Can Surface Laptop Studio use an eGPU?

Source: Daniel Rubino / Windows Central

Can Surface Laptop Studio use an eGPU?

Thanks to Thunderbolt 4, the Surface Laptop Studio can use an external GPU. However, in our testing the eGPU compatibility has been a little buggy. It does work, and you can find yourself benefiting from huge performance increases by hooking up a more powerful GPU, but Windows can sometimes get confused and cause the display drivers to crash.

For the most part, it should work absolutely fine. But our executive editor, Daniel Rubino, found himself having to factory reset the Surface Laptop Studio not once, but twice, because Windows messed up the driver install, and the display stopped working entirely.

To hook up an eGPU, just plug its USB-C cable into one of the Surface Laptop Studio’s USB-C ports, and Windows should do the rest. It’ll install the correct drivers for your external GPU, and then you should be good to go with options to configure your GPU settings in NVIDIA’s Control Panel or Windows Settings.

You should keep in mind that using an eGPU will reduce performance of the GPU you’re using externally by about 20%, due to the nature of having to transfer that power and data through a USB-C cable first. This is standard for any eGPU setup, however, and shouldn’t be much of a problem for most use cases.

Be sure to check out our best Thunderbolt laptops if you’re interested in other PCs that support eGPUs.