Depending on your reason for seeking an eGPU, our recommendations will help you find the housing that works best for you. Although still uncommon compared to traditional desktops, this solution is growing, and there are several great options available today. With improvements in external connection technology like Thunderbolt and USB-C, bandwidth has improved to the point that a GPU can be housed externally to a laptop (or desktop) and connected via cable to provide significant improvement in GPU-heavy tasks like gaming or rendering. Due to their size and power needs, discrete graphics cards remain the single most important component in distinguishing the power of a laptop and the power of a desktop.

But there remains one major component that simply cannot perform as well within the thermally and space-constraints of a laptop: the graphics card. SSDs have shrunk in size, CPUs have become more power efficient, and batteries have improved capacity and efficiency. As mobile technology has continued to progress, laptops have caught up in many areas to their desktop counterparts.