Skip to main content

The 'world's smallest' external GPU has been tested and it could be the best laptop upgrade yet — here’s why

Web Hosting & Remote IT Support

GPD’s ‘GPU box’ might be one of the most effective ways to give your laptop the graphical upgrade it needs without shelling out for a new machine, or replacing the GPU yourself.

The GPD G1 looks more like a docking station than anything else and actually may serve as one, given the plethora of ports it offers. But it comes with the added bonus of souping up your machine’s graphical capabilities. 

Weighing 867g, and measuring  225 x 111 x 30mm, the lightweight GPU expansion unit includes a Radeon RX 7600M XT GPU armed with 8GB GDDR6 memory. 

The Japanese publication PC Watch, which tested the device, claims its performance is close to the excellent Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card – which is hardly a slouch.

The performance-boosting GPU box

Benchmarking by PC Watch shows the effect it had in boosting gaming scores on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen9 enterprise notebook, equipped with an Intel Core i7-1165G7 CPU running Windows 11 Pro.

When benchmarked against Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, the system registered a score of 1,373 when not connected to the GPD G1, rising 590% to 8,900 when connected. The Blue Protocol benchmark also surged from 2,319 – “below minimum hardware requirements” – to 11,937 – “Excellent”. 

The site achieved these results on the ThinkPad’s built-in display, with the score dropping by 30% when connected to an external display with a 2,560 x 1,440 pixel resolution via HDMI. 

Testing using PCMark 10 and PCMark 10 Extended then followed, to demonstrate what effect the addition of the GPD G1 could have in more day-to-day office settings. Scores climbed by 17% for the former and 51% for the latter – demonstrating the impact of this particular external GPU was significant.

Testing with Procyon's Office Productivity Score, with benchmarking done against Microsoft Office apps including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, generated a boost of 6.1%. 

Not only does it offer a performance boost, but it also doubles as a docking station, making it the perfect companion to today’s best business laptops – many of which lack the range of connectivity options enterprise users need.

Beyond the Radeon RTX GPU, included with the unit are three 3.2 USB-A 3.2 ports, an SD card reader, two DisplayPort 1.4 ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, alongside an OCuLink port, and one USB 4.0 port. The downside? There’s just one USB Type-C port with power delivery – and no ethernet connectivity.

More from TechRadar Pro



via Hosting & Support
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Web Hosting
Remote IT Support
Sites & Socials
Computing Handbook - $9.95

Popular posts from this blog

This new malware campaign can hijack your Gmail or Outlook email account

Web Hosting & Remote IT Support Cybersecurity researchers from Cisco Talos have spotted a new hacking campaign they claim is targeting victims’ sensitive data, login credentials, and email inboxes. Horabot is described as a botnet that has been active for almost two and a half years now (first spotted in November 2020). During that time, it’s mostly been tasked with distributing a banking trojan and spam malware .  Its operators seem to be located in Brazil, while its victims are Spanish-speaking users located mostly in Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela Brazil, Panama, Argentina, and Guatemala. Horabot botnet The victims are found in different industries, from investment firms to wholesale distribution, from construction to engineering, and accounting. The attack starts with an email message carrying a malicious HTML attachment. Ultimately, the victim is urged to download a .RAR archive, which holds the banking trojan.  The malware is capable of doing plenty of things: stealing l
Post a Comment
Read more

Want to store 1PB of data in the cloud? This startup can do it for you for as little as $10,000 a month — Qumulo says it can scale to Exabytes off premise and wants to eradicate tapes once and for all

Web Hosting & Remote IT Support Qumulo has launched Azure Native Qumulo Cold (ANQ Cold), which it claims is the first truly cloud-native, fully managed SaaS solution for storing and retrieving infrequently accessed “cold” file data. Fully POSIX-compliant and positioned as an on-premises alternative to tape storage, ANQ Cold can be used as a standalone file service, a backup target for any file store, including on-premises legacy scale-out NAS, and it can be integrated into a hybrid storage infrastructure, enabling access to remote data as if it were local. It can also scale to an exabyte-level file system in a single namespace. “ANQ Cold is an industry game changer for economically storing and retrieving cold file data,” said Ryan Farris, VP of Product at Qumulo. “To put this in perspective with a common use case, hospital IT administrators in charge of PACS archival data can use ANQ Cold for the long-term retention of DICOM images at a fraction of their current on-premises leg
Post a Comment
Read more

No light without dark : making the most of ‘shadow IT’

Web Hosting & Remote IT Support In the last few decades, technology has created a modern digital workforce that is technically skilled and adept at finding innovative solutions that would help them succeed at work. However, with 95% of employees struggling with digital friction in the workplace - including a lack of access to the right tools - ambitious employees who are hungry for results have often needed to explore fixes outside the scope of existing systems provided by their employers. On top of that, the popularity of cloud-based apps has resulted in business processes often ending up fragmented across various systems, requiring workers to devote time to manual maintenance. This has accelerated the spread of (the unnecessarily ominous sounding) ‘shadow IT’, or applications that savvy workers use without official authorization to help them bypass limitations and get work done. In a perfect world, a balance can be struck between giving these technically skilled workers freed
Post a Comment
Read more