Gadgetory

what's up everyone JC tents here I get to finally do a video about something I've been wanting to do for a while but you haven't had the opportunity until now and that being playing with an external graphics card hooked up to a laptop to see whether or not it's actually beneficial and worth doing with a unique freeform modular system menu master cake maker 5 from coolermaster allows unparalleled flexibility with its adjustable internal layout and exterior customization options learn more about how you can start customizing your own case by following the link down in the description now today's video is actually featuring the Asus Republic of gamers XG station 2 which is a Thunderbolt 3 connected device it's not their first time doing this they actually built something like this all the way back in 2007 and they've been kind of revamping it ever since now the connection speed of thunderbolt 3 is actually 40 gigabit per second which equates to 5 gigabytes per second now that's significantly slower than what you get on PCI Express especially gen 3 16 X which can give you 16 gigabytes per second each direction of bandwidth so this Thunderbolt 3 is effectively three times slower than what you get with PCI Express so I guess the question is and what we're going to be looking at in today's testing is whether or not putting something like a high-end graphics card in one of these is actually doing yourself a disservice but when we talk about that let's kind of take a quick look around the XG station this is actually a very well thought out piece of equipment it's actually got fans on the top to help exhaust hot air from your open style coolers but I'm using a founders Edition card in here because I'm also going to be comparing the results of this to my MSI gaming laptop that has a full-blown GTX 1080 and the base model we're going to testing here also has a GTX 1060 in there so the question is how much improvement are you really getting when you go with something like this now it's got its own built-in power supply supplying up to 500 watts to your graphics card and it does have dual 6 pin or dual 8 pin power plugs on there so you're not gonna be able to use something that requires three power plugs because this one only has two so keep that in mind of course it's got glowing LEDs and it looks very pretty it's got a lot nice angular design it really is well thought out even this cathode on the front which is always lit is pretty neat looking especially when it's closed and that's what see through the front not to be fair this is more than just a graphics card docking station it's actually a full-blown cone activity docking station for any thunderbolt connected device including mac but we're going to talk about mac today obviously we're talking about PC but it is obviously Mac is kind of the reason why a lot of this even exists but I digress it's got 4 USB 3.0 is on there it's got one USB 3.0 type B connector it's even got a built-in network card and obviously your graphics card goes in there too because the cool thing about this is you can take your thunderbolt connected device plug in one Thunderbolt cable like you have right here and have everything else connected to this guy right here you can have monitors hooked up to this you can have your network cable hooked up to this you can even have your mouse your keyboard headset USB headset all hooked up to this so when you want to go be on the go you simply unplug your power unplug dependable 3 your laptop is free and you can go to class go to work travel whatever you want to do and then when you get home you just plug two cables back into your laptop power and Thunderbolt and then everything is up and running as a full-blown workstation so it's more than just a graphics card connectivity device connected to the connected device talking's hard but one thing you have to keep in mind though with that 5 gigabyte per second bandwidth is obviously Thunderbolt networking Thunderbolt graphics all the USB connected devices are going to eat up some of that bandwidth now the question here is whether or not this is going to slow down high end graphics cards at least that's what I had for myself so let's go ahead and take a look at some of the results right here so the baseline for this test was my msi gs70 3 vr stealth pro longest names ever these days I swear but I digress again you could say the baseline actually wasn't bad the gaming experience on this laptop is very very good for what it is especially with i7 in there and ddr4 but what happens when you plug a gtx 1080 founders edition into the XG station and start playing on what you can say there's a bit of a bump but I'll be honest it's not as big of a bump as I was hoping for which then made me go what happens when I test it with my GT 73 vr Titan which again has an i7 8 threads of processing power ddr4 and a full-blown discrete GTX 1080 in there so obviously as you can see having a GTX 1080 built in to the laptop is giving you a significantly better gaming experience than it is when it's running through thunderbolt I actually talked to Asus about this and it kind of makes a lot of sense as to why this is now typically you're going to see anywhere between about 30 to maybe 40 percent of degradation of gaming experience when you're going through thunderbolt that has a lot to do with not only the bandwidth of the cable it also has to do with the CPU overhead as well where the CPU is having to also make heads or tails of what's happening with the i/o of this device right here so not only does the laptop have to say send a communication to this device saying