terminal addict wrote:
Well, I decided to give this a try (although admittedly not solely for the GL702VM). I purchased an eGPU: the Gigabyte Aorus GTX1080.
This is almost a dock, but not quite. It is a TB3 enclosure housing a mini GTX1080, but it does have 3 USB 3.0 ports on the back. I've ordered a USB 3.0 gigabit Ethernet adapter to help this be an actual dock.
Obviously this is not a full review, and I haven't had much time with it yet. This is just a first impressions, particularly when used with the (half-assed) TB3 port on the GL702VM.
Setup was a breeze. Windows 10 detected the eGPU without issue. A new icon appeared from Nvidia in the taskbar showing the two GPUs and what apps were running on each. I couldn't get any apps to run on the 1080 until I connected an external display and set it as the primary. That's one area that needs more testing.
I ran a quick Time Spy benchmark with a Graphics result of 6359. Obviously that is well below what a GTX1080 can do, and (as expected) lower than what a GTX1080 connected to a full 40Gbps TB3 port should be able to handle.
I plan on running some benches on a 2016 MacBook Pro (Windows 10 Boot Camp) with a full TB3 port, and some actual game benches.
More soon I hope.
Let me save you some time on the internal display issue, you can't use the internal display on these laptops. Trust me I went way down that rabbit hole with my own testing. It plainly just doesn't work/isn't compatible with these laptops.
😛My numbers testing with a 1070 were actually very close to the full 40Gbps numbers and even passed them in a few cases (most likely because of the CPU in each device), and according to both my testing and some of the articles/benchmarks I used to validate/troubleshoot the performance hit between the two should be negligible (like 5-10 percent in most cases). The running theory is that the bottleneck most likely has something to do with the CPU/TB3 protocol overhead. Microstutter in heavily CPU bound titles compared to just running on the laptops discrete gpu lend credence to this theory.
Of course this is assuming you are using an external display, which with these laptops is the only option. That really seems to be the only scenario where 40Gbps really starts to pull away from 20Gbps implementations (again according to my own testing and the articles/benchmarks I have seen).
Still will be super interesting to see your results though! Happy hunting/testing!
