PC gaming is one of the most popular pastimes in the world, and based on Steam's Hardware Survey, a significant percentage of those gamers are playing using a gaming laptop. And, we can see why, because even the most basic laptop is more powerful than a PC gaming handheld, and gives a better experience with a larger screen.

Plus, once you've grabbed a good gaming controller, you're already getting a great gaming experience. But there's one more peripheral that you should consider if you're serious about gaming on your laptop, and that's an external GPU enclosure or eGPU. They let you use a desktop-sized GPU as additional graphical power for your laptop, and can significantly increase your FPS. The best ones also come with additional ports, so they're also a docking station, making your laptop even more powerful when sitting at your desk.

Gaming laptops have a big issue

You can have performance or cooling but not both

A convergence of several industry trends has created gaming laptops that no longer resemble the hulking behemoths of a few short years ago. Instead, they're closer to the ultrabooks of that era, with sandblasted aluminum and slim sides that barely fit full-size HDMI ports, let alone adequate cooling solutions. They're gorgeous, and I can't deny the engineering that goes into making sure that each model actually runs, but those svelte silky exteriors hide a burning heart that will singe your palms.

Desktop PCs fix their thermal issues mostly by having many case fans to exhaust warm or hot air out of the case and replace it with somewhat cooler air from the surrounding area. However, the smaller the case, the more of an issue thermals become, and laptops are arguably short on space. Keeping a powerful CPU cooled in that much space is difficult enough, and when you add a discrete GPU chip like in gaming laptops, the problem becomes even trickier to solve.

Laptop cooling pads help to some extent, but they only solve part of the problem and do nothing about keeping the keyboard side of the laptop cool enough to touch with your hands. The more demanding games and gamers become, the more power manufacturers want to put into laptops, and the harder they become to cool.

If Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops get support for Steam and the other gaming platforms and the ability to use discrete GPU chips with Arm-based CPUs arrives, then we can have powerful, power-friendly, and easy-to-cool gaming laptops. Until that happens, the only ways to limit overheating laptops are to lower the TDP of the parts inside or move parts outside the laptop into an eGPU.

Laptop GPUs aren't powerful anyway

That mobile chip is often cut down from the desktop part

The CPU (central processing unit) is the most important part of any computer, and that doesn't change with a gaming laptop. It might even be more important to get the right balance, as more powerful CPUs tend to overpromise and underdeliver once thermal solutions come into play. We've seen this time and time again on thin gaming laptops like the Razer Blade line, where the CPU shoots up to 100C when under gaming loads, thermal throttles to stay there, and then gives you less performance than you expected.

The story doesn't change with mobile GPU chips, which are often drastically cut-down versions of their desktop namesakes. You'll get lower cores, lower frequencies, and, more importantly, lower TGP (Total Graphical Power). That's similar to the TDP of desktop GPUs, and mobile chips come with configurable power levels, so two laptops with the same GPU inside could have drastically varying performance levels.

The other part of that power equation is how much effect that discrete graphics chip has on your laptop's battery life. Gaming laptops have improved greatly in recent years, but you still cannot get multiple hours of gaming when away from a wall socket. This limits their usefulness for actual gaming, but there is one way to get much more horsepower to run your games when at your desk.

Using an eGPU gives you performance and power

Plugging into an external GPU enclosure when at your desk makes sense, actually

Along with slimming down laptops, manufacturers have been steadily trimming ports from them. It's hard enough to find a USB-A port, let alone a full-sized HDMI, Ethernet, or anything remotely useful without a good docking station. That's already a problem for gaming laptops, as most gamers I know are full-send when it comes to peripherals and need places to plug in dongles for mice, keyboards, and either wireless headsets or USB DACs.

So, we've now got a situation where we need more ports, and could always do with more GPU power for smooth frame rates. With the increase in bandwidth afforded by Thunderbolt 5 or OCuLink, we can fix both those problems with an eGPU enclosure, adding external monitor outputs, USB ports, Ethernet, and anything else that might make sense. A slot or two for M.2 NVMe storage drives seems like a natural inclusion, and you could even use that drive as your game drive, so the internal SSD in your laptop doesn't get filled up by large game installs.

With OCuLink 2 allowing for 32GB/s of bandwidth, the same amount as an internal PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, external GPU enclosures finally have access to fast enough connectivity to shine. Thunderbolt 5 is slightly behind, but will likely be found on more devices, so I expect we'll see more TB5 enclosures than anything else.

And you might not notice the performance hit

We've tested multiple eGPUs over the years, from early Thunderbolt-based enclosures that needed a desktop GPU added to them to the more recent OCuLink-based units based on laptop GPUs, where the eGPU is a single unit. Even in those early TB-based eGPUs, we could see vastly improved frame rates over the laptops we tested with. The picture is even clearer with Thunderbolt 5 now out and OCuLink-2 promising lots of bandwidth for PCIe-over-cable.

It's been nearly a decade since we tested an Nvidia GTX 1080 inside a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. At that time, the performance drop for using an eGPU instead of directly attached to a motherboard was around 12% to 20%. That's still going to be more graphical power than even the top-tier mobile GPU chips, and again, that was a decade ago.

The bandwidth improvements in Thunderbolt from version 3 to version 5 and the newer OCuLink standard put those early eGPU enclosure results to shame. We're looking at three times the bandwidth and vastly more powerful GPUs than the GeForce GTX 1080 we used back then. It's not quite enough bandwidth for flagship GPUs to shine, but any midrange card will be able to give nearly its full performance from an eGPU enclosure, with only a minor hit from the conversion to over-the-cable transmission.

Pairing your laptop with an eGPU gives you the best of both worlds

If you're going to use your laptop with a docking station to increase the connectivity options anyway, why shouldn't you use an eGPU enclosure instead? Your Thunderbolt or OCuLink-enabled gaming laptop will be able to push a much higher frame rate without sacrificing in-game visual quality settings, and you'll have options for external monitors, peripherals, and potentially more storage space. Sure, frame rates might not be the only thing gamers want, but they're just as important as other considerations, and using an eGPU to pump up the power on a laptop gives you options.