You are going to be looking at some variant of oculink, you can get riser cards that convert a PCI-e or M.2 socket into an oculink port if you don't have one available stock. Still though, if you are building it yourself why even bother? You are going to add a significant cost to the build for marginal or no benefit over buying a mini PC with an oculink port and a known compatible dock. EGPU options are not plug and play, they rarely just work and need significant tinkering and workarounds and will come with noticeable drawbacks in the best case scenario.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
10 points (85.7% liked)
Hardware
2796 readers
167 users here now
All things related to technology hardware, with a focus on computing hardware.
Rules (Click to Expand):
-
Follow the Lemmy.world Rules - https://mastodon.world/about
-
Be kind. No bullying, harassment, racism, sexism etc. against other users.
-
No Spam, illegal content, or NSFW content.
-
Please stay on topic, adjacent topics (e.g. software) are fine if they are strongly relevant to technology hardware. Another example would be business news for hardware-focused companies.
-
Please try and post original sources when possible (as opposed to summaries).
-
If posting an archived version of the article, please include a URL link to the original article in the body of the post.
Some other hardware communities across Lemmy:
- Augmented Reality - !augmented_reality@lemmy.world
- Gaming Laptops - !gaminglaptops@lemmy.world
- Laptops - !laptops@lemmy.world
- Linux Hardware - !linuxhardware@programming.dev
- Mechanical Keyboards - !mechanical_keyboards@programming.dev
- Microcontrollers - !microcontrollers@lemux.minnix.dev
- Monitors - !monitors@piefed.social
- Raspberry Pi - !raspberry_pi@programming.dev
- Retro Computing - !retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org
- Single Board Computers - !sbcs@lemux.minnix.dev
- Virtual Reality - !virtualreality@lemmy.world
Icon by "icon lauk" under CC BY 3.0
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
There are plenty of OCuLink eGPU enclosures available. There are also bare adapter boards if you want to build your own enclosure.
Since it's just PCIe with a different connector, it's much cheaper and simpler than Thunderbolt/USB4. It does have a couple of downsides though. It can't be hot plugged, so the computer has to be shut down to connect or disconnect an OCuLink device and the connector is not designed for a large number of mating cycles.