Should I buy an eGPU? Is it worth it?

[AustinFights]

So I have a Lenovo Yoga 6 13ARE05 that I received as a gift last Christmas and I have been getting into computer gaming as my Xbox One S does not fulfill my needs for gaming anymore. My laptop has an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650U with Radeon Graphics and 8gb of RAM. I play titles like Car Mechanic Simulator 2018, BeamNG.Drive, Minecraft, Splitgate, and Fortnite. The titles I want to play are Forza Horizon 5, Rust, any Call of Duty, Rainbow Six Siege, Battlefield 2042, and any other title I may come across in the future. My laptop does not seem to struggle with memory or CPU usage while im playing the current games that I play even with discord open and being used but I do struggle with graphics. Fortnite and Splitgate are playable but is practically always looking potato and I get horrible stutters in Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 and I think a GTX 1650 G6 4GB SC ULTRA by EVGA will fix my issue but I figured I would ask here first before I jump the gun and spend $500 - $700. 

[da na]

Welcome to the forums!

An eGPU entails taking off the back of your laptop and removing your wifi card in your case since your laptop doesn't have Thunderbolt so if you really want to do that...

[RandomStyuf]

In my experience having considered doing the same thing, I found that the cost of eGPU enclosures (at least at the time I was considering it) cost about as much as buying a CPU, motherboard, RAM and SSD (I did already have a case and power supply on hand though, so that might change the math) and the performance of that would be better than what the eGPU could provide. If you use an external display (recommended for eGPUs anyways, at least over thunderbolt), and don't mind having separate states on two separate machines (Steam's cloud saves make that better, and OneDrive or Dropbox work too for non-game library stuff) it's worth checking that route.

Especially since you can't use Thunderbolt eGPUs it might be worth it even more.

 

(For context, when I was considering it, I was considering getting a Ryzen 1600AF and 16GB of RAM on a relatively cheap B450 motherboard and 500GB SSD. I don't know if it's still reasonable to get the 1600AF today, or if it's even still available at the cheap prices it was then, but it's worth checking.

As for what I ended up doing: I went for something more in the end because it was just as the first lockdowns started looming and the added cost for more for the ability to work from home easier was worth it for me. I'm very satisfied with my decision to go for an additional desktop VS eGPU).