External GPUs for notebooks were around for a while but never really caught up due to their high cost, complexity and, most importantly, an inadequate way of connecting it to the notebook, due to low bandwidth of USB ports. Now that the Thunderbolt ports are available on some notebooks, Lab501.net published a rather neat test of a DIY external GPU project which provides some decent performance improvements.

In case you missed it earlier, the Thunderbolt port, which is the key ingredient of even trying an external GPU, is capable of providing two full-duplex channels, or 10Gbps of bi-directional bandwidth per channel which is significantly higher than USB or any other interface.




In order to connect the eGPU (external GPU) to your Thunderbolt interface equipped notebook, you will also need a Thunderbolt PCI-Express Expansion board which is a pretty expensive thing since it provides one or more PCI-Express slots and one or more Thunderbolt ports.




The DIY external GPU project published by the Lab501.net site, shows 17-inch ASUS ROG G750 series with Intel Core i7-4700HQ CPU and Nvidia 765M graphics card connected to a DIY eGPU system with MSI GTX 680 Lightning graphics card.




While the cost might be quite high, considering that you need a Thunderbolt PCI-Express Expansion board, cables, dedicated PSU for the eGPU and a lot of skills in soldering and other DIY things, the performance is quite surprising as the 3DMark Fire Strike, Sky Diver and 3DMark 11 scores show that you can get some quite impressive performance improvements on your rather weak Ultrabook, as long as you have a Thunderbolt port on it.




You can check out the full project via link below.



Source: Lab501.net.