Worth getting eGPU for Gaming Laptop?  

@hangman101 What's the full specs of your laptop? Many gaming laptops with the H-CPU route their Thunderbolt 3 connection through the PCH which has no cooling. This degrades the TB3 eGPU performance a lot.

@itsage

Hi its a MSI G65 Thin.  Specs below:

CPU :3.9GHz Intel Core i7-8750H (quad-core, 9MB cache, up to 4.2GHz)
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB GDDR5, Max-Q)
RAM: 32gb DDR4
Screen: 15.6-inch FHD (1,920 x 1,080), anti-glare, wide view angle display (144Hz, 7ms response, 72% NTSC color gamut, 16:9)
Storage: 512GB SSD (M.2)
Ports: USB 3.1 Gen2 x 3, Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C), miniDisplayPort, HDMI-out, RJ-45 Ethernet, 1/1 SPDIF (ESS Sabre HiFi)
Connectivity: Killer N1550 Combo 802.11ac Wi-Fi (2x2 MIMO); Bluetooth 5.0

@hangman101 I found a picture of the motherboard showing PCH chipset. It's installed inverted and you would need to remove the entire motherboard to apply some cooling. Nice board with dual M.2 slots so you can look into M.2 eGPU adapter instead of Thunderbolt 3.

@itsage

Thanks for your reply. Yeah I know the motherboard all too well as I upgraded the ram and put a m.2 drive in there.

What kind of additional cooling would I need to put in there?

Also are m.2 egpu better than thunderbolt?

Oh my god, I really do not recommend it. On gaming laptops, the TB3 is terrible. See my results. It shows how serious the performance degradation is in TB3.
https://egpu.io/forums/builds/2017-15%e2%80%b3-aorus-x5-v7-gtx1070-7th4chk-rtx2080-32gbps-tb3-razer-core-x-win10-%ed%91%b8%eb%a5%b8%eb%b0%94%eb%9e%8c/
If you want eGPU, I strongly recommend you use M.2 instead of TB3. M.2 has a much higher performance retention rate than TB3!

@yhk02240224

Thanks  now a stupid question.  The m.2 port is obviously onside my laptop.  How and where would the cable come out of to connect to the gpu?

@hangman101

See the following links. I attached a picture of connection.

https://egpu.io/forums/builds/2017-15%e2%80%b3-aorus-x5-v7-gtx1070-7th4chk-rtx2080-32gbps-nvme-m-2-r43sg-win10-%ed%91%b8%eb%a5%b8%eb%b0%94%eb%9e%8c/

@yhk02240224

Thank you will check it out now.

If you're using 1440p and going straight to an external monitor with the eGPU you will probably see an noticeable improvement using a 5700 XT eGPU. It really has to be noticeable in game play not benchmarks to be worth it. Definitely don't expect much of an improvement using the internal 1080p laptop display. It's not a high enough resolution to become GPU bound and you will see the TB3 overhead/latency rear it's head to a much larger extent.

The cases where an eGPU can pay dividends over a decent dGPU in a notebook is where you have a high enough resolution and a powerful enough GPU installed to offset some of  the performance hit from the TB3 interface. You need to run in a scenario where the laptop's dGPU is at a large disadvantage from a game play perspective. Trading 80fps on the dGPU for 110fps on the eGPU isn't going to buy you much. Trading 35fps on the dGPU for 65-70fps on the eGPU on the other hand is pretty massive from a game play perspective.