[DeIlliad]

Speaking from experience, there is a big performance difference connecting your eGPU over PCIE and connecting over Thunderbolt. Usually people just take the performance hit with Thunderbolt because of convenience and they are usually using overpowered desktop GPUs but there are eGPU PCIE connectors for people who want the most performance.

Because this is already using a mobile chip with lower performance, Framework probably didn't want to tank performance any more by going with the lower bandwidth Thunderbolt option.

[izacus]

The performance hit is because Thunderbolt has at most PCIe x4 bandwidth, while internal GPUs are connected to PCIe x16 lanes. That's a massive loss of bandwidth.

But it also tells you a lot about why Framework didn't make x16 bus hot swappable, it's a significantly bigger engineering challenge.