I saw a post in a forum about connecting an external GPU to an x200 ThinkPad and it’s made me curious what the limitations are and what models you could use one on. I am not very familiar with eGPUs.
Could you theoretically connect a ThinkPad T440p to a 3060? I imagine you would quickly reach a bottleneck but I am wondering what kind of performance gains you would get before running into it.
The x200 utilized the express card slot so I don’t know if it would be possible with other models. I am not sure though. Maybe there’s a way with the dock that it could be setup.
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The limitation is the pcie bandwidth. The fastest an egpu can use currently is equivalent to a 4x slot in a desktop which is like 10gbs where as a 16x slot (typical for GPU) is 40gbs. These speeds are 1 way.
So you should not use your internal display at all, as that will perform horribly.
So in the case of the x200 would the limiting factor by the PCIe card?
In any setup your bus speed will be the limiting factor. PCIe uses “lanes” for parallel transmissions. So the claim here is the max bus available has 4 lanes. That’s 1/4th of what a normal in-pc 16 lanes bus will give.
So what ever can max the available bandwidth is your limit.
Yes. That’s a pretty old laptop so it wouldn’t be worth even trying an egpu setup. Even the newest laptops can’t fully utilize an egpu setup.
Totally. It’s one of those “because I can” kind of things.
Portability, price, reason
In the text below the title I mention how I’m talking about performance and compatibility. None of that.
It would be to create some weird Frankenstein device.
