External Graphics Card

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  • Hi,

    I have an older graphics card on my work pc (I don't own it, I am a consultant) - Nvidia Quadro P200. I have a hard time with Enscape on this as you can imagine. Exporting a screen shot shuts down Revit. At home I have a Nvidia Geforce RTX 2060 Super and on my laptop I have a Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000. I own both my home pc and my laptop. As I am exploring more VR I would like to update my home graphics card, I think, and definitely my laptop and I purchased that to do "show and tell" last year and Enscape seems to be a bit choppy on both of those (using VR). Someone offered a suggestion to use an external graphics card. I am not sure if it would work well? Then I could use at home and work. At work, I need to get the Revit drawing over to my laptop to be able to do the rendered screenshots which is a horrible work flow. Any thoughts or experience? Of course graphics cards are $$$$$ now too...Thanks! Sue

    • Official Post

    sueboronski , can you give me a bit more info about the laptop to which you want to attach an external graphics card? Or, the model name/number, anything I can use to find out more about the CPU, RAM, and so forth. Because connecting, say an RTX 3080 to a laptop that would bottleneck (slow down) a more advanced card may make the investment not worth it.


    In addition to that, please keep in mind that you lose about a quarter of performance when connecting any external GPU in general - So, it could be worth it with a card of the newer 3xxx lineup, but I'd need the rest of the specs to tell you if it really is.


    Thank you in advance!

    • Official Post

    Hi, It's a Lenovo ThinkPad P73, Intel Core i7-9750H CPU @2.60GHz, Ram: 32 gigabytes


    Thank you for getting back to me!

    That's good - I don't see a reason why you would not heavily benefit from an external GPU in this case.


    Just to restate again though: Especially for VR I would recommend going for one of the 3xxx GPU's ideally at least a 3070 since you lose performance solely due to the fact that it's connected externally as said.


    The only problem of course still is getting one for a half-decent price. Most often pre-built machines or laptops include them for a normal or a lot better price. If you plan to only buy a graphics card itself though I wish you the best of luck and I truly hope that this whole situation improves soon.

    • Official Post

    Just so you know sueboronski , if you really are not able to find a decent GPU on its own, perhaps even consider selling your current laptop and getting a new one with a built-in 3xxx series. It's totally insane, but these days this may be the cheaper solution.