Dawid Does Tech Stuff on YouTube has upgraded his Xyber Cybertruck PC with the fastest consumer GPU on the planet, GeForce RTX 4090. After a lot of struggling, the machine was finally able to play Cyberpunk 2077 without stuttering.
Nowadays it has become common to find laptop hardware disguised as desktop machines. Such designs have the advantage of consuming much lower power while taking less space. As you can guess, something has to give, which in this case is performance. Thus, in order to unlock more performance on these compact devices, modders have got into the habit of installing full-sized desktop GPUs using adapters.
Extracting as much performance as possible from the Ryzen 7 8845HS powering his mini-PC Cybertruck, Dawid opted for a similar solution, at least in the beginning. For his mod, the YouTuber went for the best GPU money can buy, the RTX 4090. As a reference, using the 8845HS’ 12 RDNA 3 compute units for gaming thrills and spills – broadly equivalent to a GTX 1650 – titles left a lot of CPU headroom untapped, as the chip was barely used, at around 23%.
Since these laptop-based motherboards are not equipped with full-sized PCIe x16 slots, Dawid went with a PCIe x16 to M.2 adapter and a PSU capable of feeding this monster GPU. At least that was the plan before finding that the second M.2 port was badly positioned. This left only one alternative, using the Wi-Fi card’s M.2 slot, which only runs at x2 PCIe, meaning even more performance’s left on the table.
So, after slapping the fastest consumer GPU available literally on top of the truck and fighting the BIOS settings, at last, games were able to run, with a catch. The performance was far from ideal, not even beating the original iGPU.
The only solution left at this point was an OCuLink adapter plugged into the second M.2 slot, meaning the Cybertruck PC can’t be closed back unless Dawid drills a hole in it. But at least this time performance was much better with the machine spitting 250fps instead of 140fps in Counter-Strike, above 400 fps in Doom, and 130fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at FHD low settings. Most importantly, the CPU’s eight Zen 4 cores were now approaching 80% utilisation instead of the mere 20-ish when paired with the iGPU.
Depending on who you ask, this may be considered a win for the extra performance, or a failure due cutting corners, literally. Personally, while I wouldn’t do such things to a unique PC like this, I love to see hardware pushed beyond its original state.
