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What are the limitations of connecting an external GPU to a ThinkPad?

I saw a post in a forum about connecting an external GPU to an x200 ThinkPad and it’s made me curious what the limitations are and what models you could use one on. I am not very familiar with eGPUs.

Could you theoretically connect a ThinkPad T440p to a 3060? I imagine you would quickly reach a bottleneck but I am wondering what kind of performance gains you would get before running into it.

The x200 utilized the express card slot so I don’t know if it would be possible with other models. I am not sure though. Maybe there’s a way with the dock that it could be setup.

Pantherina ,

Portability, price, reason

CorrodedCranium OP ,
@CorrodedCranium@leminal.space avatar

In the text below the title I mention how I’m talking about performance and compatibility. None of that.

It would be to create some weird Frankenstein device.

the_q ,

The limitation is the pcie bandwidth. The fastest an egpu can use currently is equivalent to a 4x slot in a desktop which is like 10gbs where as a 16x slot (typical for GPU) is 40gbs. These speeds are 1 way.

CorrodedCranium OP ,
@CorrodedCranium@leminal.space avatar

So in the case of the x200 would the limiting factor by the PCIe card?

the_q ,

Yes. That’s a pretty old laptop so it wouldn’t be worth even trying an egpu setup. Even the newest laptops can’t fully utilize an egpu setup.

CorrodedCranium OP ,
@CorrodedCranium@leminal.space avatar

Totally. It’s one of those “because I can” kind of things.

Oisteink ,

In any setup your bus speed will be the limiting factor. PCIe uses “lanes” for parallel transmissions. So the claim here is the max bus available has 4 lanes. That’s 1/4th of what a normal in-pc 16 lanes bus will give.

So what ever can max the available bandwidth is your limit.

Pantherina ,

So you should not use your internal display at all, as that will perform horribly.

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