External graphics cards shown with thunderbolt 3 interface

One of the biggest drawbacks of a laptop is the impossibility or the very high difficulty of updating any of its components compared to a desktop PC. One of these components is the GPU, which are also much more limited in power due to the heat generated by the most powerful units.

Inventec has shown in the IDF two interesting modules to externally use a more powerful GPU than the one that our laptop can have. Both modules are based on a Thunderbolt 3 interface to communicate the GPU with the rest of the system with a bandwidth of 5 GB / s compared to 15 GB / s on the PCI-Express 3.0 bus.

First of all we have a module that integrates a laptop GPU, in this case a Radeon R9 M385 that is powered by the USB 3.0 / Thunderbolt 3 interface itself that can provide up to 100W of power. It also includes three USB 3.0 ports, two HDMI, two DisplayPorts, external audio and Ethernet.

Secondly, we have a module to use desktop graphics cards, in this case the GPU is powered by its own power supply, so much more powerful cards should be used, it can also include its own cooling system. In this case it has been shown next to a Radeon R9 270X.

Source: kitguru