nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq5ufc4ns07vjn8j8lj83c55dyr2cn56ql4d37pdu780n7jkhtsgys0zre2d (nprofile…re2d) oh yeah, eGPUs are a total mess...
Two years ago my company organized a hackathon somewhere in rural Germany, I brought some Chromebooks and my desktop, coworker brought his laptop and RTX2080 (I think?) in eGPU enclosure.
eGPU setup basically... didn't work. It behaved much better with RX7800XT we yoinked from my workstation, but still wasn't super stable either way.
I ended up letting him swap the SSD into my desktop and use it for few days, after which he sold nvidia card and eGPU enclosure. He bought used Ryzen system with the same GPU I have (I think) for pretty much the same amount of money he got from selling that setup.
That's why it might be a hot take but eGPUs are inherently stupid. Setup costs the same as used parts and you give up A LOT of performance due to bus constrains (it's like what, 32Gb/s on TB4?).
I'm pretty hyped for dual-oculink board for my work laptop (Framework 16) that someone's been working on.
You have direct PCIe 4.0 x8 exposed on the back of the laptop that you can do whatever you want with.
Plus, because AMD doesn't have the whole IFD nonsense, you can split those lanes however you want (at least according to my findings while reverse-engineering this stuff so far), so you can literally have 8x PCIe 4.0 x1 slots hanging off of your laptop if you really want.
This effectively means that once I'm done with porting coreboot to that system, you'll have a toggle that will allow you to split that PCIe port into:
- 1x 8-lanes
- 2x 4-lanes
- 4x 2-lanes
- 8x 1-lane
- Maybe something custom, like 2x2 for two additional (internal) NVME SSDs, and external OcuLink with 4-lanes of PCIe (40Gb/s)?
That would be really neat in my opinion, and board costs basically pennies (~40EUR) in comparison to licensed TB4 implementation (I don't even want to think how much TB5 will cost due to signal integrity etc)
elly
npub17p…ra0st
2026-03-20 23:06:05 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…s3xx
Author Public Key
npub17p5uf3zjj0ycwmeqp2jxxxaveu6afqcfjecqjxggwy93jmvgfq6sura0stSeen on
wss://relay.ditto.pubPublished at
2026-03-20 23:06:05 UTCEvent JSON
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