Many of us rely on our laptops for work, school, or entertainment, but even the best laptops trade power and features for the convenience of portability. Gaming laptops come with power-limited GPUs, pretty much all laptops are limited in storage space, and the thinner they get, the harder they are to cool. But with a few wisely chosen pieces of external hardware, that laptop can turn into a powerhouse of productivity and graphical prowess.

6 Add an eGPU

Give your laptop a huge boost to its graphical prowess

One of the biggest drawbacks to any laptop is its lack of upgradeability. The number of truly upgradeable laptops available is very small indeed, and that means you're often stuck with an underpowered discrete graphics chip, if you have one at all. But if you've got a laptop with USB4, Thunderbolt, or OCuLink, there's a solution. That's to plug in to an external graphics card, or eGPU.

Whether you make your own eGPU or get an all-inclusive model, an external GPU will add desktop-level power to your laptop, enabling you to play the latest games with ease. Depending on the enclosure you get, you might also get additional USB ports, Ethernet, or other handy ports, along with the GPU's display outputs, enabling multi-monitor productivity from your existing laptop. Plus, it can recharge your laptop at the same time, ensuring it's ready the next time you need to get portable again.

5 DAS for added storage space

Laptops tend to be space constrained but external storage is easy to add

Laptops are known for low storage space, and that's getting more and more common as manufacturers use soldered-on components to save space. They're often not upgradeable either, which can mean reliance on the cloud for storage space, and that gets expensive quickly. But you can easily add external storage via USB, and a DAS is the best of the best in that regard.

If you don't need to share your storage between multiple devices, a DAS is the quickest way to get plenty of storage space. It's essentially an empty shell of drive bays that you can stuff with hard drives or solid-state drives and connect to via USB or Thunderbolt. Depending on the drives you get, that could be dozens of terabytes of storage space, all easily accessible with an ultra-fast cable.

4 USB-C docking station

Get more ports and charging from a single cable

Whether your laptop has Thunderbolt ports or USB-C ones, a docking station makes your life easier. Most laptops are fairly thin and have a limited number of ports on them. Manufacturers have been steadily removing ports that aren't USB, so the chances your laptop has Ethernet or HDMI are often slimmer than your device. But there are tons of good docking stations on the market that will give you all the connectivity you need, connecting to your laptop with a single cable that often charges your device at the same time.

But it's not just adding more USB ports, wired networking, and other handy considerations that make a docking station a great investment. It's a fantastic way to keep your desk tidy because you can keep all your peripherals plugged in, hide the dock away, and have a single USB-C cable in view when you need it. You can often get multi-monitor support, and it'll work with laptops, gaming handhelds, your phone, and other devices to keep your productivity high.

3 Add a cooling pad

Whisk heat away from your components while adding a comfortable angle

The increasing power of laptops, coupled with their slimline designs, often causes them to overheat. While modern hardware is designed to operate at those temperatures and throttle down to avoid damage, this causes a couple of issues. First, you're not getting the full power of the device you paid for because the throttling makes it perform below your expectations. Plus, it makes the fans spin faster and make more noise, and there's nothing quite as irritating as mosquito-whirring cooling fans.

Until fanless cooling technology gets into laptops that we can actually buy, there is one way to cool down toasty laptops. That's with a cooling pad, which is essentially a large stand for your laptop that has its own cooling fan or fans inside. These fans are larger and able to blow cooler air at your laptop to help with thermals. Plus, they can adjust the angle of your laptop, so you have a more comfortable position to type on or read the screen from.

2 Add another screen

Portable monitors are fantastic for productivity

Laptop screens are severely space-limited, which might be fine when you're on the go, but there's nothing quite like having two or more screens to display work, research, and chat apps for productivity. It's an instant cheat code to a better working environment, as you don't have to spend as much time switching between windows to stay ahead of everything.

And thanks to smaller, USB-C-powered portable monitors, you can take those additional screens with you wherever you go. The most popular ones aren't much different to the dimensions of your laptop, just thinner, so you can often slip them into the same bag you use to protect your laptop. Then, you can live the multiscreen digital nomad life from anywhere you are, whether that's a coffee shop or a train on your way to the next destination.

1 Coral USB Accelerator

Give your laptop some AI crunching powers

AI is everywhere these days, but not everyone has a computing device that's powerful enough to run the models needed to train new AI assistants or other uses. But any laptop with a USB port can use the Coral USB Accelerator, which brings the power of an edge TPU to any device that it's plugged into. That means you can run quantized pre-trained models on relatively low-powered devices. Normally, these loads would be hosted on a cloud server and run that way, but having them local breaks the reliance on connectivity and on cloud server costs while you're playing around with AI uses.

Your laptop can be a powerhouse with a few external accessories

All of these peripherals will make your laptop experience better, whether it's by adding more connectivity or more graphical power to run games and render videos. It all depends on how you want to use your laptop while you're at your desk and which portable devices you want to have with you at all times for productivity. I'm a big fan of additional storage, so I can back up my laptop whenever I get back home, but your needs might be different.