Laptop and eGPU Experience and Comparison

[Kathmandu Gilman]

Just wanted to share my experiences with Second Life on some different hardware so you could get an idea of what you might see if you decided to upgrade. I recently purchased a Gigabyte Aorus external GPU box and hooked it up to my HP Spectra 360 15" laptop. Basically it is an an externally connected video card which connects through a Thunderbolt3 type-c port and turbocharges your laptop to near desktop performance. The laptop is no slouch itself and the Nvidia MX 150 internal graphics can run SL adequately itself but with the Aorus Nvidia 1080 box connected it steps it up from adequate to good in my opinion. 

Laptop: 2017 HP Spectra 360 15" with Intel i7-8550U, 16 gig system memory, Intel 620 integrated graphics and Nvidia MX 150 dedicated Graphics set at 1920x1080 resolution.

Using all of the same High preferences with shadows and looking at the same scenery and draw distance.

Laptop with integrated graphics: 12 fps average

Laptop with dedicated MX 150: 34 fps average

Laptop with Aorus Nvidia GTX 1080 eGPU box: 74 fps average

And just for comparison to a rocking desktop. i7-8700k watercooled and overclocked to 5gig with 32gigs memory and Nvidia GTX 1080ti: 119 fps average, changing the resolution to 4k only dropped the fps to 109 which is surprising. 4k on the laptop pretty much cuts the fps in half across the board.