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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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.
Edit: Nowhere did I say “no eGPUs have been made” just that there are signifucantly less options than 5 years ago:
https://egpu.io/best-egpu-buyers-guide/
Look at the vendor pages for most of these models and see if you can buy them from tge vendor or an manufacturer-listed distributer and then try to find newer, actively produced eGPUs by the manufacturers (including the big names). For the vast majority they have stopped making them.
To frame it as an example: If you saw that 30 laptop manufacturers making 100+ models in 5 years went to 3 manufacturers making 5 models, you would say that is a very rapid decline.
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.
