Testing Mobile Gaming PC with RX 6600 GPU

I decided to check out the gaming capabilities of my mobile gaming PC, specifically the RX 6600 GPU. I plugged it into my laptop and ran some benchmarks, but first things first, I wanted to jump into some gaming. I went with Cyberpunk 2077 and set my graphics settings to 1440p High with FSR (Frame Rate Scaling) set to Performance. With this configuration, I was able to achieve an average frame rate of around 73 FPS.

I'm impressed with the performance of the RX 6600 in my mobile gaming PC. The GPU is running at PCIe X4 4.0 speeds, which is impressive considering it's a laptop GPU. My CPU wattage is at 32 watts, which is relatively low, and I believe this is due to the power supply connected to the GPU being more efficient than my laptop's integrated power supply.

Next up, I tested Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p High settings. In this game, my RX 6600 was able to achieve an average frame rate of around 90 FPS, with only a few instances of dips below 80 FPS. This is impressive considering the game's demanding requirements and the fact that I'm using a laptop GPU.

Finally, I tested Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 at recommended settings for 1440p. The RX 6600 was able to achieve an average frame rate of around 110 FPS, with only a few instances of dips below 80 FPS. This is great considering the game's demanding requirements and the fact that I'm using a laptop GPU.

External Docking Issues

One issue I've been experiencing with external docking on my mobile gaming PC is that some newer games are not supporting USB4 or Thunderbolt docks, which can result in reduced performance or even complete stability issues. This has been an issue for me when trying to play games like Spider-Man or Horizon Zero Dawn, but fortunately, the RX 6600 was able to handle Cyberpunk 2077 without any major issues.

To test this further, I set up my mobile gaming PC with a Thunderbolt dock and ran Cyberpunk 2077 again. In this case, my average frame rate dropped by around 12 FPS compared to when I was using USB4. However, in some cases, the game would stutter or dip below 30 FPS, which can be frustrating.

Fortunately, I recently purchased an external Oculink port for my mobile gaming PC, which has allowed me to achieve great performance with external GPUs. The Oculink dock is a cheap and effective solution that allows me to connect my GPU to a power supply and get around the issues with USB4 or Thunderbolt docks.

Building Your Own Dock

If you're interested in building your own Oculink dock, it's actually quite simple and affordable. I spent around $80 on materials, including an M.2 adapter, which can be used with other devices such as laptops or PCs. You can find all of the necessary components on Amazon.

