Give your thin and light laptop the power of a full gaming rig. Whether you’re hunting down enemies in an apocalypse or designing your own 3D world, the Razer Core X and Razer Core X Chroma deliver desktop-class graphics to your laptop instantly. Compatible with Thunderbolt 3 Windows 10 or Mac laptops. Of course, there's always the Mac Pro with its Radeon Pro 580X (8GB) graphics card, but those are really designed for professional video and graphics work. And as well as costing more than the.

External GPUs are in the news lately, what with NVIDIA's announcement offering macOS drivers for its Titan Xp and Apple offering an eGPU Developer Kit for High Sierra, so we thought we'd take a second to explain what, exactly, an external GPU is — and how you'd go about getting one.

External GPUs: Supercharging gaming and video production

All Macs have a CPU, which provides the primary processing power for your computer. But in addition, they have a GPU — a graphics processing unit — designed to drive your computer's screen, external displays, and visuals.

GPUs are what sell high-end Windows gaming laptops and desktops: They keep your favorite game flawless, your external display running smoothly, and visual effects rendering speedy. They're also very important in rendering VR experiences.

But all that power comes at the expense of battery and optimization: Heavy-duty GPUs are frequent power hogs with lots of fan noise and problematic battery life. As such, Apple has historically trended toward putting in GPUs that balanced power with optimization: great for your laptop's battery life; not so great for gamers, VR, or visual effects artists.

Enter external GPUs: Like external hard drives, these essentially allow you to stick a GPU in a Thunderbolt housing, where you can then connect it to your computer; from there, when you run games, VR, and visual apps optimized for that GPU you should see significant performance improvements. Awesome, right? Well, almost.

The cons of an external GPU on your Mac

Here's the issue: Macs won't officially support external GPUs until macOS High Sierra. That's not to say you can't use an external GPU on older operating systems — only that Apple Support won't bail you out if you do something that doesn't agree with your Mac. Proceed at your own risk, here be dragons, et cetera.

In addition, should you decide to use an external GPU, there are only a handful of Thunderbolt enclosures and graphics cards with appropriate Mac drivers — you can't just pick an arbitrary graphics card you'd like to attach to your Mac.

How to use an external GPU with your Mac

Thankfully, you don't have to venture into the void without guidance: The eGPU.io community has put together a huge array of helpful how-tos and setup guides for interested users — I'm looking forward to using their startup guide and forums to make a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU for my MacBook Pro.

External Gpu Mac Gaming

Questions?

Other questions about external GPUs? Let us know below.

Mac Pro: What you need to know

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Eve updates app to add new customization and better iCloud syncing

Eve has updated its Eve for HomeKit app, and version 4.2 has a host of new features!

There is some yes and no here. At least in the case of

2011 Minis, some of the new Thunderbolt->PCI-X card

boxes can nearly fully support any PCI-X video card,

if running Windows7 via Bootcamp. In OSX however,

a Thunderbolt aware driver for the video card is required.

So, this would also be true for the 2012 as it is an OSX

limitation and not hardware.

There are Thunderbolt->Express Card adapters (Sonnet

is main source). They seem to be limitied as to which

Express Cards are usable. Again, it seems to be a

driver issue.

External Graphics Card For Gaming Mac Laptop

So as yet, external GPUs seem to be accessible only via

these pricey Thunderbolt->PCI-X boxes with Windows

External Graphics Card Macbook

(using Bootcamp install) and not OSX.

External Graphics Card For Mac Gaming

Nov 9, 2012 11:23 AM