**EGPU Performance: A Hands-On Review of the Win 4 and Thunderbolt 3/Thunderbolt 4 Cables**
I've been playing around with my new Win 4, and I'm excited to share my hands-on experience with you. Initially, I had some issues with the system's performance, but after replacing the Thunderbolt 3 cables with new Thunderbolt 4 cables, things started looking up. I was able to get a smooth gaming experience on The Witcher 3, with frame rates reaching up to 120 FPS at 1440p Ultra settings.
However, when I tried playing Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p High settings, I noticed some dips down into the upper 60s. It seemed like there were some issues with the game's compatibility with the external GPU (eGPU) setup. Despite limiting the power consumption of the RTX 3080 Ti, I still encountered some anomalies when connected over USB4. Forza Horizon 5 at 4K Ultra settings was a different story altogether - it performed admirably, with smooth frame rates above 60 FPS.
On the other hand, Elden Ring at 1440p Ultra settings showed some screen tearing, which was only noticeable after I turned off V-Sync and noticed it in the footage. Despite this, the system still managed to maintain a decent frame rate of around 57 FPS. It's worth noting that these issues might be specific to certain games or configurations, but overall, the Win 4 has shown promising EGPU performance.
One of the most surprising observations was how some games simply don't like EGPs, regardless of the setup. The Spider-Man remastered and Miles Morales games were among those that didn't perform well with external GPUs. Even at lower resolutions and settings, I couldn't achieve a steady frame rate. This suggests that there might be some inherent limitations or compatibility issues with these specific titles.
As for my testing process, I've been experimenting with different EGPs, including the RTX 3060, RX 6500 XT, and even the GTX 1660. The RTX 3060 has proven to be a great match for Thunderbolt 4 and Ryzen chips, while the GTX 1660 could potentially deliver impressive performance on lower-power configurations. However, I'm still waiting on new USB4 cables to see how the system performs with these EGPs.
Lastly, I want to mention my experience with the GPD Win 4, which runs Steam OS (also known as Steam Deck OS). This handheld device has been a fun project, and it's amazing to think about how much power is packed into such a small package. If you're interested in learning more about this, I recommend checking out my separate videos on Steam OS and the GPD Win 4.
**System Specifications:**
* CPU: Ryzen 6800U
* GPU: RTX 3080 Ti (non-Ti variant)
* RAM: 16 GB DDR5
* Storage: NVMe SSD
* Operating System: Windows 11
**Testing Environment:**
All testing was conducted using the Win 4, with the exception of the Steam OS and GPD Win 4 tests. The EGPs used in testing were:
* RTX 3080 Ti (non-Ti variant)
* RTX 3060
* RX 6500 XT
* GTX 1660
**Note:** The testing environment and specifications may not be exhaustive, but they should give you a general idea of the system's capabilities.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's actually pretty awesome seeing this kind of performance 4K Ultra settings out of a handheld now given we are connected to an e-gpu but I'm glad they added Thunderbolt 4 here what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking another look at the GPD Win 4 but in this one we're going to be testing an external GPU now I've been having a blast with this handheld the way it sits but GPD did add usb4 up top and it's actually using 40 gigabit protocol so connecting an external GPU is actually pretty easy and of course first and foremost this is a handheld gaming machine I completely understand that but we do have the option to add an external GPU that way when you get back to the house you can actually just set this up on the desk plug in an external GPU and up that GPU performance by quite a bit now if you're not familiar with the GPD Win 4 I have created a couple videos we did some windows testing that's what it comes with right out of the box and we also installed steamos 3 otherwise known as Steam DAC OS if you're interested in checking those videos out I'll leave some links in the description but adding an e-gpu to this is actually quite simple now there's several ways to go about it but I'd say the easiest way is just to pick up an egpu dock now while what I've got here is an older sonnet dock unfortunately it doesn't offer any kind of PD charging actually it does 10 watts but that's really not enough to keep the battery topped off and I definitely need to upgrade soon this thing has been through the wringer I've modified it so we could fit a three slot GPU and I've added a bigger power supply and in this video we're actually going to be testing out an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 TI this is a Galaxy version with 12 gigabytes of vram now you might have noticed I have a little stand here and this was actually originally designed for the GPD win3 and I've modified it a little bit to make the wind for a fit but keep in mind GPD is offering a new stand that'll kind of slide right down in here and it'll work with the GPD win 4. but this is actually great if you've already got one because on the rear here we've got PD Power in HDMI three USB ports and ethernet and with this I can actually charge the unit up because my egpu dock doesn't offer PD Power out a lot of the newer ones do like 65 Watts which is plenty for the G BPD went for this one just doesn't do it alright so here we are I've got the gpd14 in the dock and by the way I do have power plugged into the dock because this is an older sauna e-gpu Dock and it really doesn't put out a lot of wattage I think around 10 watts but the newer ones will charge the unit and