I used to have a desktop: E3 1230V2 + 16G DDR3 + GTX 1070. I forget when I put it together. Once I started using a laptop as my main machine I pretty much stopped upgrading it, and honestly the performance was enough for me — I could play through Ori 2, Doom Eternal, even Genshin without issues. Genshin 2.0 even ran at 4K with settings cranked, so I never bothered upgrading. In the first half of last year someone gave me a bunch of spare parts they’d retired, and I pieced together an i7 12700 + 16G DDR5 + 512G NVMe setup. Then I grabbed a cheap motherboard off JD, swapped the whole thing into the case, and installed Fedora 43 as my main system.

Honestly, I’m not sure why I bought this thing. Maybe because I saw it on sale during Double 12. I did the math, and building an eGPU dock myself would have cost more than this. I’d also been wanting to play games again, and I wanted something that worked with my Linux laptop and my Windows handheld, with some room to spare. After looking around, this seemed to fit, so I bought it. Anyway, I bought it. I mainly want to talk about my experience using it, because I think a lot of people are curious and there’s very little online about how this thing works under Linux. So I’ll share my impressions and give Linux users thinking about an eGPU dock some reference.

So I switched to a 4K monitor a while back, and the old Ice Dragon 770 4G just couldn’t keep up with Doto 2 or Overwatch at native 4K. Overwatch was still playable, but from what I could tell it was rendering at 2K and upscaling to 4K — not exactly the pure experience I wanted! So I figured it was time to sell it and get a new card.