- While doing the review of the Razer Blade 2016 that I just
recently launched, I came across an eGPU, or an external
GPU housing by the same company, called The Core.
Now, the idea behind any GPU, not just this one by Razer,
but there's other ones as well, is that you can plug in
by a Thunderbolt 2 or Thunderbolt 3 into your laptop,
and then put a desktop graphics card into this enclosure,
and your computer can use it as if it was
internally installed.
Now, the implications of that are pretty incredible.
When playing games, for, for example, editing video like
I do, it's very graphic intensive, so that means the ability
to have a much more powerful graphics card gives you
this desktop crazy performance out of your tiny laptop.
Now Razer isn't the only one to make one of these
eGPUs, there are other companies, but the Razer one has
become a little more popular, one, because it's been out
for a bit, it also looks really nice and has a bunch
of extra ports on it, ethernet port and USB 3.0 ports and
all this other stuff.
And it also is not proprietary to Razer.
Now, it does work best when you plug in a Razer laptop,
it's kind of just plug and play.
But it is using standards, like Thunderbolt, so you
could technically plug in other laptops into it.
Now there are a few other ones that have that ability
as well, I have links to a few other ones that are
a little cheaper than the Razer down below, you can check
those out, but the idea is all the same.
Any laptop, technically, with a Thunderbolt 2 or 3 port
can utilize this feature, albeit with some headaches
depending on the laptop, it's not always plug and play.
But this turns out that it's a feature built into Windows.
Whatever enclosure you use, it's going to have some sort
of locking mechanism that you can unlock, pull it out,
put your graphics card into the VCI slot, and then attach
the power cables, put it back in, lock it up.
Then we're also going to want to plug in the power,
of course, for the enclosure, and an external monitor.
Now the reason we plug in an external monitor into
the graphics card in the enclosure is because Thunderbolt
is kind of what's helping make this a reality because
it has a lot of speed for the bandwidth, right?
So even though it does have that speed, it's not quite
enough usually to send stuff from the computer to the
graphics card and then pull that back for the display.
You can try it, but it's gonna slow things down a lot.
So it's better to actually plug in an external monitor
so that you can send the information to the graphics
card and then have that go out a different cable
into a monitor.
Now, if you're using an enclosure that is related to the
computer you're using, for example, a Razer Core and a
Razer computer, then it's a matter of just kind of
plugging it in and it works, for the most part.
I, for mine, actually had to download Razer's GPU Switcher
program, which is in beta, but essentially it disables
in device manager the graphics card within the computer
whenever you attach and external one, and vice versa.
So, just a little extra thing I had to do, but for the most
part, that's about it.
Once I plug it in, it's good to go.
Now, if you have a computer that is not meant to be
used directly with the enclosure you bought, then
there's a few more things you need to do.
First, you need to click this link below, and install
the Thunderbolt drivers from Intel.
Once those are installed, you can plug in the eGPU.
And then, we're going to install the drivers for the
graphics card.
So, if you've got an NVIDIA graphics card, you're going
to go to their website and download the graphics drivers
for them, otherwise if you've got an AMD one, you
need to go to the AMD website, etc.
After that, though, it should just work.
And 'should' is the key term there.
There's a lot of different cards, a lot of different
enclosures, a lot of different laptops, so there can
be some other things you might have to do to make sure
that it works.
What I recommend though is if you're planning to do this,
go look online for your exact setup, the laptop, the
enclosure and the graphics card, and just see if other
people have gotten it to work, and if they didn't,
chances are you can find where they've posted how
they got it to work after the fact, or other people
have helped them get it to work.
So just do that before you decide on the graphics card,
the enclosure, etc.
If you don't want to experiment and try to figure that out,
you can of course buy the enclosure that goes with
the laptop that you have.
Besides Razer, MSI has one, Alienware has one, there's
a bunch of different companies.
So you could look that up and figure that out if you
wanted to just go the easy route.
Although, that one is going to be a little more expensive,
generally speaking, and it also means that you have
to buy the laptop.
So if you don't already have that laptop, it means
buying a new laptop and that's obviously dumb.
But yeah, but that is a way to guarantee compatibility
and also their technical support will help you if there
is any issues.
Regardless of which way you set it up, though, the
difference in power is pretty impressive.
Now, these benchmarks are from my Razer Blade with has
a GTX 1060 already in it, which is a desktop graphics card,
and then I plugged it into the Core with a GTX 1080 in it.
So, it's a jump, but it's not going to be as drastic of a
jump as some other computers that you'll find out there,
for example, like the Razer Blade Stealth if we're
sticking with Razer.
But, yeah, you can Google online to see different
comparisons that are a little bit bigger than the ones
I have here, but, for mine, I have between a 40 and a 50%
jump in performance, that counts for frame rates and videos
when doing 3DMark, and also even for rendering for Premiere
it cuts the footage time for rendering in half.
So there you go, not too shabby, right?
And it's kinda cool to have them as a docking station
as well.
I kind of like that I have all of my drives and everything
plugged into the Core, or whatever eGPU you want to use,
and then as soon as I plug in my laptop it just kind
of projects onto my monitors and I'm good to go.
Now, this also by the way isn't entirely limited to Windows.
It is meant for Windows, but there is a way to
get this to work on Mac.
I'm going to do another video on that, though.
So if you want to see that, please subscribe to be
notified when that happens.
Otherwise, let me know in the comments below what you
guys think of the eGPU concept, of the Core, the Razer,
the other ones that are out there.
Are there any ones that you guys really think are
cool that are probably more universal than the Core?
Because it's not the cheapest, if we're honest.
But, yeah, let me know what you guys think.
Always love to hear from you guys.
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As always, though, thanks for watching.