CPU chips. There is no way around this. AMD and Intel chips do although newer is better.
I think the best you can do these days is a GPU dock that you’re also using a power supply with. I’ve been looking into such a thing for my Lenovo Legion Go as it’s got USB4 and I rarely use the thing not hooked up to a larger display.
I have a Surface Laptop 6 and a Razer eGPU enclosure with a Radeon 6600 XT in it and it works fine. The manufacturer will list what sorts of GPUs are compatible, assuming you get a brand name one and not some cheap no-name Amazon job.
Honestly if you have the money, go for a PC. The mobile CPU in laptops/tablets will your biggest bottleneck. Get a decent CPU, motherboard and PSU and the best GPU you can afford and it’ll probably out perform the Surface.
eGPUs have all but disappeared. 90% of the models available in 2019 are no longer available with no models to replace them. Even bigger companies like razer and coolermaster seemed to silently discontinue them and simply let the product webpages break down. I think power requirements of the last years of GPUs have also made them less practical and people aren’t going to pay 500€ for an enclosure when that is simply approaching the cost of the rest of the PC.
There are even fewer thunderbolt4 but thunderbolt3 has a bit of latency results in slight performance loss, so finding an old model enclosure with thunderbolt3 might be your best chance of getting it. Different storefronts sometimes still have a few in stock you can buy.
??? The success of the Mini PC formfactor has caused a big resurgence of egpu products. Now they are sold as empty pcie slots with a thunderbolt or occulink port. You provide your own GPU and power supply.
Here’s a new product from last month:
I think power requirements of the last years of GPUs have also made them less practical
Wait, what? If power requirements are going up, then I’d say that there’s more pressure for an eGPU, if anything. Laptops are limited in heat dissipation compared to desktops.
I can understand someone saying “you’re better off using a desktop for gaming with powerful GPUs, if you can deal with not moving it around”. But I wouldn’t expect that power-hungry GPUs would make internal GPUs in laptops more desirable.
eGPUs have all but disappeared. 90% of the models available in 2019 are no longer available with no models to replace them.
kagis
This is the first hit I get for “2025 egpu”
The 2025 ROG XG Mobile Leads New Era of eGPUs with Thunderbolt 5
I think that there are still new ones coming out.
There are plenty of chassis available if you go looking. Some haven’t been updated to newer models but remain available.
A chassis is fairly simple - its basically a bit of mother board with pcie and a thunderbolt 3+ connection. Thunderbolt 3 remains powerful enough for most uses, and ones with dedicated PSU will work with newer cards. I think the lack of new products reflects the lack of needing to change the products at the moment.
I haven’t seen much about thunderbolt 4 reducing the overhead. It might do, but there are fundamental constraints in these devices as this is basically converting pcie to thunderbolt and transferring over a distance - thats not going to ever match a direct pcie connection into a motherboard no matter how fast Thunderbolt 4 or 5 are. Thunderbolt 3 may not be the main bottleneck.
The Razer Core X is still available for example. And there are loads of smaller companies woth offerings.
I think just the highest end cards would be out of reach for the popular existing chassis but there is not going to be much market for pairing cards costing 1000s with a laptop when you are far better getting a desktop. So there may not be the market to make lots of new thunderbolt 4 chassis with PSUs.
AFAIK, any. But expect performance lost due to bottoneck in bandwidth. Even the latest TB5 is only slightly faster than PCIe 2.0 x16. OCulink 2.0 can achieve PCIe 4.0 x8 which is way better, but Surface Pro have neither.
I think YouTube might be a good resource for this kind of thing.
I think any gpu would work, but check with the vendor of the enclosure. They might have limitation for size or possibly power.
I also think there is a 10% performance loss, but maybe newer thunderbolt versions have over come that.
