Connect EGPU to DELL WD19TB Thunderbolt 3 with XPS 15

Hi!
Thx for your enlightenment.
I, too, had a same question. I will not be using this as a game configuration.
I was thinking about using this configuration for video rendering and photoshop.
My XPS 13 (9350) connected to only WD-19TB takes 5 days to render a video that is 45 min long....
How much am I sacrificing in performance by eGPU though WD-19TB?
In theory, how much improvement will I get by connecting eGPU through WD-19TB?
Thx!

@Kelly_Song  I’m not certain, but given that the XPS 13 9350 only has a single TB3 port, if you want to use a dock and eGPU at the same time, then you don’t have the option of connecting both separately anyway. Although even if you could, a dual port TB3 system typically has both ports running from the same TB3 controller, so the max total bandwidth from the controller back to the system might not be any more than you’d be able to carry over a single port. Having a system with multiple TB3 controllers might be another story, but those are rare.

But that isn’t the main concern anyway. The bottleneck that will definitely exist is that the XPS 13 9350 only has a PCIe 3.0 x2 interface wired to its TB3 controller, not a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface as some other systems do.

I don’t think the dock itself will create a bottleneck. Yes, whatever else you’re doing with the dock will consume some bandwidth, but your only alternative would be to use an eGPU with no dock at all, which isn’t exactly apples to apples even if that would be an acceptable solution. However, if it helps, the major potential consumer of bandwidth with docks is typically displays, since uncompressed DisplayPort traffic can require a lot of bandwidth, and DisplayPort traffic takes priority over PCIe when TB3 can’t carry everything at once. But if you connect your displays to an eGPU, then you’re not running DisplayPort over TB3 anymore; you’re just running PCIe to the eGPU, so you won’t have this resource contention issue. That said, the max theoretical throughput of the PCI 3.0 x2 link you’ll have is 16 Gb/s. And USB 3.1 Gen 2, which the WD19TB supports and which would be carried over PCIe between the dock and system, is 10 Gb/s if you have any peripherals that can actually take advantage of that. So your eGPU and everything non-display that you have running through the dock would all be sharing that 16 Gb/s worth of bandwidth.

But even then, you might find that this isn’t a practical limitation for video rendering. I don’t know much about that, but for example it’s possible that the bottleneck with video rendering is always the GPU itself rather than PCIe bandwidth between the system and GPU. In that case, this may all be moot.

Thank you for your prompt and detailed reply!

I will be using solely for Video rendering, no games.
I know that it is not the optimal configuration, but it is temp solution until I upgrade to the latest machine still I want it to be future proof.

My main concern is if this configuration will work, not having to order and return things.

I have plans for upgrade to latest XPS 13 with 11th  gen i7 (2021?).
I have had this PC long enough and it has served it's purpose.
Still, I will be getting XPS 13 for it's portability's.

XPS 13 (9350) - 1x TB3 port
WD19TB
4K external monitor connected to WD19TB running on 4K with DP
Couple of USB3 ext.HD for file storage/back-up, and a Scanner connected though USB to WD19TB
Ethernet network connected to WD19TB
Wireless mouse connected to XPS 13 by USB

Wants to connect through WD19TB;
Core X Chrome with nVidia RTX 2060 Super / 8M

My plan is to run Monitor connect through Core X DP running in 4K
and Core X connected to WD19TB - so I can use present setting.

In your expert eyes, will this work?
Is there a better solution?

I don't want to have to run Video rendering for 5 days...
(Upscaling of 45 min 720p old video to FHD)

Can you guess, how faster will this configuration will be compared to my present setting?

Thanks again!

@Kelly_Song  Happy to help! I’m afraid I can’t comment on the feasibility of the eGPU setup. The XPS 13 9350 was the first XPS 13 to have Thunderbolt 3, and I know that eGPUs were a bit finicky back then. (Actually, lots of Thunderbolt products were finicky back then. Despite being a standard, Thunderbolt seemed to have a lot of interoperability problems.) That may have been resolved with purely firmware and driver updates since then, but you may want to do some research here and possibly on the eGPU.io website (a forum dedicated to eGPUs) to find out what the experience of other XPS 13 9350 owners has been when trying to use an eGPU.

I also can’t comment on what sort of performance increase you’d see for rendering, since that’s simply not something I do except for very rare uses of Handbrake. I am surprised that you’re seeing rendering jobs for 720p to 1080p upscaling take 5 days though. Assuming the video is the length of a typical movie or something. that seems absurdly long. Then again, if your upscaling job includes a lot of complex algorithms to try to improve the quality of the image rather than just adding more pixels (which would serve no purpose other than increasing file size), then maybe the complexity of those algorithms is responsible for that. When I use Handbrake it’s usually to repack a source file in a more modern codec or to downsample it for viewing on a mobile device.

Sorry I can’t offer more insight on this, but hopefully you can find what you need in other posts here and/or on eGPU.io!

Thank you! You have been great help.
The rendering is a 45 minutes video of my wedding 30 years ago, and I am running it on Topaz Video Enhance AI so it is a lots of rendering. Normally, I do photoshop.