Summary and conclusion
The limitations of Thunderbolt are ubiquitous in everyday life and generally the higher the resolution, the less severe the losses. When using an external monitor, however, the losses compared to a desktop system are limited. In FHD, you are often better off with an integrated graphics chip, but from WQHD onwards, the tide increasingly turns in favor of the eGPU. Sweeping statements are really hard to make, though, and games like Watch Dogs Legion are struggling to run at a playable level. In contrast, other titles that are less taxing on the overall system scale cleanly.
In general, the Radeon cards are at a disadvantage when used as an eGPU, especially the performance on the internal panel drops massively. I suspect this is due to the compression of the data, which is much more efficient on the NVIDIA cards. Oddly enough, though, the NVIDIA cards achieve lower gross scores on the bandwidth test than the Radeons do on the write. However, the NVIDIA GPUs are slightly faster in reading. This could then explain the results in Dirt 5.
Interestingly, the RTX 3060 cut the best figure in the test, because the differences are lowest, the card has enough VRAM and it can also be overclocked well. The card is actually the sweet spot for an eGPU setup at the moment – also an interesting finding. With increasing performance, the losses then become increasingly serious and one must then also clearly question the purchase price of the barely faster card.
I also improved the memory of the laptop after the tests. Instead of 16 GB Single Rank Dual Channel I have now 3 2GB Dual Ranked in Dual Channel. Of course I would have liked to test with higher clock rates on the memory how big the influence of the used RAM is, but unfortunately the board doesn’t accept clock rates above 2400 MHz, so I have to be satisfied with the latency improvement as well as the advantage of the dual ranked design.
I was able to measure slight performance increases with it, modern systems with TB 4 controllers and fast RAM should be able to alleviate the symptoms of Thunderbolt significantly and offer another increase, but basically a doubling of bandwidth would be necessary to scale cleanly with the performance of modern GPUs as well. Unfortunately, TB4 is currently often found in rather weak machines with only 4 cores.
In conclusion, the Radeons are clearly inferior in this application area, as the NVIDIA GPUs get their performance on the road much better. AMD definitely has some catching up to do here and unfortunately doesn’t cut such a happy figure at the moment. I finally opted for a GeForce RTX 3070 in my own build, despite the rather meager 8GB of VRAM. I just need a bit more performance for the UHD panel than the RTX 3060 delivers, although I had actually become comfortable with the card.
However, the RTX 3070 runs great undervolted, gives me enough performance, doesn’t move too far away from the performance sweet spot of the port yet, and the coolers are more in line with my expectations as well. To show off the Core X mod a little better, I ordered an RTX 3070 Suprim from MSI, and the metal case should add the finishing touches to the look. Well, it’s always in the eye.
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