I recently ordered an external graphics solution from banggood.com (insert sexual innuendo here) and noticed the connector feeding data to the laptop from the external pcie slot is just an hdmi port. This got me thinking, "Would it be possible to use a regular hdmi cable to transfer data from the external pcie slot to the laptop?" Now, even with the understanding that usb 3.0 hasn't nearly enough bandwidth to shoulder pcie throughput, I would still want to know that if in theory, whether or not an hdmi cable plugged into an hdmi to usb 3.0 adapter would allow a graphics card in the external pcie slot to be recognized by the laptop. I also ask the same of an hdmi to thunderbolt implementation connected to a thunderbolt enabled device such as a macbook.