System Specs 14in Thinkpad x1 carbon Gen 7, 14in, i7 10710u - integrated graphics and windows 10
eGPU Hardware bought secondhand Aorus Gaming Box RX 580 with three tested cables - 1.5in passive TB3, 6ft passive TB3 (Cable Matters), and 6ft active TB3 (CalDigit)
Installation Steps This was mostly plug and play with the drivers. I had trouble restarting the computer after installing with the device attached (BSOD) but that was fixed by unplugging it during restart and now it's been fine. Part of this installation was testing a couple TB3 cables I bought and I did have to power cycle the device after switching the cables on random instances but it's not been too much of a hassle.
Benchmark Which brings me to benchmarks. I have three cables I am using: the 1.5ft passive cable that came with the device, a 6ft passive cable by Cable Matters, and a 6ft active cable by CalDigit. My intention is to be able to use this while retaining the laptop capabilities, so I expect I will use mostly the internal screen and would like the flexibility of a longer cable. However, I heard the thinkpad x1 thunderbolt ports don't play nicely with active cables so I bought a backup to test. I ran them through Unigine Heaven on both the internal display and an external monitor just to compare and the result were expected: the short cable runs the best, followed by the active cable, then the passive cable. An external monitor works better than the internal screen.
1.5ft cable on the internal display:
1.5ft cable on the external monitor:
6ft Active cable on the internal display:
6ft Active cable on the external monitor:
6ft Passive cable on the internal display:
6ft Passive cable on the external monitor:
Comments Regardless, they are all improvements on the gaming performance I was seeing so that's exciting. I still expect I will mostly use this on the internal screen but I haven't decided which cable I will keep between the 6ft ones. I may keep testing the active cable to see if any lingering problems like flickering or suddenly stopping exist with the Thinkpad drivers. The active cable was about 3 times the cost of the passive cable but it does lose performance, particularly on the internal screen so if I can make it work consistently, I will likely continue to use that.
I wanted to update the post with some pics now that I have I have this set up for working from home:
Pending: Add my system information and expected eGPU configuration to my signature to give context to my posts