I'm considering connecting a GPU externally to my laptop...

[ofsegrnj]

So I have this sorta old laptop I had for a couple years. At the moment, it works pretty fine despite it being old. The caveat's with this laptop is, as I mentioned, it is somewhat old. It has an AMD processor with integrated graphics. The one I have is pretty bad. 

 

I plan on building my own custom PC in like a year or so, which will be my primary machine. For this, I plan on looking at every single part I buy carefully, and try to get them for the cheapest prices. But once again, this will take a while, so for the time being, I plan on using my current laptop until then. In my case there is no point in buying a new laptop because I plan on getting a custom build PC soon, so I might as well use this current laptop by then. I don't really do gaming on this machine, mainly because it can obviously hardly run anything. Now I am considering connecting a GPU externally to my laptop using the EXP GDC Beast device. I want to connect something at least similar to a 1060. 

 

This will no doubt be time consuming, and may not even work. In order to do this, a spare Wi-Fi adapter port must be present, and be plugged in with the wire hanging out of the bottom of the laptop. I believe to access the Wi-Fi card in my laptop, you have to take the thing apart from bottom and the top. If you have an express card in your laptop, you can use the beast with the express card cable. My laptop does not have an express card port. But would it work if I had a USB to express card slot (https://amzn.to/2W5NroS)? Would something like this work? So if I have that adapter in my laptop, along with everything else connected, would this method even work? Would this idea of using the EXP GDC on my laptop even be a good idea? What do you think?

[Snipergod87]

USB to express card would not work, it would still be USB.

You need some sort of PCI-Express interface.

Thunderbolt (your AMD laptop wont have)

M.2 NVMe (probably doesnt have that either)

or the mini pci wifi standards as you mentioned, but performance would be low

 

I am not sure if will work on your laptops display or if you will be forced to use an external one.

[ofsegrnj]

12 minutes ago, Snipergod87 said:

USB to express card would not work, it would still be USB.

You need some sort of PCI-Express interface.

Interesting. That makes a lot of sense, but I wondered how those adapters would even work.

 

12 minutes ago, Snipergod87 said:

Thunderbolt (your AMD laptop wont have)

M.2 NVMe (probably doesnt have that either)

or the mini pci wifi standards as you mentioned, but performance would be low

 

I am not sure if will work on your laptops display or if you will be forced to use an external one.

Probably the Wi-Fi PCI-E thing would be the only one that would work, but as I mentioned, I believe to access the Wi-Fi card, you have to open the laptop from top and bottom, you can't just have a cable sticking out of the bottom. As for the laptop display, I may even get an entirely new display connect to my laptop. If I did that, couldn't I just use that display to output what is needed and use the laptop display for everything else? Would this work at all?

[ofsegrnj]

Bump

[sato_slp]

Some of the things that you must have in count before continue with your upgrade are:

1) what kind of slots do you have aviable in your laptop

   Expresscard: the easiest way to add a compatible eGPU, just plug the adapter in the expansion slot, connect the "beast", plug the GPU and the PSU and voala

   NGFF m.2 you lost any NVME or SATA m.2 drive

   mini-PCIe you lost your wifi, must use a USB wifi adapter

2) what CPU and RAM do you have, so you can check for bottlenecks on the CPU-GPU side of things, worth it? the more viable AMD CPU for a GTX 1060 is a FX8350, not present in any laptop. You probably have an A10 or something like it, but I can't know because you don't give more details...

With more information you can get more accurate help