2025 could finally be the year of the external GPU

Years ago, I really wanted a laptop with an external GPU. It seemed like the holy grail of portable laptop gaming — a power-hungry GPU that lived on your desk, to be plugged in for gaming performance as needed, then unplugged when you needed to work on the go.

Sadly, external GPUs never really took off. While some products were released, the idea never went mainstream. But that doesn’t mean the dream is dead! In fact, one of our favorite showings at CES 2025 was a new Asus external GPU with Thunderbolt 5 connectivity.

Are we finally on the cusp of external GPUs taking off? Let’s look at what happened to external GPUs, why they didn’t take off, and why 2025 could be the year that sparks an eGPU revolution.

The first external GPUs weren’t so good

External GPUs now go back at least a decade. In 2015, we reviewed the Alienware Amplifier, an external GPU for Alienware laptops. A few years later, they were becoming more standardized and could connect to laptops over Thunderbolt 3. For example, in 2017, we reviewed the Akitio Node Cabinet, a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU.

The problem was, eGPUs like these only worked on some Thunderbolt 3-enabled laptops. It didn’t stop people from using them, but it wasn’t exactly ideal. So while some hobbyists even created their own DIY external GPU setups, eGPUs languished in uncertainty.

Furthermore, they just weren’t as fast as having the same GPU directly in your PC. Why? Well, the speed of the Thunderbolt 3 connection was a bottleneck, plus the extra latency that came from connecting the GPU over a cable rather than inserting it directly into a motherboard slot.

PCIe lanes were another factor. When you insert a GPU into a PCIe slot on your PC’s motherboard, you’re generally inserting it into a PCIe x16 slot with 16 “lanes” for data transfer. An external GPU would likely use a PCIe x4 slot instead, with only four lanes. That doesn’t make it four times slower, but it does have a non-trivial impact on performance.

And this isn’t just theoretical hand-waving. We can point to real benchmarks that show this in practice. In 2020, PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray benchmarked a variety of games with a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU. With The Witcher 3, the eGPU ran the game at 60 FPS while the same GPU in a desktop PC ran the game at 140 FPS. That’s more than double the performance… with the very same GPU! (By the way, the eGPU was faster than the laptop’s older built-in GPU, but not by much.)

Why external GPUs failed to take off

As PCWorld’s benchmarks demonstrated, while you could slap a powerful desktop GPU into an external GPU enclosure, you’d get much better performance from that very same GPU if it was running directly in your PC. So, your hard-earned cash was better spent buying a better gaming laptop with a more powerful built-in GPU.

Meanwhile, gaming laptops became ever thinner, lighter, and more portable over the last decade. Yes, they’re still a bit bulkier than thin-and-light laptops, but they’re no longer the heavy bricks that gaming laptops were a decade ago. You can now get surprisingly good battery life and portability from many gaming laptops, no external GPU required.

Plus, to really get the most value out of a desktop GPU, you needed it inside a full-blown desktop PC, not sitting in an enclosure that was bottlenecked by cable speeds. And besides, if you were spending that much on a powerful desktop GPU that you could only use while sitting at your desk anyway, why not just build a powerful gaming desktop? (Or buy an equally powerful pre-built PC.)

In the end, eGPUs were just too slow and too expensive. As gaming laptops grew more portable and as desktop PCs grew more powerful, it was hard to justify the expense back then. But maybe not anymore.

How Thunderbolt 5 makes a difference

In 2025, we’re talking about eGPUs again because we now have Thunderbolt 5, the cutting-edge tech that offers more.

While Thunderbolt 3 could only hit 40Gbps max, Thunderbolt 5 can reach up to 80Gbps — or even 120Gbps in some situations. And with Intel (who develops the Thunderbolt standard) trumpeting Thunderbolt 5 for external graphics, it’s all pretty exciting. But is it just hype?

Asus was at CES 2025 showing off the latest version of the Asus ROG XG Mobile, an external GPU solution that supports everything up to Nvidia’s new $1,999 GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. While it looks impressive, will it perform as well as an RTX 5090 directly inside a desktop PC?

We haven’t had a chance to benchmark it yet, but I’m excited to see what those tests will show. If products like this can close the gap, that’ll be amazing — and I’ll be the first to jump on these new external GPUs.

But there’s a big hurdle right now: the lack of Thunderbolt 5 support in the latest PCs. As PCWorld’s Mark Hachman pointed out, Thunderbolt 5 was essentially a no-show on the latest laptops at CES:

“From my conversations at the show, device makers blamed two things. First, the continued lack of Intel chipsets with integrated Thunderbolt 5 inside. But they also pointed to the stalled transition to 8K content. Without it, device makers say that consumers seem happy enough with the capabilities Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 provide.”

So, even if Thunderbolt 5 external GPUs prove to be amazing, the “year of the external GPU” may not come until Thunderbolt 5 itself arrives in more laptops. And the industry may zoom right past these eGPUs, like with Nvidia announcing that GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards will come to laptops. Why bother with an external GPU when you can get a faster built-in GPU on your laptop?

Why eGPUs might not be the future

A decade after my interest in eGPUs was piqued, I have to be honest: eGPUs still don’t feel like they’re about to go mainstream. Yes, the tech is getting better and more capable thanks to Thunderbolt 5, but the rest of the industry continues to change around it.

Gaming laptops just aren’t that inconvenient anymore. A gaming laptop can be your only laptop now, especially now that gaming laptops can be surprisingly lightweight and portable. You don’t need an external GPU to have a truly good gaming experience on a laptop.

If you’re chasing absolute top-end performance, nothing beats a desktop gaming PC. Theres more to it than a GPU, too. Even in a perfect world where external GPUs performed equally as well as internal GPUs, the gaming PC would have a better CPU with stronger performance!

And the cost is still a problem. Dollar for dollar, you might be better off spending your cash on the right gaming laptop (or building a gaming desktop) than buying an external GPU in addition to a normal laptop.

Not to mention that performance isn’t everything. The rise of gaming handhelds like Valve’s Steam Deck proves that, with integrated graphics hardware getting more and more capable as well.

Personally, I’m still intrigued by external GPUs. I want the technology to work and I want it to succeed. It’s just cool. But I no longer crave one like I used to because gaming laptops have become portable enough for me.

In 2025 and beyond, external GPUs look like they’ll get better and better. But will they ever truly go mainstream? We’ll see!

Further reading: The best gaming laptops under $1,000