Can i improve gaming experience on my laptop by adding an external GPU or graphics card?

Question

I have an Acer Aspire E5- 575G Signature Edition Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7200 CPU @ 2.50GHz 2.70GHz RAM: 8.00GB With a NVIDIA GeForce 940MX

I've been getting notifications, that my system doesn't meet the minimum requirements for optimal settings on a few games. I wanted to know if I can add an external GPU/eGPU (or whatever is needed) to solve this/increase my laptop's performance for a better gaming experience.

Answer 1

I wanted to know if I can add an external GPU/eGPU (or whatever is needed) to solve this/increase my laptop's performance for a better gaming experience.

No. An external GPU is only possible with USB 3.1 Gen 2 and/or Thunderbolt 3. Your laptop has neither. Whatever, you find that supports anything else other than that, will be worse than your 940MX.

Even if your laptop had the required ports, you would require a power supply, unless you purchased an enclosure designed for the purpose you describe. Those external GPU enclosures are extremely expensive and don't even include the GPU.

There are perhaps ways to hack together a solution. It would still cost a good amount of money, and you would still have a major performance bottleneck, your processor.

a single USB Type-C 3.1 port that accommodates up to 5 Gbps

The port described in the above description is for a USB 3.1 Gen 1 port.

Source

USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 is described as the following:

• USB 3.0 is now called USB 3.1 Gen 1 (Speed up to 5Gbps)

• USB 3.1 is now called USB 3.1 Gen 2 (Speed up to 10Gbps)

Source

Thunderbolt 3 is described as the following:

Thunderbolt v3: 4× PCI Express 3.0, DisplayPort 1.2 (2 streams), USB 3.1 gen. 2

Source