Razer Upgrade

[Habulda]

Hello, I am new to forum so please pardon if this is in the wrong section. Having seen today's video about bottle-necking, I was wondering if I could upgrade the graphics for my laptop and at what cost. Currently, I have the 2016 Razer with 970M graphics card paired with i7-6700HQ processor. If I get an external graphics dock, like the Razer core, for example, what graphics card could I buy to get the most performance out of it (after accounting for some performance losses over USB-C and all that good stuff)? I don't want to buy another laptop at the moment, and getting something thin and light with great graphics comes at a cost much greater than doing something like an external dock + graphics card. Any advice would be appreciated, thank you.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/CssGnH
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/CssGnH/by_merchant/

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor  ($149.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ASRock - AB350 Pro4 ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($59.89 @ OutletPC)
Memory: Team - Vulcan 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory  ($140.98 @ Newegg Business)
Storage: Patriot - Burst 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($46.89 @ OutletPC)
Storage: Western Digital - Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($43.89 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: Asus - Radeon RX 580 8GB DUAL Video Card  ($239.89 @ OutletPC)
Case: Cougar - MX330-G ATX Mid Tower Case  ($48.23 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair - CXM 550W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($38.98 @ Newegg)
Case Fan: Corsair - Air Series White 2 pack 52.2 CFM  120mm Fan  ($19.67 @ Amazon)
Total: $788.41
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-08-05 23:12 EDT-0400

 

Just build a PC, it's not that hard

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 minute ago, Habulda said:

I was wondering if I could upgrade the graphics for my laptop and at what cost.

Most thinner and lighter laptops such as your Razer Blade have soldered GPUs, which means you will have to de-solder the GPU from the mainboard in order to change or replace it. The highest you can probably go is to a GTX 980M, but I'm not aware of any of those you can find that aren't PCIe-based GPUs(laptops have PCIe, most of the higher end laptops such as the MSI Titan series use them).

 

4 minutes ago, Habulda said:

If I get an external graphics dock, like the Razer core, for example, what graphics card could I buy to get the most performance out of it (after accounting for some performance losses over USB-C and all that good stuff)?

I would look at a used GTX 980 or 980Ti. If I recall correctly, most of the higher end GPUs will be bottlenecked due to Thunderbolt 3. If I'm wrong, then whoever is right is more than welcome to correct me. I only listed those two GPUs are less likely to be bottlenecked by a) Thunderbolt 3, and b) your CPU.

 

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