Going to the market to buy a notebook can be a very difficult and confusing experience. There are endless options, and then you have to consider your capabilities as well, your price range, whether you want a PC made especially for gaming, or you want to just have a simple PC, with good capabilities, according to your price range. Picking between the many endless options can be an absolute nightmare.
If you want a gaming system, one feasible option is to buy a notebook or a two-in-one, that’s good enough for productivity, and then just connect an external GPU (eGPU) enclosure for the addition of an extra gaming option. But along with the endless options comes another headache, that of discovering whether the PC actually supports eGPU or not, and dell is working hard to try to make even this easier for its customers, by making it easier for its XPS 15.
The most basic necessity for eGPU supports is having a USB Type-C support with thunderbolt-3 support, but along this comes the necessity of the ports using the right controller, and in the case of the latest eGPUs, specific support needs to be enabled by the manufacturer. With older eGPUs, the TI82 Thunderbolt 3 chipset provided support without an official stamp of approval, as long as the user was willing to put in some effort. That includes the Razer Core and the Akitio Thunder 3. With the introduction of newer eGPU options that use the TI83 Thunderbolt 3 chipset, however, machines need to be explicitly supported or they simply won’t work. That means that manufacturers like Dell need to get their machines eGPU-certified to work with options like the Asus XG Station 2 and Akito Node.
Dell hasn’t exactly done this till now, but now it seems that dell indeed will put some effort into this. There is still no certainty that dell will actually that the XPS 15 will support eGPU, but at least dell is looking into it, and giving its customers even a wider range of options, and even more reason to buy dell!
