So currently I have a 2013 15-inch MacBook Pro with intel Core i7 and 16GB of RAM. This upcoming semester I will be taking a deep learning course focused in computer vision. I was in a deep learning course last semester and because of that I am scared I will roast my computer further into oblivion than it already has been if I try to train my models on it next semester.

So with that said I am thinking of purchasing an external GPU. Does anyone have any experience with this or do I just have to suck it up and use google collab, or use campus computers, or just buy a new machine? (I don’t want to do any of those because I hate notebooks, I would rather be able to code in the comfort of my home and I don’t want to pay that much money when my laptop works just fine for everything else).

The one thing I am worried about is getting bottlenecked by transfer speeds between my mac and the eGPU. I have thunderbolt 2 ports and I am not that knowledgable of hardware so I have no idea if the transfer speeds are so slow that having an eGPU will just be useless because of this.

But if anyone has experience with this or suggestions I would love to hear them!