Chinese TechTuber and hardware reviewer Chaowanke recently showed off their success in getting a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop to work with an NVIDIA RTX 4060 as an eGPU. The laptop that they used in this case was a Lenovo Yoga Air 14s with Windows 11.
The setup used by Chaowanke is, understandably, hodgepodge. The laptop itself uses USB4, while the eGPU enclosure he used in this project is the Razer Core X V2, which uses Thunderbolt 5. IN addition, they used a Thunderbolt-to-M.2 connection and an M.2-to-PCIe graphics adapter. If this sounds tedious, you’re not technically wrong about that feeling: typically, an all-in-one eGPU enclosure provides the same connections and does not require all the adapters which we named off here.
On the software side, Chaowanke used an NVIDIA ARM GPU driver, which has been confirmed as having been developed and coming from an RTX Spark developer preview. Basically, it means that the driver was meant for the upcoming RTX Spark laptops and mini AI PCs. They had to manually install the ARM64 driver through Device Manager, but after some troubleshooting in which the display showed a black screen, the RTX 4060 became fully functional, with the laptop initially listing the GPU as a generic “NVIDIA Desktop Device”, before correctly being identified by the card’s official designation.
As for the performance, the RTX 4060 eGPU on the Snapdragon X Elite laptop was, unsurprisingly, not smooth. At QHD (2,560 x 1,440) resolution, the laptop was only able to run Cyberpunk 2077 at an average of 40 fps. The laptop and eGPU combo also repeated the same average frame rate with Forza Horizon 6, but the main takeaway here is that Chaowanke was able to run games using an ARM-based laptop with an external GPU.
Gaming on ARM-based systems has been an arduous process, even more so with laptops powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X series processors. When we reviewed one of the very first laptops to be powered by the chipset, the experience — purely from a gaming standpoint — was far from ideal.
Since then, Qualcomm claims to have made numerous fixes for more than 100 games, as well as rolled out graphics driver updates, AVX2 emulation, and improved compatibility with anti-cheat programs, the latter having been a thorn in the company’s side.
NVIDIA RTX Spark Cometh
That may change this year, what with the launch of NVIDIA’s RTX Spark chipset. Co-developed with MediaTek, the SoC is made up of the 20 Grace CPU cores; 6,144 Blackwell RTX GPU cores; 5th generation Tensor Cores, and 128GB of Unified Memory. NVIDIA says that the chipset outputs 1 Petaflop of FP4 performance, thanks to each component being connected via its own NVLink-C2C interconnect link. And yes, it is most definitely confirmed to be an ARM-based chip.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite notwithstanding, we can’t wait to see what sort of performance laptops powered by the RTX Spark will be able to churn out once we get our hands on a unit.
(Source: Videocardz, Chaowanke via YouTube)
