Question for the wise: Laptop/Desktop workstation?

[Thenexus96]

So I’ve been looking around for a way to set up a laptop as my main mobile workstation for when I’m at Work, and then when I get home I just plug in my laptop to a desktop tower To take advantage of the desktops power and performance for gaming and workflow. I know the comment after this might be. “You don’t just have a gaming pc.” But I’m intrigued to see if it’s possible due to me not wanted to totally get rid of my laptop since it’s so handy for on-the-go performance. Thanks to you all for answering and I will be intrigued to see what comes of this thread.

[QuantumBit]

Why would you plug it in?

[Mira Yurizaki]

The closest thing you can do that is get an external GPU dock. But you need Thunderbolt 3 on the laptop.

[Thenexus96]

Just now, QuantumBit said:

Why would you plug it in?

That’s a good question... I believe what I was drawing from was what a lot of my co-workers have is a docking station for their work laptops for a multi-monitor setup. But the line of thinking is something similar that works with a desktop (weather it’s plugged in or not). Like the laptop is the main brain and the desktop is the powerhouse mech body you hook the brain up to.

[Shreyas1]

See if you can use an external gpu dock

[doomsriker]

The only way to do this elegant is to buy a new laptop with thunderbolt 3 or a proprietary solution like alien ware’s (but stay away from Alienware becouse dell sucks). You can do this with your current system but you would have to take off the back and remove the WiFi card and hook in the adaptor and power the GPU with an external PSU and use an external monitor every time you get home. In other words more trouble than its worth unless you are going to permanately use it as a desk top. 

 

For or more information:

 

 

 

[Drak3]

Unfortunately, there's no method of having a full desktop system that can run off of the laptop. The best you could to is mod the laptop to have fast and easy access to the HDD/SSD and just swap it out between systems, from a raw performance standpoint.

 

Otherwise, you can use TB3 on Intel based laptops (that come with it) for dGPU, but that'll start to bottleneck anything as powerful as a GTX 1080. Alienware's GFX amp is a tad better, but it only does graphics. MSI's docking solution is the best out of the bunch, it gives a x8 connection to the dGPU, and can do another x8 for stuffs like storage and IO hubs, but that only works with a few MSI laptops.

 

You could get/wait for a Ryzen 5/7 based laptop with a beefy dGPU (or TB3 if Intel really opens that standard and makers add it).

[QuantumBit]

1 hour ago, Thenexus96 said:

That’s a good question... I believe what I was drawing from was what a lot of my co-workers have is a docking station for their work laptops for a multi-monitor setup. But the line of thinking is something similar that works with a desktop (weather it’s plugged in or not). Like the laptop is the main brain and the desktop is the powerhouse mech body you hook the brain up to.

That doesn't make much sense. Usually people get beefier laptops, and hook them up to monitors at the end of the day.

So connecting a PC and a Laptop to the same monitor(s) is really pointless.

 

Im most likely misinterpreting what you're saying though

[DanielMDA]

3 hours ago, Thenexus96 said:

So I’ve been looking around for a way to set up a laptop as my main mobile workstation for when I’m at Work, and then when I get home I just plug in my laptop to a desktop tower To take advantage of the desktops power and performance for gaming and workflow. I know the comment after this might be. “You don’t just have a gaming pc.” But I’m intrigued to see if it’s possible due to me not wanted to totally get rid of my laptop since it’s so handy for on-the-go performance. Thanks to you all for answering and I will be intrigued to see what comes of this thread.

If your LAptop has Thunderbolt 3, get a Razer Core (with a 1080 or 1080Ti)

[Thenexus96]

I want to thank you all for your responses. I believe I'm not articulating this well (Or the technology is not there yet and I'm over-complecating the thought process.) So I'm going to try this a again with a longer post that may ramble so please bear with me.

 

So what my thought process is for a laptop to have a standard processor (say 2.6GHz) with integrated graphics and 8GB of internal RAM. So say your working from home to get some projects done and the next day when you go to work you drop the laptop into a dock that would have a faster processor and GPU. I imagine the laptop and dock would have to have a piece of software to let the dock's processor/GPU to take over the workload but be able to use the same internal drive for the files... Or maybe just a dock that just allows the for the hard drive to be used rather than the onboard processor and GPU.

[Riesling]

Couldn't you just get something like a NAS or home server and save the files there so that you can access it from work and home?

You'd have to figure out how to do it and also security though.

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 hour ago, Riesling said:

 security

Change the font to Dingbats, you'll be all set

[Froody129]

14 hours ago, Thenexus96 said:

I want to thank you all for your responses. I believe I'm not articulating this well (Or the technology is not there yet and I'm over-complecating the thought process.) So I'm going to try this a again with a longer post that may ramble so please bear with me.

 

So what my thought process is for a laptop to have a standard processor (say 2.6GHz) with integrated graphics and 8GB of internal RAM. So say your working from home to get some projects done and the next day when you go to work you drop the laptop into a dock that would have a faster processor and GPU. I imagine the laptop and dock would have to have a piece of software to let the dock's processor/GPU to take over the workload but be able to use the same internal drive for the files... Or maybe just a dock that just allows the for the hard drive to be used rather than the onboard processor and GPU.

I like the idea but unfortunately the latency involved with the data transfer would make it impossible. You could of course made a with extra monitor ports and more storage space but that’s not what your looking for.

 

The closest thing would be an external GPU enclosure

[Riesling]

On 1/12/2018 at 7:13 PM, Froody129 said:

The closest thing would be an external GPU enclosure

actually, could you possibly set up your pc so that it saves certain files to an external ssd that you have on a dock, then plug in that ssd to an external enclosure when you're at home, you know, like the standing external hard disk dock that Linus used, i think it was featured on one of the 'handy tech under a 100' videos.

I would say hard disk, but if your're gonna be bringing it around, an ssd should be much better. Also less dangerous. Wouldn't want all your work to go kaput because you dropped an external hard disk, right?

[Froody129]

1 hour ago, Riesling said:

actually, could you possibly set up your pc so that it saves certain files to an external ssd that you have on a dock, then plug in that ssd to an external enclosure when you're at home, you know, like the standing external hard disk dock that Linus used, i think it was featured on one of the 'handy tech under a 100' videos.

I would say hard disk, but if your're gonna be bringing it around, an ssd should be much better. Also less dangerous. Wouldn't want all your work to go kaput because you dropped an external hard disk, right?

Yeah sure, I share files between my laptop and PC on a hard drive. Applications might struggle though since they’ll install some things to the windows file which won’t be transferred