hey here's what's happening this is going to process it and send it back to the computer and the computer has to also make heads or tails and process what this is telling it before it can start to render it on your screen so there's some latency in there and there's some CPU overhead now something I'm going to do to try and measure how much performance we're actually losing by going through thunderbolt like this with an external graphics card as I took my nvidia gtx 1060 there reference cards it's not a founder's for the 1068 and call it founders and I put that inside of the XG station 2 here and I'm going to compare these results by running the discrete external versus the discrete internal to see what kind of performance Delta there is here's a 1080i together they're right there you're definitely not getting the full potential or your full money's worth when you put a 1080 into a solution like this and start running it on a on a laptop I ran the same test in a couple of benchmarks I'm using here and unfortunately we saw once again a degradation of performance which shows that obviously running over a Thunderbolt cable is unfortunately not going to realize the full potential of a graphics card so if I had in the back of my mind kind of thought that maybe this would make a good benchmarking solution for graphics card testing nope not at all obviously it's not going to be indicative of what real performance is going to be with something like this plugged in either natively on your motherboard or discreetly soldered in on your PCB inside of your motherboard on your on your laptops and stuff but it will at least allow me to have a kind of a neat testing station here if I want to see if a graphics card works if it's bad or something but it's kind of unfortunate I was really hoping for better overall performance with something like this now I can see the benefits of it I purely can of turning it into a docking station the problem is this particular unit right here costs 299 dollars that's $300 so if you throw another 1080 in and it can be almost another $700 you're talking about a thousand dollars for a situation like this to make a smaller laptop like that well run better but nowhere near the performance of what you would expect if you had a discrete graphics card in fact even the 1080 over here the unplugs described this thing is so big that's what you said anyway the Titan guys this is a massive laptop so obviously you are trading off quite a bit in terms of size and sheer performance but look at these two together can you see that if you see the stealth on the bottom there yeah it really looks like well it kind of looks like you're watching the nature Channel if you know what I'm saying but anyway yeah it's all the performances here on this guy but it definitely comes at a weight disadvantage because the reality is the excitation here with a 1080 in it is about the same cost as this on top of the laptop you could have just bought that now I thought that my results here might have been wait and I did hop on the phone with Asus who told me that there could be up to 30 to 40% performance degradation realize depending on the graphics card that you're using depending on the thunderbolt switching mechanism that the laptop is using and there's a lot of things that are at play here there's some additional CPU overhead because the CPUs having to handle additional communication with the i/o on top of the game and on top of the graphics rendering and then display and all of that so there's some induced latency as well as some additional CPU overhead in mind which or which kind of brings up a very good point here I'm using a 7700 HK in this laptop that's a good laptop it's a 7th gen it's got hyper threading it's eight threads and it 23.9 gigahertz so if you're using a slower laptop that has maybe no hyper threading in the lower clock speed then you're going to see probably an even larger gap between what you would get with a discrete graphics built into the laptop versus something like this or desk desktop graphics card like this in here versus in a desktop you're going to see quite a bit of a performance degradation with something like that which is kind of unfortunate I think we're getting there we're getting better at this but unfortunately with the price of this this is 299 dollars on top of the price of wherever graphics card you're going to put in there so even if put a 250 dollar gtx 1060 in there you're still looking at 550 dollars for this and as you can see you're still not getting the full performance of a gtx 1060 and it's even worse we put something like a 1080 in there because you're talking about $1000 for the total package price of this and of course you're also gaining the base station aspect of an unplugged inori devices in it having one cable connect everything personally for me this is now my subjective hat this is just me talking about me what I would do I would not do this for a lower-end laptop unless you had a laptop that has no discrete graphics in it whatsoever and updating your laptop is completely out of the question for whatever reason because I think it'd be better to take the thousand dollars you would pay for this and the 1080 and save a little bit longer and get a better laptop because this cost the same as this the laptop and this station and a 1080 but it's all self-contained obviously we gain a lot more weight a lot more heft and a lot less portability with it so I guess that's kind of a trade-off anyway guys sound off in the comments tell me what you think about this thanks for watching and as always I will see you in the next video