you can also use the external graphics card at the same time this one's just old and I think I need to upgrade soon but if I give it a little bit of time because this is actually the first time I'm plugging in the RTX 3080 fans will start spinning up uh windows will automatically download an older Nvidia driver which we definitely want to update and the way this is set up is we've got the external monitor connected to the RTX 3080. we want everything running out of there now it is possible to use this external GPU on the built-in screen but performance is going to be cut in half and we're already going to be limited here because we're using this over a thunderbolt 4 connection plus these Thunderbolt 3 cables are only a little over a foot long so you know sitting at the desk with this plugged in I mean you could do it but we're going to be using this external Monitor and I want to jump right into some gaming because I was really impressed by what this thing can do I'm going to go ahead and get everything situated and install my new NVIDIA drivers all right so before we jump into gaming I wanted to give you a quick look here as you can see we've got that ryzen 760 800u 8 cores 16 threads we can still access the Radeon 680m igpu but instead of using that we're going to be using the RTX 3080 TI 12 gigs of vram and this wasn't without issue now I'm working with early drivers on the Win 4 right now and I'm not sure if this could be attributed to that or you know maybe even my egpu dock or the cable but with this card I actually had to go into afterburner and limit the power to 80 because I was running into stuttering at a hundred percent but dropping it down to 80 seems to kind of smooth everything out and uh by the way I've actually got the TDP on the 6800u at 35 Watts right now in handheld mode you really don't want to run this at 35 Watts but since we've got power here I don't have to worry about battery life but the fan and the Win 4 does spin up a lot more than if we were running at 15 or even 28 Watts but it keeps it cool enough we don't hit thermal throttle at 35W Watts alright so first up we've got Doom Eternal 4K Ultra settings and like I mentioned you know since we're connected over a thunderbolt connection here we aren't getting the full potential of this RTX 3080 but either way you look at it it really did up the performance now if this card was plugged into a real PCI ex16 slot in a gaming PC we could go up to ultra nightmare 4K no problem but given that we're running over Thunderbolt on a mobile chip this isn't bad at all next on the list we've got God of War so we're at 1440p ultra settings with no dlss and with these newer AAA games this is kind of where Thunderbolt starts showing the performance loss now with this game here on the RTX 3080 at 4K we could get a little over what we're doing right now but since we're limited by that bandwidth 1440p Ultra is really going to be The Sweet Spot here and of course we could go ahead and lock this down at 60 and have a great time with it and another thing you got to remember is I've set the power on the RTX 3080 to only 80 percent because at 100 I was getting a lot of stuttering with basically everything that I tested and I think it comes down to either my egpu dock or the cables that I'm using I've got three Thunderbolt 3 cables and it was actually doing the same thing with each of them so I went ahead and ordered some Thunderbolt 4 cables hopefully that will fix the issue if not I will have to invest in a new dock but as you can see here The Witcher 3 runs phenomenally 1440p Ultra looking great I mean we're getting around 120 FPS out of this one and of course we had to test out cyberpunk 2077 1440p High settings and this one still gave me some issues even though I've got that power limited we still get some dips down into the upper 60s and you know I thought we'd get a nice steady frame rate out of this but I am seeing some anomalies here when this is connected over usb4 I mean it's kind of all over the place here's Forza Horizon 5 4K Ultra settings and I'll tell you that the 6800u and the Win 4 actually handles this really well at 1080p medium settings we can do over 60 just on the built-in igpu but we can definitely up that resolution and the frame rate with an external GPU here's Elden ring ultra settings 1440p and you will see some screen tearing here I actually didn't notice it while I was filming but when I went back I did notice it in the footage it's my fault I forgot to turn vsync on and my monitors actually set at 144 Hertz right now it's usually set up for a variable refresh rate but it wasn't with this one it actually performs really well but I did get a few dips down to around 57 FPS and I'm just going to chalk it up to the connection we're using here so everything we've seen so far actually performs really well but there are a few games that just don't like egpus no matter what way you go about it and these new Spider-Man games be it Spider-Man remastered or Miles Morales just don't like external gpus I've tested this on a bunch of different systems and I've never been able to get a steady frame rate out of it we're at 1440p very high settings and even if I go down to 720p very low settings we're going to get the same frame rate we have right now it's just something about the way the game's set up I just haven't really had good luck with external gpus in this one overall when it comes to egpu Performance it's not looking bad and keep in mind it's still really early for the drivers on the win for here this is kind of a prototype unit it's still up on Indiegogo as making this video and I know not a lot of people are going to be pairing up a 3080 TI with this but I do have more gpus I'm just kind of waiting on those new cables to come in just to see if we could alleviate