When I was going to university, I got a laptop for schoolwork. It was an Acer E15, one of the most popular laptops on Amazon at the time. Running an i5 6200U, a GTX 940MX, and 8 gigs of memory, it was plenty for anything my Computer Science schoolwork would throw at me.

However, I found it to be quite unusable. It had flimsy construction, consisting mostly of plastic, and the CD/DVD drive died right after it went out of warranty. The SSD and chassis were not far behind, and my hinges started failing. Furthermore, it seems like Insyde didn’t do a very good job building the BIOS for the Acer E15, as it would have tons of trouble with Secure Boot being on and not allowing me to boot Linux distribution even in Legacy mode.

Trying to repair the Acer laptop was an exercise in futility, and there were no parts available. Acer’s out of warranty support was ludicrously expensive, and so I decided to sell the E15 and get a new machine. That is when I got introduced to Thinkpads. I’m fairly sure everyone has had a parent who got a Thinkpad from work(I’ve spent hours trying to get NFS MW to work on one growing up). Business class machines like IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads, HP Elitebooks, and Dell Latitudes are bought on company contracts, and have build quality that is significantly better than consumer laptops. Furthermore, they come with features that aren’t enabled on the consumer models(eg battery thresholds for Thinkpads). However, these machines are very expensive, and often hard to obtain without a corporate contract with Lenovo/HP/Dell. On the other hand, when companies retire their fleet of machines and upgrade to newer ones, the used market is flooded with resellers selling machines used in corporate environment at great prices.

Having run an NVIDIA gpu in my laptop for nearly 2 years, I was determined to not have a dedicated GPU in my laptop. It wasn’t worth it to me for all the weight it adds due to cooling requirements, the lowered battery life, and an absolutely terrible experience in most distributions except Ubuntu(Canonical developed NVIDIA-Prime as a sort of explicit Optimus technology). I had a desktop as well, that I built for schoolwork but found myself not using. Running an i5 6500, GTX 1080, and 16 gigs of memory, it was way overkill for any kind of work I was doing, so I ended up selling it off to fund my new Thinkpad addiction.

I still wanted to play games and encode video though, so I set out in search of a laptop that would fit my purposes. That’s when I found the T430 modding guide(https://medium.com/@n4ru/the-definitive-t430-modding-guide-3dff3f6a8e2e). Mobile Processors haven’t gotten much faster in a while, just more efficient(https://i.imgur.com/pN4FC0z.png). Furthermore, with an expresscard slot, I could buy an adapter and connect a GPU to my laptop, letting me play games and do compute intensive work whilst maintaining the relative portability of my laptop.

I bought a Thinkpad T430 used for $150, replaced the CD/DVD drive with another SATA bay for more storage, and bought storage, bumping my machine up to 1TB (500+500) or pure solid state storage, 8 gigs of RAM(most software I use doesn’t require more than 4), and an i5 3520M. Still lacking the performance I wanted, I bought an i7 3630QM (4 cores at 3.3 Ghz each with hyperthreading) and an EXP GDC Beast 9.4c with a 220W Dell PSU(Dell DA-2). Plugging all of these in allowed me to connect a GTX 960 to my laptop for when I wanted to game/ do compute intensive work, or connect to multiple displays. Furthremore, the i7 game me much better CPU performance, both single core and multicore, allowing me to encode video while working even when I don’t have the GPU to use NVENC. All the performance did come with a few drawbacks. I had less battery life than I would have with the i5, and the machine was louder and hotter as the thermal solution in the T430 was never meant to deal with a quad core. I fixed most of these issues by switching my thermal compound to Thermal Grizzly’s Liquid Metal, which has 10x the thermal conductivity, at the cost of being careful due to it’s electrical conductivity.

Some modifications I had to make: I didn’t have a cable to power the GPU, so I ended up modifying one fo the other power cables that I had by looking up which pins carried power on the power rail , which ones were dummy pins, and which ones were grounded. Here’s the website I used:

http://www.playtool.com/pages/psuconnectors/connectors.html#eps8

http://www.playtool.com/pages/psuconnectors/connectors.html#pciexpress

Here’s my current setup:

i7 3630QM, GTX 960 2GB, 8GB DDR3, 1TB (500+500).

I dual boot Ubuntu 19.04 and Windows 10 on seperate SSDs(Windows likes chewing up Linux partitions). Most of my time is spent working in the Linux environment, but sometimes when I want to game, I boot into Windows.

Some more pictures of my setup and how it evolved:

Now for the PSA:

If you do decide to do this, there are some caveats. Read through understand egpu.io before buying any parts. This eGPU setup isn’t a use case supported by NVIDIA. You can’t install drivers through Geforce Experience, and have to use the regular executable. The GPU cannot be hotplugged, and since Expresscard 2.0 is a much older connection, performance is much less compared to a PCie 16x connection due to bandwidth restrictions. Furthermore, using an external monitor improves performance since the bandwidth isn’t consumed returning the display signal from the GPU to the laptop as it is when using only the internal screen on the laptop. Also, the T430 doesn’t boot into GRUB or any bootloader for that matter if an external monitor is connected to the GPU when you power the machine on, so I need to disconnect my monitor and while booting and then connect it to the GPU after booting into an operating system environment. This quite possibly due to the BIOS not being able to recognize GPUs while the operating system has drivers to identify it.

Some reading that I suggest:

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/4lkiel/is_a_t430_and_the_whole_xx30_line_objectively_the/?st=juutt6ni&sh=35fc06d1

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/5lafre/step_by_step_adding_external_graphics_card_to_a/?st=juutuavg&sh=9e821193

https://egpu.io/forums/builds/2012-14-thinkpad-t430-rtx20704gbps-ec2-exp-gdc-beast-8-4d-win10-ursubpar/