Laptop recommendation for gaming with no GPU (egpu)

[The Torrent]

So i want a thin and light laptop i can take around all day, good battery life, very light very thin nice to use, etc.

 

Then i can come home, plug it into an egpu and external monitor, and use it for gaming.

 

So heres what i think i require among questions:

-STORAGE. Game storage is a big thing, i wanna store a lot of games, now.... is storing games on an external hard drive viable at all? Or are they too slow? I would prefer to get a big external hard drive of a few tb, as that would be cheaper and save me having to have a hard drive in the laptop itself. (SSD storage is expensive). But uh i dont want shit speeds. No slower than a 7200rpm seagate barracuda thats in my desktop rn.

-TOUCHSCREEN? - i would like touchscreen. Some laptops ive been looking at recently, like certain dell latitude laptops, are touchscreen. Seems like a very very nice nicetohave.

-Size - not too bothered tbf. 14 inch is a nice number it seems which ive seen around quite a bit. 17 inch seems a bit too big. maybe 15 is too big? gray area. 14 seems nice though.

-BUDGET- i normally skim the 2nd hand market looking for a deal on an open box for a few months, so while ideally i wanna spend under 1000gbp, go for brand new price maybe under 2000gbp, but thats including the eGPU enclosure.

-GPU - uh i dont wanna comment on this yet because this part of the build i will buy in maybe august september time when maybe the market will have changed quite a bit? I could see a 3070 in there though, but depending on how the market goes with newer cards, i wouldn't be suprised if i put a 3080 or higher in there at some point - so i would like the cpu in the laptop to not bottleneck this ideally? Do you think a laptop will handle it?

-EGPU - yh drop me some egpu suggestions. 2k is my budget with an egpu included, idk how much a egpu costs tbf they all seem the same to me. i dont care too much how it looks? i kinda do but i aint gonna pay 300 more quid for a strip of rgb. No such super cheap and shitty but basically do the job pcie to usb slots without even an enclosure that i can jerry rig a psu up to exist, do they? That would be mad if they do. I will make it look ugly if it gets super cheap. I will plug a monitor prolly only 1? maybe 2, keyboard and mouse into this egpu ideally.

-I will pay extra for a solid construction on a laptop. The dell latitude just seem like they could take a beating to me, so i kinda like the 7000 series. I aint gonna pay extra for a brand name.

-A lot of DDR5 ram laptops around now - should i go for these?

-uh i think im missing something i wanted to speak about i might edit this and write it here later

 

All suggestions appreciated, thanks.

[jaslion]

I've got some bad news for egpu stuff really.

 

Thunderbolt 3 caps out at about gtx 1060 level of performance which well isn't great at all. You can put as good a gpu in there as you want it will not perform well at all. There are even thin and light with better performance.

[The Torrent]

7 minutes ago, jaslion said:

I've got some bad news for egpu stuff really.

 

Thunderbolt 3 caps out at about gtx 1060 level of performance which well isn't great at all. You can put as good a gpu in there as you want it will not perform well at all. There are even thin and light with better performance.

firslty i dont think this is right at all.

 

secondly everything is thunderbolt 4 now anyway so its all good.

[jaslion]

It isn't because 4 is at best double the bandwith and a x4 4.0 link severly cripples a 3070 or 3080 too. You can see that in tests.

[The Torrent]

Just now, jaslion said:

It isn't because 4 is at best double the bandwith and a x4 4.0 link severly cripples a 3070 or 3080 too. You can see that in tests.

you can see it in a lot of tests where the gpu is sending video data back to the laptop.

 

I mentioned i want to use a 2nd monitor which i can plug straight into the egpu.

[jaslion]

Just now, The Torrent said:

you can see it in a lot of tests where the gpu is sending video data back to the laptop.

 

I mentioned i want to use a 2nd monitor which i can plug straight into the egpu.

That doesn't change anything. Just gives you a tiny bit more bandwith. You are still limited to a x4 link for sending data which is a problem and you will not even get close to full 3070 performance.

[The Torrent]

Just now, jaslion said:

That doesn't change anything. Just gives you a tiny bit more bandwith. You are still limited to a x4 link for sending data which is a problem and you will not even get close to full 3070 performance.

i guess a 3070 will have to do then. whats the recommendations then?

[jaslion]

7 minutes ago, The Torrent said:

i guess a 3070 will have to do then. whats the recommendations then?

I'd get a 3060 at best because you are looking at a up to 40% performance deficit on the 3070.

 

As for laptops well it depends really because the ones with weak cpu's that suck for gaming are the ones that are the thin and the more full power ones are of course in thicker devices or ones that struggle to cool. The real question is how much do you want it to weigh?

[The Torrent]

1 minute ago, jaslion said:

I'd get a 3060 at best because you are looking at a up to 40% performance deficit on the 3070.

 

As for laptops well it depends really because the ones with weak cpu's that suck for gaming are the ones that are the thin and the more full power ones are of course in thicker devices or ones that struggle to cool. The real question is how much do you want it to weigh?

 

tbf after checking out the benchmarks with external displays, i think a 3080 will be fine ill be happy with it. ofc its expensive rn hopefully price will come down near the end of the year though.

 

how much do i want it to weight? well i assume any laptop without a gpu aint really gonna be heavy is it? so im going to say that i dont mind whatever weight. thinner the better of course, but a gpuless laptop aint gonna get as thick as my alienware r5 or something is it.

 

A single cpu cant need that much cooling can it? Theres no point getting a massive brick of metal to bring the cpu down from 90 to 70, because i dont mind it being at 90. as long as it aint throttling i dont care. how powerfull a cpu can we get?

[Alex Atkin UK]

24 minutes ago, The Torrent said:

how much do i want it to weight? well i assume any laptop without a gpu aint really gonna be heavy is it? so im going to say that i dont mind whatever weight. thinner the better of course, but a gpuless laptop aint gonna get as thick as my alienware r5 or something is it.

The catch is that typically you'll find the high-end CPUs paired with a decent GPU.  People who don't need a good GPU rarely would need a fast CPU either.  It just limits the choices especially within a budget.

[The Torrent]

20 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

The catch is that typically you'll find the high-end CPUs paired with a decent GPU.  People who don't need a good GPU rarely would need a fast CPU either.  It just limits the choices especially within a budget.

Absolutely. That's my entire reason for making this post here.