Performance delta: Ice Lake Ultrabook + eGPU vs desktop I9-9900k/R9-3900X?

[Harry Voyager]

So I need to rebuild my desktop, and after seeing the Cleanest Build video, I find myself intrigued by the versatility of docking an ultrabook with an eGPU desktop setup for demanding games.

 

What I'm wondering is, how much of a performance hit does one take from doing that? Is this a thing that's actually reasonably comparable, or would I be looking at a 20% or more performance hit by running a laptop CPU and the 3D card on 4x PCIe lane? I'm mostly playing either VR flight sims, which rather eat everything for lunch, or old classics, which really don't, so if it can keep up on the flights sims while docked, and handle older stuff while its not, that's potentially a pretty big deal. 

 

It's definitely going to be more expensive, but the flexibility and mobility are very enticing, especially if the performance hit is not that bad. 

 

What have your experiences been with setups like that? 

 

Thank you, 

 

Harry Voyager

[Neftex]

whats the point tho, you wont be carrying the external gpu with you anyway so might as well get a desktop instead and use cheaper laptop for mobility

[Harry Voyager]

Mostly unification, cable nest clean-up and I'm at a spot where pretty much everything except the GPU is about to be replaced.

 

Right now I'm using a Surface 3 for my mobile stuff, but it means I have to keep my documents in sync and I can't really do light load game stuff on it, such as mapping flights or setting up missions, etc etc, and even if I could, I'd still need to keep everything synchronized. 

 

As I said, if the performance hit is not bad, the flexibility is appealing to me and my use case, but right now I don't have a good idea of what sort of a hit we're actually talking about. 

 

Addendum: After digging around for some synthetic benchmarks, PCMark does seem to show the Ice Lake i7-1065G7 does seem to, core for core, match the I9-9900K and Zen2 cores, however, it only comes with four cores, compared to the eight on the I9 and up to sixteen on the 3950, so for multi threaded applications we're looking at about half the performance. With Il-2 moving to multi threaded in a month or so, it looks like my better bet will be the dedicated desktop. 

Edited September 24, 2019 by Harry Voyager
New information

[Wellingtonzed]

well ive never had an eGPU setup, but common sense leads me to the following:

 

yeah, games like war thunder wont ask much of you gpu if at all and will be splendid with a eGPU, but sims like DCS etc... are much more punishing on hardware. 

 

Another problem is heat management, A surface might have trouble removing all the heat from the cpu which will be running hot. I know having a clean eGPU setup is nice, but given you play sims and whatnot, having a proper desktop might be best for you.

 

Heat is basically the biggest problem, i think. Unless your confident your device can handle it?

 

[Harry Voyager]

I wasn't planning on running it on a Surface. What I'm talking about is, rather than getting a new motherboard/CPU/Ram combo, getting an Ice Lake based Ultrabook, and mounting my existing GTX 1080 Ti in an eGPU case and running off of that. 

 

Basically the Ultrabook would replace both my desktop and my Surface for most uses.m

 

So apparently it's sounding like right now is that the flight sims are using around four or so threads, where they are multi threading, so a quad core, if the cores are fast enough may do the job just fine. So that really leave the question of how much of a performance hit is it going from a 16 lane PCIe to a 4 lane connection.