any of those stutters I was getting with those higher power limits on that card now I've done a lot of testing on the Channel with Thunderbolt 3 Thunderbolt 4 and usb4 be it on uh Intel or even ryzen and one of my favorite cards is actually the RTX 3060. it's a non-ti variant I think it pairs up really well with usb4 and these ryzen chips so as soon as I get those usb4 cables in we will be doing some testing with the 3060 and I also want to throw in an AMD card I've got the RX 6500 6600 we can do a 6750 or a 6900 XT just let me know what you want to see running on this in the comments below even lower income cards would probably be pretty awesome on this one that I've actually been wanting to test is the 1660. no it's not a top of the line card but with the smaller egpu enclosure less power you could definitely get some really great 1080p performance out of it but when it comes down to it I've been having a lot of fun with the GPD win 4. if you're interested in checking Steam OS otherwise known as Steam deck OS running on this unit link for that video is in the description along with a Windows testing video just strictly on the igpu here and it does a great job even just at 15 to 28 watts and 28 watts is kind of gaming mode here for a lot of these manufacturers with these 6800u handhelds and if you're interested in learning more about the Win 4 maybe even backing the Indiegogo I'll leave a link for that down below but uh that's going to wrap it up for this one let me know your thoughts in the comments below like always thanks for watchingit's actually pretty awesome seeing this kind of performance 4K Ultra settings out of a handheld now given we are connected to an e-gpu but I'm glad they added Thunderbolt 4 here what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking another look at the GPD Win 4 but in this one we're going to be testing an external GPU now I've been having a blast with this handheld the way it sits but GPD did add usb4 up top and it's actually using 40 gigabit protocol so connecting an external GPU is actually pretty easy and of course first and foremost this is a handheld gaming machine I completely understand that but we do have the option to add an external GPU that way when you get back to the house you can actually just set this up on the desk plug in an external GPU and up that GPU performance by quite a bit now if you're not familiar with the GPD Win 4 I have created a couple videos we did some windows testing that's what it comes with right out of the box and we also installed steamos 3 otherwise known as Steam DAC OS if you're interested in checking those videos out I'll leave some links in the description but adding an e-gpu to this is actually quite simple now there's several ways to go about it but I'd say the easiest way is just to pick up an egpu dock now while what I've got here is an older sonnet dock unfortunately it doesn't offer any kind of PD charging actually it does 10 watts but that's really not enough to keep the battery topped off and I definitely need to upgrade soon this thing has been through the wringer I've modified it so we could fit a three slot GPU and I've added a bigger power supply and in this video we're actually going to be testing out an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 TI this is a Galaxy version with 12 gigabytes of vram now you might have noticed I have a little stand here and this was actually originally designed for the GPD win3 and I've modified it a little bit to make the wind for a fit but keep in mind GPD is offering a new stand that'll kind of slide right down in here and it'll work with the GPD win 4. but this is actually great if you've already got one because on the rear here we've got PD Power in HDMI three USB ports and ethernet and with this I can actually charge the unit up because my egpu dock doesn't offer PD Power out a lot of the newer ones do like 65 Watts which is plenty for the G BPD went for this one just doesn't do it alright so here we are I've got the gpd14 in the dock and by the way I do have power plugged into the dock because this is an older sauna e-gpu Dock and it really doesn't put out a lot of wattage I think around 10 watts but the newer ones will charge the unit and you can also use the external graphics card at the same time this one's just old and I think I need to upgrade soon but if I give it a little bit of time because this is actually the first time I'm plugging in the RTX 3080 fans will start spinning up uh windows will automatically download an older Nvidia driver which we definitely want to update and the way this is set up is we've got the external monitor connected to the RTX 3080. we want everything running out of there now it is possible to use this external GPU on the built-in screen but performance is going to be cut in half and we're already going to be limited here because we're using this over a thunderbolt 4 connection plus these Thunderbolt 3 cables are only a little over a foot long so you know sitting at the desk with this plugged in I mean you could do it but we're going to be using this external Monitor and I want to jump right into some gaming because I was really impressed by what this thing can do I'm going to go ahead and get everything situated and install my new NVIDIA drivers all right so before we jump into gaming I wanted to give you a quick look here as you can see we've got that ryzen 760 800u 8 cores 16 threads we can still access the Radeon 680m igpu but instead of using that we're going to be using the RTX 3080 TI 12 gigs of vram and this wasn't without issue now I'm working with early drivers on the Win 4 right now and I'm not sure if this could be attributed to that or you know maybe even my egpu dock or the cable but with this card I actually had to go into afterburner