Is an eGPU worth it to speed up encoding?

[mfmto]

Hi everyone.

I'm posting in the newbie board, because this is (in my mind) a newbie question. I'm intermediate to advanced in my video editing skills, but I have very little knowledge when it comes to hardware. I have been using PowerDirector for most of my basic editing, and sometimes slip over to Premiere for more advanced functions. 99% of what I edit are captured VHS and 8mm film transfers, so I use a lot of denoise, stabilization, white balance, etc. I realize that encoding is a slow process, but mine is REALLY slow. A 2hr video can take upwards of 8-10 hours. My laptop is a few years old, but it's still a decent machine that I haven't had a lot of issues with. The specs are as follows...

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7200U CPU @ 2.50GHz 2.70 GHz
20GB RAM
64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Intel(R) HD Graphics 620 [Display adapter]
NVIDIA GeForce 940MX [Display adapter]
Generic PnP Monitor (17.1"vis, August 2014)
2GB vram
Windows 10 Home

So here's my question. Would an external graphics card help with encoding speeds? I had always presumed that I needed to bump up my RAM to achieve faster speeds, but as I research, I'm finding that may not be the case. As per usual with the internet, I have read a few thoughts on this and some are opposite of what others are saying, and it's been a bit confusing. I actually joined this site so that I could ask this, so any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
Matt

[JN-]

I don't have any experience of them, have often considered the idea, but they seem to be expensive. Anytime I looked at this I always came to the conclusion that upgrading, or buying a better laptop/PC was the better, though even more expensive option.

[usually_quiet]

How do you plan to connect an eGPU to a 2014 laptop? I suspect that it is too old to have a connection with enough bandwidth for a powerful eGPU.

[johns0]

It's better to buy a regular pc that's at least a 6 core cpu.

[Cornucopia]

Not able to go into the details RN, but the thing about encoding is that it is a process that is very CPU/GPU intensive, light-to-medium load on RAM, and light-to-heavy load on drive subsystem (greatly depends on codec & intended bitrate here).

The more complex & efficient your codec, the more load you will be putting on your CPU/GPU.
The more complex & efficient your bitstream (incl. InterFrames, OpenGOP, B-Frames, etc), the more load you will be putting on your CPU/GPU as well as your RAM, but the less load it will be on your drive subsystem.
It's a lot having to do with removing the bottlenecks of the weakest links.

Dedicated GPUs (internal or external) can use "shortcuts" to offload lots of the burden. But as has been mentioned, if you don't have a VERY fast communication bus between the CPU and offloaded GPU, that communication bus will become the weakest link bottleneck.
Also note, because GPUs (and the "hardware accellerated" codecs that use them) use shortcuts (often using Integer math vs Floating Point), they don't have quite the quality per bitrate that their EQUIVALENT, standard CPU-based codecs do.

I too would recommend a separate desktop with great graphics card for processor-intensive encoding.
Another suggestion, in addition, might be to split the workload - NR/FX processing & resizing (but to simple digital intermediate, IntraFrame codec) in one pass, and a simple straight cross encode to complex/efficient codec in 2nd pass. This will avoid maxxing the processor for long periods.
Last suggestion: if you can, always encode output onto a different drive than the input/sources' drive(s), otherwise you are not able to read & write simultaneously.

Scott

[mfmto]

Last suggestion: if you can, always encode output onto a different drive than the input/sources' drive(s), otherwise you are not able to read & write simultaneously.

Thanks to all that responded. It's all greatly appreciated. It seems the consensus is that I just need a new (better) desktop. Carnucopia, thank you for your last suggestion of encoding to a different drive. I gave it a shot, and it cut down (albeit slightly) the time it took to encode.

As I stated, this was my first post here, and I greatly appreciate everyone's input. It was all very helpful.

Matt

[pandy]

Probably latest GPU generation can be something at least interesting to compare - NVidia and Intel boards usually offer best possible HW video encoding.
For some older notebooks, docking station with PCIex interface may offer possibility to connect regular video card but usually there is physical dimension limit and tight power budget so only slowest graphic boards can be used - probably not something you are asking.