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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbolt-3 is the way of the future. People are building thunderbolt 3 external chassis with a gaming card and extra storage in lieu of having a desktop computer and a laptop computer.

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This is how I'm rolling these days (HP Spectre 13" + 1080Ti inside an Akitio Node) and it's not without it's issues, but overall I'm very bullish on this type of thing. I would love for a similar AMD powered laptop, especially if they would let me mess with the fan curves etc. With some hackery my Spectre can be configured to a 20W up-TDP state over it's normal 15W, and when connected to the node I can have it in tent-mode, which improves the cooling a fair bit, as long as the fans stay on full blast (which unfortunately can only be achieved by pushing it to the thermal limit briefly) it stays at a nice ~80C at 25C ambient under all core loads. I manage 240FPS in Overwatch, it's fantastic.

This being said I opted for the 1080p screen (wish it was 1200p) and I personally see little reason to get a UHD screen in a laptop this size, it would be nice if it was a 10 bit HDR OLED screen with 400nits, but I can definitely live without the extra resolution, it's pretty meaningless on a screen this small, and most of the time when I'm at home I'm using a 144Hz gaming panel anyway.

It is not. Intel gave away the TB3 standard to the USB IF who made USB 4 out of it and that is the way of the future. It came out in '19 August, the differences are small but important: where the TB3 bus only carried PCI Express and DisplayPort signals the USB 4 Gen 3 bus also carries USB signals. Previously the USB ports on a TB3 dock / enclosure were implemented using the hotplug USB root hub in the TB3 controller in the TB3 device and it often resulted in a less than satisfactory experience (in other words, it sucked so badly some manufacturers used two TB3 controllers to make it better).

TB3 enclosures will be usable by USB 4 hosts.

I agree yet at the same time I avoided it largely because it's a zero-redundancy setup and a desktop/laptop setup is fundamentally more reliable... and it allows the failure of one device to not involved panicked repairs. Plus I do like the ability to segregrate the devices by function, or use one device to repair the other device. Also I'm staggered by the price of these GPU adapters considering the often crap quality of the hardware.

Yet I wouldn't be surprised to see myself go this way in the future especially because my phone only becomes a more and more capable "Backup" every year.

In that sense, it is not a very good version of the future. https://egpu.io is a good resource to get started on this. The 4-lane (sometimes only 2-lane) configuration of Thunderbolt 3 controllers, the overhead of the protocol and Intel’s insistence to reserve DisplayPort and USB bandwidth has made TB3 slower — 22Gbps maximum in a 32Gbps port hosting graphic cards that are usually electrically connected at 128Gbps (PCIe 3.0 x16).

I am going back the other way now, after having used an external enclosure for years.

Or just get a laptop with dual graphics card, having a gaming/workstation class card

I don't own a desktop since 2004.

Such laptops are usually pretty bulky/heavy, or they have a very low-end discrete card. They're a compromise.

15" Thinkpad, Asus and Dell workstation laptops are pretty alright.

Great machines, sure, but it's still (to me) a compromise. Right now I have a Macbook pro for portable use and a full-on workstation at home with a 20870Ti in it for playing with ML and CUDA, and for gaming.

I love the idea of having one machine and just plugging in to an external GPU caddy when at home for the full capability. Unfortunately MacOS and Nvidia cards aren't friends right now...

And the laptops that have got discrete GPUs are both heavier than the ideal (I'd like a portable machine coming in at 1kg or less) and far less capable than the 2080Ti.

Every laptop I've used is thermally limited if you try to do anything interesting computation wise. Simple things like 8 minute compiles turn into 12 minutes on a laptop, with fans at full blast.

Me neither, but I look at eGPU enclosures regularly. I don't even need the GPU power, but a desktop card is miles ahead of a laptop if well cooled and overclocked.

Will consume a lot of power though, and it definitely doesn't look like a portable solution.

Overclocking is something I never cared about, the prospect of being forced to buy new hardware was never appealing to me.

It's not rocket science. I've run a 30% overclock on a machine with 80% daily uptime on air and saw it BSOD like twice over 4 years. Also as some other people in this thread have mentioned, modern CPUs will overclock themselves, and if you undervolt you can get quite a lot of headroom, especially if you get lucky with binning. With that headroom and some hackery (Throttlestop is often all you need) you can get modern chips to hold all core turbos indefinitely. YMMV but I've managed to hold a stable 35% increase in sustained processing power without running too close to the thermal limits.

The risk of breaking anything by overclocking is really low anymore - you'll run into instability long before you damage anything. The best argument against overclocking IMHO is that the time and expense is generally not worth it. With a CPU overclock you might gain 10% performance while consuming 30% more power, after investing time and fancy cooling solution. Gone are the days of rapid improvement when you could occasionally get a stable 33% overclock with no real downside.

That, and CPUs will juice themselves up by default. Intel has turbo boosts up to like 5GHz nowadays. I couldn't do that if I tried, and frankly I don't feel any reason to.

Yep, they're very aggressive with the voltage and frequency out of the box. Continuous per-core thermal monitoring and frequency throttling changed the game - chips no longer need extra headroom to accommodate the worst thermal conditions they might see.

USB4 really. TB3 will be replaced with the former. So TB is becoming history.

I know it might be practical and hip if you're constantly on the move, but, eww.

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