I plugged an Nvidia RTX 5090 into a gaming handheld

Two weeks ago, I showed you how the world’s fastest graphics card works in a small form factor PC. To my surprise, Nvidia’s RTX 5090 Founders Edition delivered the vast majority of its performance even in a 12.7-liter desktop with a five-year-old CPU.

It made me wonder: what if I plugged this card into a handheld gaming PC instead? So I did, and let me tell you: it’s a wonder to behold. It’s enough to make me believe in a rich future where handhelds get more powerful when you dock them at home.

I started with the same $1,999 RTX 5090 FE and 1000-watt power supply from my desktop test, dropping them both onto a $99 Minisforum DEG1. It’s an open-air external GPU that can connect to the Oculink port that’s now shipping in a handful of portable gaming PCs, so long as you bring your own desktop GPU and power supply. 

I plugged that Oculink cable into a $1,000 GPD Win Max 2 handheld. And then, with just an AMD Ryzen 8840U mobile CPU and four lanes of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth, rather than the 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 that Nvidia’s GPU technically supports, my new Franken-desktop spit fire anyhow. I’m talking over 100 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K resolution and Ultra …

Read the full story at The Verge.