Turn your old laptop into a gaming beast with a DIY external GPU.

Big thank you to everyone for watching the video and commenting below. We have updated the description of this video to include more details on what you will need to jump an external PSU as requested.

I remember doing this forever ago, nearly a decade ago, when I didn't have a proper PC yet, but had found the GPU I wanted (Radeon HD 7770) on a really good sale and wouldn't have the money for the other parts for a few more months, so I used it on my crappy laptop to play games for the time being, good times! Remember telling people I had a desktop GPU on my laptop and they were like "how?", because it was such a new concept back then. For testing how things are detected by Windows by the way, I prefer to use good old dxdiag, since it can show you if the card specs are also recognized correctly, not just the model.

Very cool video! It actually brings back what PC gaming was (for me) always about. A bit of tinkering and achieving results with creative thinking. Nowadays it seems it's all about splurging funds for the latest and greatest - yet this shows that lots can be done with older hardware. Thanks for posting!

You should take it to the next level and convert this into a retro game cabinet. Mount the laptop internals inside the cabinet, attach the GPU like you have shown, get an old CRT monitor and create a good old arcade cabinet. The system will be plenty powerful enough for old arcade game emulation and you'd have a nice conversation starter.

This video is perfect for me, I've been looking for a way to upgrade my laptop and the only thing I have find about external GPUs are those ones that are really expensive

You can use a different raiser like ADT-Link or others which you can connect to your M.2 pcie slot which has 4 lanes instead of 1 for the mini pcie making it a lot faster. You should test this and try different gpu generation for example 3000 series and overkill 4000 series to see if there are any difference going overkill. Would be a great content for you.

Finally someone made this cheap riser, I think this riser is the same as EXP GDC, the logic is the same but I've been looking for a review of this riser for a long time, and it only appears in 2023. This video is very useful, this can be a cheap alternative to old laptops. Unfortunately, I'm still afraid to try because of an unexpected error 😂

Oculink is the way to go, I recently modded my Steam Deck and added an external RX 7600 GPU, the difference is night and day. The Oculink kit only costs $36 on Amazon, it allows me to run Diablo4 at 1440p high settings and still gets 90+ fps. After seeing how good the Deck works, I'm getting another kit for an old laptop, it's just amazing.

Great idea endless GPU possibilities now!

If your laptop doesnt have a ethernet cable, don't get your hopes down, you can buy a wifi usb adapter.

I did this with my Apple Macbook Pro 2015 and it worked very well with a GTX1660ti running windows 10. Only problem was that it would only start up successfully with the GPU working 1 in 5 to 10 times so it was not without hiccups .... The E-GPU was connected trough Thunderbolt port.

I'd be curious to see the results with something like a rtx 3060.

I Livestream A LOT and have a 4k camera. My Livestream video quality it garbage so this is inspiring to make my streams exponentially better.

Great video. Ive known of this but its awesome to see it done step by step. Wanted to do this to my 13 year old lenovo AIO. They made great stuff back in the day. Wanted to keep it all internal and add one of those mxm cards but this looks much easier, cheaper and more effective. Thanks

I just realized that in my computer from 2009 i used the gtx750. I didnt knew you could still use it today. Haha :) great video

Thank you so much! I've been looking into rebuilding an old netbook with a broken screen into a headless games console of sorts, and i've been looking into these adapters... but all the other youtube channels only use these super expensive GPU docks and i had no idea if these small adapters actually work, or if they are just useless mining hardware.

This is so helpful. I don't have the money to get a PC, all I can do is this. I don't take my laptop anywhere bc the battery is basically gone. So, if it's already staying on my desk all the time, might as well make it good.

Thank you so much for this video, I'm just looking for about using regular gpu with laptop around 5 years ago and never find out.. thank you so much.

This is just proof that you can Jerry rig anything on a budget for PC building. This is especially true if you’re looking to get into DCS and you don’t know where to start. You can literally use your dad’s old compact desktop and turn it into a gaming PC or SIM rig for less than $500 if you know where to look.

Greetings from México! Hey guy, i will take your tutorial as a guide in order to upgrade a friend's Acer Aspire Laptop. You've got a like, good man, you deserve it.