Gadgetory

I love the idea of external graphics cards at their best they allow you to have a super light and portable laptop that you can easily convert into a shockingly potent gaming system when you have time to sit down and you happen to have an outlet nearby but the main complete we hear about them is come on you guys you can get the same level of performance with a PCI Express card for way less but how do you put one of these in one of these ha the answer is with one of these meet the exp GDC or the beast the cheap and dirty way to boost your laptop's gaming power today's video is brought to you by PIAA the VPN service that encrypts all your Internet traffic and uses a safe protected IP it's got a ton of other useful features as well you can check it out at the link below so there have actually been quite a few iterations of the beast but the previous ones never really appealed to us mostly because they connected to the system either to external ports like Express card a dying if not completely dead standard or to internal ports that couldn't be spared most laptops only have a single mini PCIe slot that is usually taken up by the Wi-Fi card a fairly essential component of the mobile experience but thanks to nvme version 9.5 here has some big advantages so first it gets four times the number of PCI Express Lanes four of them here running at Gen three speeds and second some mobile devices actually have more than one m dot two slot like this one so you should be able to have both a high speed boot drive and an external GPU connected at the same time furthermore because there's no protocol overhead it should actually perform better than Thunderbolt 3 enclosures like this one at a significantly lower cost in theory so to put that to the test we are hooking our beast up to the D bottleneck err 5000 here a powerful desktop with all three of the connectivity methods that we want to evaluate we also grabbed a GTX 1080 so this thing is obviously much more powerful than any laptop on the market but we need this combination of a fast CPU and a high performance GPU to help us identify which interfaces if any are causing a bottleneck that will adversely affect the performance of our overall system this is pretty trippy this is like just having your graphics card like out here it's kind of like it's like if you had like a human body that's totally normal and the heart is on the table next to it and it's just connected with tubes and wires and stuff but it works so in graphically intense games you can see the performance of the beast ends up about where we would expect somewhere between the razor core with Thunderbolt 3 and a graphics card running at full 16 X speed plugged directly into the motherboard although it should be noted that in older cpu-bound games like csgo the FPS was comparable for all three okay so that all sounds pretty great if you've got a laptop then with a spare MDOT to nvme slot like this one that we mentioned before you could get better than Thunderbolt three levels of performance on the cheap yes however I still find myself asking who is this actually useful for like you're really gonna go out and buy a brand new laptop then literally cut a hole in the bottom of it for the beast's cabling that will still need to be run but consider something a little older like this msi DL 62 it packs a GTX 940m which I mean is better than nothing but barely so if you're looking to play modern games you're basically plumb out of luck even though your CPU is still decent unless ah yes there it is even though this is a couple of years old and our configured it actually used a slow mechanical hard drive for storage the GL 62 does feature an nvme capable and dot 2 slot which means that thanks to that still decent quad-core CPU I mentioned and the upgradable ramp remember upgradable around you guys with a beast and something like a gtx 960 you could turn the GL 62 to a gaming ready machine again for just a couple hundred bucks at least in theory we have tried everything with this machine BIOS updates disabling the integrated graphics disabling the dedicated graphics newer drivers older drivers older cards newer cards it just won't work so the working theory based on some discussion over on the eg pew forums those guys are awesome by the way is that passing a PCI Express signal over a fairly long couple of HDMI cables here leads to a fair bit of signal degradation which was fine on our X 299 motherboard because the m2 slot is physically close to the CPU socket and has a strong signal but might cause problems in laptops where the PCI Express signal might be within spec but a little bit lower now some folks suggested that a shielded m dot - 2 PCIe 4x adapter might actually do better in this case and they might be right but at 70 US dollars plus the cost of power and some kind of a mounting mechanism we don't consider that a viable solution outside of rare edge cases like recycling an old laptop as a no longer portable ghetto gaming desktop either with that said let's say that you were trying to do that what kind of compatibility could you expect as it turns out not that great even the dell inspiron gaming a machine that this approach could make sense for requires a custom bios and the rest of our efforts basically went a little something like this so yeah we we gave up because to get the beast to work with the Triton 700 for example we'd need a custom bios with raid disabled and PCI Express hot-swap enabled in order to get compatibility with anything that would be faster than what's already built into it so a 10th gen Nvidia card so there are people out there who will happily fork over a hundred to a hundred and fifty bucks like the owners of the aging laptops that we alluded to before or I mean another good example would be someone with like a mini ITX desktop who wants to add 10 gig networking or something along those lines but for everyone else the compatibility both physical and in firmware the user unfriendliness the general flakiness the lack of documentation the fact that you need to reboot to plug and unplug it from the system and the fact that you'll probably end up voiding your warranty are going to confine this product to a niche within a niche within a niche forever it's been forever since we've done this blog for Corsair introducing Corsairs unplug and play series the dark core RGB se mouse is quick features one millisecond 2.4 gigahertz and low latency Bluetooth connectivity if you opt for the wireless charging model you can charge with Corsairs mm 1000 or any compatible qi wireless charging pad and there k63 wireless gaming keyboard features the same low latency connection options as well as Cherry MX red switches and a blue LED backlight check out their entire lineup through the links below so thanks for watching guides if this video sucked you know what to do but if there's awesome again subscribe hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join