GPD G1 eGPU review: External AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT with 8 GB of VRAM uses USB4 or OCuLink

The box contents are fairly barebones: other than the eGPU, you’ll only find a power cord and a USB-C cable. Those who want to connect the GPD G1 using the faster OCuLink interface will require an additional cable. Depending on the model, you can expect to fork out roughly another €50 (US$54) for an M.2-2230 adapter and a suitable cable.

The GPD G1 eGPU can connect to a device via USB4 or OCuLink. We first used our GPU test system fitted with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X to find out how the G1 stacks up against the desktop graphics cards in our testing. Because the Asus TUF Gaming X670E-Plus doesn’t have a native OCuLink interface, we had to resort to using an M.2 adapter. At this point, we need to mention that the eGPU is only connected at PCIe 3.0 speed despite having support for PCIe 4.0. Using it with other M.2 slots likewise didn’t yield higher data transfer rates. As a point of reference, you can say that the 40 Gbps speed of USB4 is reached in this case. To have a direct comparison between USB4 and OCuLink, we also conducted additional tests by pairing the GPD G1 with a Minisforum UM780 XTX. The Minisforum mini-PC is one of the few devices on the market that are equipped with this interface. In this combination, the GPD eGPU was able to showcase its full power with PCIe 4.0 x4.

We first compared the performance of the GPD G1 with various desktop graphics cards in order to check out how it measures up in an identical test system. The mobile graphics chip in the GPD G1 is only around 20 percentage points behind its desktop counterpart (AMD Radeon RX 7600). But this was to be expected owing to the lower power consumption. In contrast, our review unit is just 15% less powerful than an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060.

AMD consistently performs well in benchmarks related to rendering performance. The GPD G1 likewise managed to produce a relatively good result. That said, the G1 doesn’t offer quite enough performance for professional use. AMD has the PRO Series in their lineup for such applications, whilst Nvidia markets their professional graphics cards under the Quadro brand. You can certainly use the Radeon RX 7600 XT in the GPD G1 for smaller projects in a personal or semi-professional setting. It also supports the popular AV1 format for decoding and encoding videos.

The GPD G1 has great gaming performance and is largely better than a Radeon RX 6600. Nonetheless, it is lacking somewhat in power to match the Radeon RX 7600. Considering its performance, you shouldn’t expect to use the eGPU for anything more than Full HD gaming. But it is good enough as an expansion for handheld PCs. Because the RX 7600M XT is paired with only 8 GB of VRAM, the eGPU may sometimes hit its VRAM limit when running games at max settings, resulting in relatively poor P1 values (1% low). The Radeon RX 7600M XT also supports ray tracing, though we can only say this is a good marketing gimmick. In practice, enabling ray tracing reduces frame rates so much that it is no longer possible to game comfortably. 

Looking at the games tested, we see that the GPD G1 can mostly produce good frame rates at high presets. However, there was a major outlier in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. We weren’t able to get playable frame rates regardless of the preset selected. At the moment, we can’t entirely rule out the possibility that this is caused by driver issues. But when you consider how much the GPD G1 costs, the results obtained here are clearly not good enough. Comparable desktop graphics cards in the price range would be something like the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070.