If you wanted to connect your laptop to a desktop GPU, generally, you have to use a Thunderbolt 3-based graphics dock of some kind. However, a mod from Kosin (a China offshoot of Lenovo) has demonstrated that there is another way. Kosin shared a video where one of its employees managed to run an RTX 3090 off a notebook’s NVMe M.2 slot, and it works! (via PC Watch.)

Kosin used one of its own laptops, the Ryzen 4600U-powered Air 14, to demonstrate its modification. The modder first removed the M.2 NVMe SSD residing in the notebook, then connected an M.2 to a PCIe adapter cable, allowing the RTX 3090 to communicate with the laptop. Finally, the modder drilled out a slot in the laptop’s housing so the cable could run outside of the laptop’s chassis.

However, one creative modder managed to hook up a GeForce RTX 3090 to a laptop using an M.2 slot. As Tom's Hardware and PC Watch reports, the laptop mod was carried out by an employee of the. MSI Aegis RS 10TH-061US Gaming and Entertainment Desktop PC (Intel i7-10700K 8-Core, 32GB RAM, 512GB PCIe SSD + 3TB HDD (3.5), NVIDIA RTX 3090, Wifi, Bluetooth, 1xUSB 3.2, 1xHDMI, Win 10 Home). EVGA GeForce® RTXᐪᔿ 3090 The EVGA GeForce® RTXᐪᔿ 3090 is colossally powerful in every way imaginable, giving you a whole new tier of performance at 8K resolution. It's powered by the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, which doubles down on ray tracing and AI performance with enhanced RT Cores, Tensor Cores, and new streaming multiprocessors.

Surprisingly, performance from the RTX 3090 was perfectly adequate, even with just four PCIe lanes being fed to the card. The system scored 14,008 points in 3DMark TimeSpy: For reference, a standard RTX 3080 paired with a Core i9-9900K gets 15,000 points. So, yes, you lose quite a bit of performance compared to installing the 3090 in a desktop PC, but the score is still quite good considering the notebook’s specs (and the downgrade to four PCIe lanes).

Two Slot 3090

If you want to do this yourself, beware that this is a mod and isn’t guaranteed to work. However, NVMe based M.2 slots run off pure PCI Express, so theoretically, you can execute this mod with little to no compatibility issues.