[Jochim]

They often just don't justify the cost. The enclosures themselves are expensive, and there's a really rough performance hit, less than half the framerate of the same card connected via PCIe in some cases[0]. A decent gaming laptop probably costs about the same while having better performance[1].

They're not particularly portable either, so you'd be better off getting the gaming laptop, or building a desktop with a cheaper GPU for roughly the same price.

The size/power delivery of the enclosure can be a limiting factor as well, new GPUs have tended to be bigger and more power hungry, resulting in many enclosures just not being compatible with newer cards.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlYHPj-0DTE

[1] https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs-thunderbo...`