Gaming laptop with eGPU for 3D work - £2500 budget should get you interested

[DaQuteness]

Sweet mother, I'm back, it's been 6 years since I've last posted on Anandtech and 10 since I've joined! WOW!

Anyway, my mind being blown aside, I've come back here for a good reason: tech-savvy nerd central with good opinions. Not every day someone pops up in here and says "I have a nice budget for you to get inspired".

So down to the nitty grits: I need a laptop with decent enough power to run GPU-intensive software and maybe a few games but I'm not particularily fussed about that, and an eGPU which is NOT for gaming! I do a lot of 3D work in Blender, Revit, 3ds Max, and quite a bit of programming with C++, C#, Alea, CUDA. I've survived well enough on a Lenovo Y510p with a 755m in it but it's high time it took the bullet.

To get you into the ballpark, I am seriously eyeballing a Razer Stealth Pro (1060 in it) and a Razer Core combo with a 1080Ti in it. Here's an interesting question: anybody know of a good multi-gpu enclosure? Again, I don't care for SLI, it's just computing power I'm after. I know of RenderBoxx alternatives but are just stupidly expensive for me right now and don't always work well with laptops.

Now... before everybody pops a vein and says that I should get a desktop: I work on the go A LOT and I only need extra computing power while at home. I do not want to spend £3500 on something that will sit at home until I get to use it. I am, however, willing to spend £2500 on a combo because I can use about 1700£ worth of productivity wherever I go. Please no Quadro-based suggestions, I have an XPS at work with m2000m in it and it honestly is not worth the £1200 price difference from my laptop (performance-wise).

Many thanks my many dudes, fire away with your opinions!

 

[VirtualLarry]

I saw a blurb from LinusTechTips on their "WAN Show", talking briefly about external GPU enclosures over TB3, and how they lose around 30% of performance, and that's "normal".

I'm not really sure that, because of that fact, that it would even be worthwhile to create or sell a dual-GPU external enclosure.

 

[DaQuteness]

I can't find the article right now, I'll post it a bit later on but from what I've read, the loss is on the way back to the pc. If you use a remote monitor (i.e. hook it up directly to the eGPU) you gain more frames. I really need to find that benchmark somewhere, at work now so can't contribute with a source. Also it has to do with the eGPU enclosure itself, Razer Core seems to be the real deal unlike most eGPU enclosures which look more like glorified external SATA drives. Maybe someone can shed some light on this?

Having said that, I'm curious to see how eGPUs handle computations such as issued by GPU renderers instead of game engines, i think the bottleneck is of a different nature since it's not about dishing out hundreds of fps.

 

[cbn]

Having said that, I'm curious to see how eGPUs handle computations such as issued by GPU renderers instead of game engines, i think the bottleneck is of a different nature since it's not about dishing out hundreds of fps.

Since you mentioned Blender take a look at these threads:

https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?351863-Cycles-CUDA-rendering-with-PCIe-splitter

https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?383731-Blender-Cycles-and-GTX-SLI-cards (see post #6 and #7)

(In a nutshell the speed at which the scene is transfered to VRAM over PCIe doesn't really matter compared to the time actually required to do the rendering)

 

[DaQuteness]

Since you mentioned Blender take a look at these threads:

https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?351863-Cycles-CUDA-rendering-with-PCIe-splitter

https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?383731-Blender-Cycles-and-GTX-SLI-cards (see post #6 and #7)

(In a nutshell the speed at which the scene is transfered to VRAM over PCIe doesn't really matter compared to the time actually required to do the rendering)

EXACTLY! It's not about bandwidth with me, it's actually 100% card processing speed, you don't ever reach Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3.1 bandwidth bottlenecks, I just need to find a few tests, that's it

Many thanks @cbn !

The best multi-gpu enclosure I found available in the UK will get me broke in no time: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/4-g...u-external-pcie-gen3-to-gpu-desktop-enclosure

This is the rig the guy in the blenderartists forum was talking about and it looks PROPER DODGY! =)) http://amfeltec.com/products/gpu-oriented-cluster/
http://amfeltec.com/products/gpu-oriented-cluster/
There are ways of getting eGPU for rendering but they are dodgy to say the very least when it comes to actually connecting them to your computer. Not even better-funded units made for everyday users, like the Razer Core, work well - actually a pain in the a. even on their own laptops!

Cheers!
V.