A few years ago, I bought a bulky nVidia RTX 3080 GPU as part of my venture into crypto mining, I also DIYed a thermal pad upgrade for it so it runs cooler and quieter. But since the PoS merge of Ethereum in 2022, it’s no longer mine-able using GPUs so my 3080 started to gather dusts. I hesitated to sell it because everyone was selling GPUs at low price at that time, also it felt a bit special with the upgrade I did myself.

Recently I got an idea – buy a GPU dock and use the 3080 as an external GPU for my laptop! I already got a very good PSU on Gumtree so the only missing piece is the dock. Through egpu.io site I saw quite a few popular docks and this one seemed a great fit for my plan.

Fast-forward, I got the package in a week or so and I assembled the PSU and the GPU onto the dock. After connected power, HDMI and Thunderbolt 4 cable, I turned on my laptop. I actually expected something to fail – I run Arch Linux on my laptop, and it’s not uncommon if a device works for Windows or Mac but not Linux. But this time, to my surprise, everything just worked: The GPU turned on automatically right after my laptop booted, then the screen lighted up too 🙂

The laptop has nVidia driver already so I guess that’s 1 reason this worked out of box. Probably not something nice to say about nVidia, but I think nVidia’s latest gen GPUs – RTX 50xx – aren’t as revolutionary as before. Looks like my good old 3080 is just about as fast as the new 5070 and half as fast as 5080, is that a lot after 2 generations 🙂