Laptops have severe limitations when it comes to throwing graphics around, lacking the big, fan-cooled processors that are often a feature of desktop machines. What if you could keep the mobility of your laptop and plug into an external GPU when you need to render graphics or export your content? Could this be a game changer when it comes to your workflow?
In this short video, Ted Forbes looks at the impact of plugging his Dell laptop (a 15” XPS 9570 with 32gb of RAM) into an NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 Ti contained inside a Razer Core X enclosure and connected via Thunderbolt 3. Frustratingly for photographers, there doesn’t seem to be a huge impact in terms of the machine’s efficiency when it comes to exporting images from Lightroom, but videographers will be delighted to see the effects when it comes to rendering graphics and exporting video.
The question, as always, is whether the gains offered by an external GPU are worth the investment. With a laptop already costing in excess of $2,000, some might be wary of spending another large sum on a piece of kit unless it adds significant advantages, and this is where I think the problem lies. The enclosure will set you back a cent short of $300 and the graphics card itself is just shy of $1,300. So is a $1,600 investment worth the advantages that Forbes is putting forward here?
As usual, please leave your thoughts in the comments.