Journal #8874

I’m gonna break the silence, in all honestly; it’s up to you. But I see it as impractical, unless you can only afford the adaptor and graphics card, I’d say just new a get PC if it’s a big problem.

Most of my work and games can be run fine with 1 750TI, so unless your doing rendering work I’d say stick with what you have, or upgrade if it’s too old.

Well. My main problem is that I have a laptop with Intel Integrated Graphics 3000. It kind of sucks for tasks that get any more demanding than a spreadsheet. It can run older games but sometimes I need to do 3D rendering and that brings it to its knees.

A whole new computer is almost entirely outside my budget at the moment. Perhaps this contraption could be a relatively inexpensive way to give a mostly decent computer a much better graphics system.

"It can run older games but sometimes I need to do 3D rendering and that brings it to its knees."

I don't know what exactly you mean by '3D rendering', but raytracing does not make use of the graphics card.
If you were to use a graphics card to accelerate it, you would run out of VRAM very quickly due to the nature of how raytracing works, which is why there's +10/20GB cards like 1080ti and Titan on the market. I've also found GPU accelerated raytracing to not only be less useful due to missing features, but also quite buggy and unstable as well.

If you mean just using the 3D suite itself can't handle the simple geometry used during modeling/designing, yeah I would actually agree that something like this would be a worthwhile investment so long as you understand render times will not improve.

Both. I did believe it was also used for raytracing, actually. Even if it doesn't, it would still be a great improvement during modelling. Anything slightly complex becomes excruciatingly difficult to work on.

Well the nice thing about this device is since you want improvement in both areas, you can buy an appropriate graphics card, get some improvement short-term but also have a graphics card for your desktop system later.

Look into a barebones Ryzen system: A320 chipset, Ryzen 7 (no sense in going any lower for a workstation) and AMD support on linux is garbage, so go with an nvidia card.
Any older mid-range graphics cards would work fine if you're not paranoid about used hardware.

I'll have a look at that stuff, thanks!

What would you call an older mid-range graphics card? I've been out of the loop so long that the last thing I know is the nvidia FX5600 I bought twelve years ago.

Oldest I would go would be 500 series, though 400 series should still be supported. Midrange is x50/x60 or x050/x060, so whatever is affordable within that range will do fine.

That's good to know. Thanks! I'll definitely bear that in mind.