Cheapest laptop with a Thunderbolt 3 port

[hardtofindinthefuture]

Hi, Whats the cheapest laptop with a thunderbolt 3 for hooking up to a razor core.

 

What i need

A GOOD CPU but not to Overkill

6-8GB ram

AND to be as cheap as possible 

$300-400

 

[ShadySocks]

You could use a PCI slot.

[bgibbz]

The cheapest I know of is the dell xps 13 starting at 800$. You will have to look st used to find any cheaper ines. 

[hardtofindinthefuture]

1 minute ago, ShadySocks said:

You could use a PCI slot.

 

6 minutes ago, v0nn_toaster said:

laptop

 

[hardtofindinthefuture]

3 minutes ago, bgibbz said:

The cheapest I know of is the dell xps 13 starting at 800$. You will have to look st used to find any cheaper ines. 

Would a usb C to 

thunderbolt 3 work?

 

[NumLock21]

Let's be realistic here, there is no way a $300 to $400 laptop is going to have a premium feature like thunderbolt.

[ShadySocks]

21 minutes ago, v0nn_toaster said:

Would a usb C to 

thunderbolt 3 work?

 

USB C will not work, as it does not support all the protocols thunderbolt does.

[Droidbot]

Thunderbolt is hardware that costs extra from Intel.

Best bet is a Dell E6430 and then run eGPU through PCI-E X2 slot

[Pendragon]

You can't. Sorry. 

[GiggleGrenade]

Okay I understand what you're getting at, but you're in for a lot of RTFM and searching for answers on forms if you're not willing to take the the time to figure out the compatibility issues yourself. Literally coding, even if you're just copying and pasting from forms you ask desperately. 

Take it from someone thats been there, it isn't worth your time and struggle in my opinion, and there's better ways to invest.
 

On some laptops like mine, the Ideapad 320 15AST going for 250 at walmart in midwest missouri, and has an APU capable of running half-life 2 respectively and more importantly has received amazing decent driver support (per my experience :x) Screen is bad, it's plastic, and the battery is garbage but you can upgrade it a fair bit. I mention this about my laptop but you'll see this as a theme among other laptops at this price range. 

More importantly, this laptop and others of the same price maybe use M.2 for the bluetooth and wifi module card. This laptop and others with PCIe SmartCards and more can theoretically support eGPUs, but this isn't the full picture. You really ought to understand the scope of this.

It will at best give you only 10-15% degradation in performance in even the best cases. So whatever, you get a 1050ti because they are cheap. Well you will also want a power supply, and a decent one that won't make your gpu fry because you'll be saving up for a better one and won't be able to afford a short and a dead GPU. Now you have a pretty ineloquent setup, you will have to tear off the back of the computer to get access or at the very least plug into a legacy connecter not designed to take this abuse. 

That, and you can't move a single thing because you have to station you computer for a good 5 minutes if you are really considering getting a cheap laptop to do this. It's not like it's going to boot up quick or be without hiccups, ever driver update or windows update might provide a challenge.

All of this and more headache  and you spent 500 on a shitty laptop you tore apart to fit in a 150 budget GPU to justify the huge GPU cost and performance drop. I swear at the end of this the best case scenario is that you deal with all of this and it ends up working. Depending on skews, drivers, updates, but also very physical things like leaving the components of the motherboard exposed and reusing a fragile connecter... In my opinion reasoned here it is really, really, not worth it.

Honestly, Realistically, a decent solution is to use that money and invest in faster internet that would allow you to stream using Geforce, playstation, liquidsky, ect. You could buy this laptop for 250, be able to play some titles with an older APU. Set aside 100 to stream the games. Set aside 150/mo for subscription and to save up for a dream rig? Because the thing here I'm trying to say is you'll need to be realistic .

[SpacingOut]

On 2/11/2017 at 12:33 PM, Droidbot said:

Thunderbolt is hardware that costs extra from Intel.

Best bet is a Dell E6430 and then run eGPU through PCI-E X2 slot

 

@DroidbotHow? where is the slot? https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E6430-Notebook.81780.0.html#toc-connectivity

[zhubaohi]

https://thunderbolttechnology.net/products?tid=14&field_company_nid=All&field_prod_os_value_many_to_one=All&field_prod_tb_version_value_many_to_one=tbv3

Here is a list of all certified thunderbolt3 devices.

There is something you need to know tho.

A lot of these machines on the market uses 2 PCIe 3.0 lanes on their tb3 port, and runs at 2GT/s mode. This will greatly influence the performance of your eGPU, especially when you are using the internal display.

If you are looking for a machine that fully uses the power of eGPU, you will have to pay more for that.

The lenovo Yoga 730 is the cheapest one so far, and you will need to pay at least 600 USD for that machine.

[Droidbot]

8 hours ago, SpacingOut said:

 

@DroidbotHow? where is the slot? https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E6430-Notebook.81780.0.html#toc-connectivity

use egpu setup bios tool and bplus technology pe4c adapter, hook port 1 to mpcie port 1 and port 2 to another mpcie port

 

can go up to pcie x2 2.0 8gbps

 

[jonrosalia]

only way your getting any thunderbolt for that price is thunderbolt 2 and that's going to be on a used MacBook Pro not a bad option I still use TB2 for things and it does all the thunderbolt crap but at a slower transfer speed.

[SpacingOut]

On 11/17/2018 at 6:00 PM, zhubaohi said:

https://thunderbolttechnology.net/products?tid=14&field_company_nid=All&field_prod_os_value_many_to_one=All&field_prod_tb_version_value_many_to_one=tbv3

Here is a list of all certified thunderbolt3 devices.

There is something you need to know tho.

A lot of these machines on the market uses 2 PCIe 3.0 lanes on their tb3 port, and runs at 2GT/s mode. This will greatly influence the performance of your eGPU, especially when you are using the internal display.

If you are looking for a machine that fully uses the power of eGPU, you will have to pay more for that.

The lenovo Yoga 730 is the cheapest one so far, and you will need to pay at least 600 USD for that machine.

Yup, Lenovo offers the cheapest options. Can also go for Dell Inspiron 15 7000 with 7th gen Intel Core processors which is getting real cheap now. In my region it's selling even cheaper than the lowest spec variant of new G3 gaming laptop.