Intel’s Thunderbolt 3 Hub lets you use an External GPU with a Laptop

When it comes to portable gaming on a laptop, we are always limited by our laptop’s power efficiency. Since laptops are designed to run on a limited power source, most of their hardware are also built to operate with low power consumption. This is the reason why that two identical hardware from a PC and laptop always have a huge performance difference. All the advertisements that you’ve seen about high end gaming laptops are just marketing gimmicks. A laptop based GPU will never be able to provide the same performance as a PC based GPU and this is why I have never recommend laptops to my friends and relatives who wanted to do a lot of gaming. Fortunately, this is going to change soon. Intel has demoed an interesting piece of technology at Computex 2015 that enables laptop users to power their laptop with an external PCI-e based graphic card. Thus boosting the gaming overall performance on a Laptop.

Power by Thunderbolt 3, the device is an PCI-e based extension hub that allows you to hook a dedicated GPU and harness it’s power to play graphically demanding games on your laptop. Before we move ahead let me give you a brief introduction of Thunderbolt 3 and what it is capable of. In June at Computex 2015, Intel unveiled Thunderbolt™ 3 – The USB-C that does it all. Thunderbolt 3 brings Thunderbolt™ to USB-C at speeds up to 40 Gbps, creating one compact port that does it all – delivering the fastest, most versatile connection to any dock, display, or data device. So Thunderbolt 3 is essentially a supercharged version of USB-C with double the bandwidth, i.e. 40 Gbps. What you see in the below picture is an thunderbolt 3 based hub that encloses a AMD Radeon R9 M385 GPU. The hub has three USB 3.0 ports, two HDMI ports, two DisplayPorts, external audio, and Ethernet.