and limit the power to 80 because I was running into stuttering at a hundred percent but dropping it down to 80 seems to kind of smooth everything out and uh by the way I've actually got the TDP on the 6800u at 35 Watts right now in handheld mode you really don't want to run this at 35 Watts but since we've got power here I don't have to worry about battery life but the fan and the Win 4 does spin up a lot more than if we were running at 15 or even 28 Watts but it keeps it cool enough we don't hit thermal throttle at 35W Watts alright so first up we've got Doom Eternal 4K Ultra settings and like I mentioned you know since we're connected over a thunderbolt connection here we aren't getting the full potential of this RTX 3080 but either way you look at it it really did up the performance now if this card was plugged into a real PCI ex16 slot in a gaming PC we could go up to ultra nightmare 4K no problem but given that we're running over Thunderbolt on a mobile chip this isn't bad at all next on the list we've got God of War so we're at 1440p ultra settings with no dlss and with these newer AAA games this is kind of where Thunderbolt starts showing the performance loss now with this game here on the RTX 3080 at 4K we could get a little over what we're doing right now but since we're limited by that bandwidth 1440p Ultra is really going to be The Sweet Spot here and of course we could go ahead and lock this down at 60 and have a great time with it and another thing you got to remember is I've set the power on the RTX 3080 to only 80 percent because at 100 I was getting a lot of stuttering with basically everything that I tested and I think it comes down to either my egpu dock or the cables that I'm using I've got three Thunderbolt 3 cables and it was actually doing the same thing with each of them so I went ahead and ordered some Thunderbolt 4 cables hopefully that will fix the issue if not I will have to invest in a new dock but as you can see here The Witcher 3 runs phenomenally 1440p Ultra looking great I mean we're getting around 120 FPS out of this one and of course we had to test out cyberpunk 2077 1440p High settings and this one still gave me some issues even though I've got that power limited we still get some dips down into the upper 60s and you know I thought we'd get a nice steady frame rate out of this but I am seeing some anomalies here when this is connected over usb4 I mean it's kind of all over the place here's Forza Horizon 5 4K Ultra settings and I'll tell you that the 6800u and the Win 4 actually handles this really well at 1080p medium settings we can do over 60 just on the built-in igpu but we can definitely up that resolution and the frame rate with an external GPU here's Elden ring ultra settings 1440p and you will see some screen tearing here I actually didn't notice it while I was filming but when I went back I did notice it in the footage it's my fault I forgot to turn vsync on and my monitors actually set at 144 Hertz right now it's usually set up for a variable refresh rate but it wasn't with this one it actually performs really well but I did get a few dips down to around 57 FPS and I'm just going to chalk it up to the connection we're using here so everything we've seen so far actually performs really well but there are a few games that just don't like egpus no matter what way you go about it and these new Spider-Man games be it Spider-Man remastered or Miles Morales just don't like external gpus I've tested this on a bunch of different systems and I've never been able to get a steady frame rate out of it we're at 1440p very high settings and even if I go down to 720p very low settings we're going to get the same frame rate we have right now it's just something about the way the game's set up I just haven't really had good luck with external gpus in this one overall when it comes to egpu Performance it's not looking bad and keep in mind it's still really early for the drivers on the win for here this is kind of a prototype unit it's still up on Indiegogo as making this video and I know not a lot of people are going to be pairing up a 3080 TI with this but I do have more gpus I'm just kind of waiting on those new cables to come in just to see if we could alleviate any of those stutters I was getting with those higher power limits on that card now I've done a lot of testing on the Channel with Thunderbolt 3 Thunderbolt 4 and usb4 be it on uh Intel or even ryzen and one of my favorite cards is actually the RTX 3060. it's a non-ti variant I think it pairs up really well with usb4 and these ryzen chips so as soon as I get those usb4 cables in we will be doing some testing with the 3060 and I also want to throw in an AMD card I've got the RX 6500 6600 we can do a 6750 or a 6900 XT just let me know what you want to see running on this in the comments below even lower income cards would probably be pretty awesome on this one that I've actually been wanting to test is the 1660. no it's not a top of the line card but with the smaller egpu enclosure less power you could definitely get some really great 1080p performance out of it but when it comes down to it I've been having a lot of fun with the GPD win 4. if you're interested in checking Steam OS otherwise known as Steam deck OS running on this unit link for that video is in the description along with a Windows testing video just strictly on the igpu here and it does a great job even just at 15 to 28 watts and 28 watts is kind of gaming mode here for a lot of these manufacturers with these 6800u handhelds and if you're interested in learning more about the Win 4 maybe even backing the Indiegogo I'll leave a link for that down below but uh that's going to wrap it up for this one let me know your thoughts in the comments below like always thanks for watching\n"
