I was daily driving an Egpu on my framework laptop with an 11th gen Intel cpu/main board for a few years up until early last year. It did its job, I could play games & run graphically intensive applications, but performance was really bad for the card I was using, which was a radion 6600 (8gb). The problem was the laptop was stuck at only 4 lanes of pcie at gen 1 speeds , resulting in high latency, frequently buggy audio, & poor overall performance for the hardware.

If you have better hardware that fully supports USB 4 & thunderbolt 3+, & is able to link to the GPU at gen 3+ speeds you should have a better experience than I did. If you’d like, I can DM you various resources I’ve found while I was troubleshooting this setup a few years ago.

I actually did exactly this last night, & it was as painless as could be. I replaced my old amd RX 6600 with a fresh nvidia 5060 I got for Christmas.

The distro I am using is Bazzite, & because of the immutable nature of the distro, all I had to do was rebase to bazzite-nvidia-open & swap the gpu’s. The process was as follows:

• rebase bazzite using only one command
• shutdown & open case
• swap graphics cards, dust the machine & close case
• reboot machine
• enjoy games my rig struggled with previously for 20 minutes
• watch YouTube for the rest of the night

All there was to it. The download page on their website was all I needed to tell me how to do it.