I consider buying Titan XP for my work on training neural net on my laptop Mac. I have never used any external GPU but as far as I investigate how to set up eGPU, it seems that I must prepare another component called eGPU box. For example this blog author uses an eGPU box called Akitio Thunder3 along with GTX 1050 Ti.However, I don't understand what is eGPU box and what is it for? Is it not possible to just buy eGPU and connect it to my laptop Mac? Do I have to buy yet another component to connect to eGPU?
What is eGPU and what is it for?
graphics cards
In order to use an external Graphics Processing Unit (eGPU) you (usually) need three components:A Thunderbold 3 cable (I will not elaborate on this one)A case / box that supplies power and a mount for desktop graphics cardsA desktop graphics card that satisfies the spatial and power constraints of the boxIn the blog entry the box is an Akitio Thunder3 and the graphics card is a Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Ti. The Thunder3 provides the mount for the desktop graphics card, provides the power and the PCIe <=> Thunderbolt 3 interface and optionally also provides power for the connected laptop.Is it not possible to just buy eGPU and connect it to my laptop Mac?There is no such thing as an eGPU, the name designates the concept of using an external GPU, which is most commonly done by faking an internal environment to an internal GPU externally.If you are interested in actually acquiring an eGPU solution, egpu.io has nice coverage, reviews, guides and overviews.