The final section of my article will cover my experience with using the new 7840U-powered GPD Win Max 2 laptop, but that's a story for another time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again with the all new ryzen 7000 series powered GPD winmax 2. now I recently did a video on this unit absolutely amazing all by itself we've got the brand new ryzen 7 7840u with rdna3 Graphics but one of the things that I really wanted to take a look at was the New Port they added on the back here known as an oculink Port if you're not familiar with oculink that's totally fine and you know when I first heard about this I was like oh cool another port for VR but that's not the case this has nothing to do with VR oculink ports and Technology have actually been around for a long time used in server applications and in simple terms it's a low-cost cable to extend pcie outside of the box and that's exactly what GPD has done here so basically instead of connecting an e-gpu using Thunderbolt or in this case since we've got an AMD platform usb4 we're going to be using a pcie e-bus here instead and in my experience especially with thunderbol bolt 4 given that it's newer to the market I've had a much smoother experience and I've been able to get higher frame rates with an e-gpu connected over oculink as opposed to Thunderbolt or usb4 but before we move any further I do want to mention that this video is brought to you by urcd Keys I've actually been using this site for a couple years now they do offer steam Keys origin you played they even offer Microsoft applications like office but the main reason that I use urcd Keys is for their Windows keys right now their Windows 10 Pro OEM key is 19.84 cents but if you use code ETA at checkout you can get 25 off and another great thing about buying from here is they do accept Paypal I just did this build here I need to activate Windows I'm going to head over to my updates and security we're going to go to activation as you can see I've got Windows 10 Pro but it's not activated so I'm going to change product key I'm going to paste it in here choose next choose activate and windows is now activated we're ready to go my warning is totally gone and basically that's it they'll email your code once your payment is processed and that's basically it if you're interested in picking up cheap Windows 10 keys for your new pc builds I'll leave a link in the description as we know you can always pick up a thunderbolt dock pretty easily they do get a bit expensive right here I've got the Razer cortex non-rgb version and inside of here I've got an RTX 3080 TI this is a pretty large setup given that it supports a three slot GPU and you can always go over usb4 or Thunderbolt if you want to but since the new GPD win Max 2 has that oculink Port I wanted to show you the performance here and give you an idea of how cheap you can actually build an oculink egpu dock for so this kit is available on Amazon for 38 shipped and this comes with our oculink cable which is a lot longer than the Thunderbolt 3 cables we can use over Thunderbolt 4. most of the docks nowadays are only Thunderbolt 3 anyway we've also got our PCB this has our pcie x16 slot that will put our GPU inside of there's also a 24-pin power input for a power supply and our oculink connector goes right here this Kit's pretty cool because it also comes with a smaller m.2 adapter so it's m.2 to oculink and you can use this with mini PCS or other laptops and kind of build a little dock for basically anything that has a free m.2 slot now the dock itself isn't going to offer us graphics performance so we'll need a GPU and for this video I'm going to be using an RX 6600 this is actually a great card I know a lot of people you know weren't too keen on these 6000 series cards but I really like this one it's a non-xt variant you can pick them up pretty cheap on eBay and I'll tell you using AMD over oculink works so much better than Thunderbolt I've always had issues with AMD over Thunderbolt with the new usb4 interfaces but uh the final thing we'll need here is a power supply so I've got a smaller power supply here that was actually designed for an egpu dock it was designed for the sonnet docks 350 Watts you can pick these up anywhere from 50 to 70 on eBay and with this we get one eight pin connector one six pin connector and our 24 pin power this is all I'm really going to need this is actually my dock itself what I've done here is mounted the oculink board directly to a piece of pay light which is a kind of corrugated PVC it's a lot denser than regular corrugated PVC easy to cut we've also got the power supply mounted and now that I've got all that set up all I need to do is plug in my GPU I've also got that six pin power connector going to the GPU and uh yeah I mean this is basically it I know it's kind of open air it's definitely a really cheap option and in total you can get out building one of these cheaper with a GPU than you could buying just an egpu dock using Thunderbolt and this works out really well I've got the oculink cable plugged into the back of the win Max 2. we'll go ahead and Power It Up see those fans spin up on that RX 6600 and I'm going to tell you right now running an egpu on your internal screen with a handheld is not the way to do it you can up the GPU performance but it's basically going to be cut in half due to the bandwidth limits of trying to send that back to the internal screen so what you want to do is take HDMI or even a DisplayPort to an external monitor that way we can get the maximum performance out of the GPU we have connected to the handheld and right now I've got the screens duplicated but when gaming I'm only going to use that external screen connected to that external GPU as you can see I've rearranged everything we do have power going into the GPD win Max 2 to keep that battery up and uh yeah I mean this thing is actually working pretty good we've got that ryzen 7 7840u 8 cores 16 threads based on Zen four and of course we're going to be using the RX 6600 instead of the built-in Radeon 780m graphics now I will tell you that the 780m graphics do an amazing job in a handheld mode but when you want to dock it do something like this you can turn it into a full-fledged gaming PC checking out gpu-z I actually wanted to see what kind of speeds this is running at now of course it's not going to be the same as plugged into a full-fledged desktop PC but we are running at pcie X4 4.0 and performance here is great I did run some benchmarks but the first thing I want to do is definitely jump into some gaming here so we're going to go with cyberpunk 2077 and I do consider the RX 6600 a 1440p card with FSR right now 1440p High settings we do have FSR set to Performance so you know we've got that resolution scale going but we're getting an average of around 73 FPS with this game and if you take a look my CPU wattage is right there at 32 watts so we're not maxing out this 7840u and right there at 100 with the RX 6600 that 100 watts is coming from the power supply we have connected to it personally I think it looks great like this and I wouldn't mind playing through this all day next up we've got Red Dead Redemption 2 1080p High settings and my uh 7840u is pulling under 15 watts this is a really great mobile CPU and I think I could pair it up with a more powerful card for sure but the RX 6600 actually does a really good job for what it is and the final game I wanted to test at least for this video was Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. I like using the built-in Benchmark and we're at recommended settings 1440p and I believe when this went to recommended settings FSR was set to Performance automatically but either way you look at it with the settings used here we got an average of 110 FPS and our low was only 74. so we're over that 60 threshold we can definitely play through this game just fine at the beginning of the video I mentioned that I haven't been getting great performance using usb4 and these Thunderbolt docs with AMD cards and I want to show you exactly what's happening here with a lot of the newer games now not every single game does this but a lot of the newer games that I personally want to play like the Spider-Man franchise be it Miles Morales or remastered Horizon zero Dawn and cyberpunk 2077 and a lot more are giving me a major issue now this is actually running at pcie X4 3.0 which isn't going to make a huge difference at least in the overall average frame rate but I will hop right in here to cyberpunk 2077 we're using this Thunderbolt dot connected to the GPD winmax 2. we've got the same exact GPU and I'm using the same settings 1440p high with FSR set to Performance and my average frame rate is down by about 12 right now but uh as you can see when I move around quickly I get that real bad stutter I mean that frame rate drops into the 30s and it's constant so it doesn't matter if I got this level fully loaded in or whatnot using Thunderbolt over usb4 with these AMD cards is presented a major issue for me Nvidia is much better but uh recently I've started noticing some of the Nvidia cards are also doing it so I'm super excited that GPD has added this external oculink Port I've been getting really great performance out of it using an external GPU with the little setup that I have and it's actually much cheaper than a thunderbolt dock with the power supply board and cable it was around 80 dollars to create the dock and that's not including the GPU but if you've already got a power supply laying around you can always utilize that the Thunderbolt dock that I have was around 230 dollars on sale so it's much cheaper creating your own little oculink dock and remember when you pick that board up from Amazon it does come with that m.2 adapter so you can always use this with other devices different laptops many PCs or even the original GPD win too we've got that free 22 30 slot on the bottom you can always put this in but that's going to wrap it up for this one I really appreciate you watching I will have a couple more videos coming up using oculink on different devices and you know if you're interested in putting a little dock together yourself I'll leave links in the description basically everything can be picked up from Amazon and if you're interested in seeing what the new 7840u powered GP the win Max 2 can do all by itself with the new integrated 780m rdna3 igpu I'll leave a link to that original video down below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching\n"