New to Blender - eGPU with workstation laptop?

[David_G]

I’m new to Blender, and am currently running it on a Dell workstation laptop with integrated Quadro graphics card (specs below):

System Information:-

 Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

System Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
System Model: Precision 5520
BIOS: 1.23.1 (type: UEFI)
Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1505M v6 @ 3.00GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.0GHz
Memory: 32768 MB RAM

Graphics Card name: NVIDIA Quadro M1200
Chip type: Quadro M1200
Display Memory: 20365 MB
Dedicated Memory: 4055 MB
Shared Memory: 16309 MB

Rendering is slow, and viewing the Render Preview runs fairly slowly, especially when adding complex animated materials and particle systems.

My question is - without having to upgrade my entire setup to a tower PC - how much would I benefit from an external GPU system? Would the limitations of my currently CPU and RAM be a factor, or do I simply need a faster GPU to render the scenes?

I’m not a SUPER technical person, but I am a fast learner. If anyone has any thoughts or can point me in the right direction, it would be very much appreciated!

[kkar]

It sounds like some people had relative success with those.

Are e-gpu worth for blender?

I just picked one up on e-bay: fantastic! (for rendering, no noticeable differance for the UI) I’m using it on a laptop with an internal GTX 1060/6GB, with an old GTX 1070 in the external box. Not exactly a laboratory test, but one of the scenes II’m working on was taking 24 minutes or so a frame on my laptop (5 odd mins a frame on my 16 core workstation with 2 x 1080tis, 8 or 9 minutes a frame on another 12 core machine with 1 x 1070ti & 1 x 1070). The e-gpu dropped this down to about 13 min…

Your setup does not sound that bad for a laptop. Do you get the same speed issues with other renderers or DCCs? Are you using Cycles or Eevee for your renders?

Check your specs against this database and see if you are falling way behind of similar systems. You can also download the Blender benchmark utility from there and do comparisons before making the right decision.

Blender - Open Data