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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While the desktop probably costs something, so does the eGPU.
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.
It means a desktop, if you don’t already have one (though really all it needs is that beefy GPU).
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.
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.
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.
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.