GoKawiilWhat if you could strap a full desktop GPU to your MacBook Air? Turns out, you can.
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Never tell me the odds#
As much as I hate to admit it, step one in most of my projects now is to ask AI about it. Maybe it’ll tell me something I don’t know.
Fortunately, borderline-impractical is kind of my thing.
What’s a Thunderbolt eGPU?#
Ok, so the plan is to plug a big PC gaming GPU, an NVIDIA RTX 5090, into my M4 MacBook Air. To do that, we plug it into a Thunderbolt dock which adapts PCIe to Thunderbolt, and we plug that into a USB-C port.
Thunderbolt tunnels PCIe over a USB-C cable, so from the computer’s perspective a Thunderbolt device really is a PCIe device, not a USB one. You get 4 PCIe lanes at up to 40Gbps on Thunderbolt 4, with a small performance penalty for the tunneling. USB4 includes the same PCIe tunneling as an optional feature, so some non-Thunderbolt USB4 ports can do this too. You can use this to plug a GPU into a laptop with a compatible port.
Thunderbolt from the laptop plugs into the GPU dock. The GPU plugs into the monitor via DisplayPort. Shortly after this was taken, I broke this dock.
From the computer’s perspective, the device looks more or less like a slightly slower PCIe device, so you can usually use the same drivers you’d normally use for those devices. eGPUs work pretty much out of the box on Linux and Windows. It’s even possible to use one on a Raspberry Pi (albeit with Oculink, not Thunderbolt).
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