Even a grinder came in handy when connecting a GeForce RTX 3090 to a Lenovo Ultrabook

Lenovo last year introduced an updated line of Xiaoxin ultrabooks with AMD Ryzen 4000U series processors. As you might guess from the name of the series, it was intended only for the Chinese market, but this is not what we will discuss. In Lenovo Xiaoxin Official Group on Weibo Platform there was an unexpected video, demonstrating how to connect a discrete GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card to a miniature 14-inch ultrabook.

Experiments with connecting external video cards to laptops are not new. Manufacturers are already releasing specialized solutions that connect via the Thunderbolt interface, which provides high bandwidth – up to 40 Gbps in version 3. What if Thunderbolt isn’t there? There is a way to connect via the M.2 connector, associated, in the case of AMD, with the PCIe Gen 3 interface. This will provide a bandwidth of about 32 Gbps, which is 8 times less than a full-fledged PCIe 4.

In the case of the ultrabook, Lenovo had to take drastic measures – even a grinder came in handy, with which a window was cut out for installing an M.2 adapter. The whole process can be seen in the video. As for the performance, it turned out to be at a fairly good level: in 3DMark Time Spy, the video card scored about 17900 points, which is 8% less than in a full-fledged system. The results should get even better when AMD rolls out PCIe 4.0 to its APUs – this is expected in the Rembrandt family by the end of 2021.