I am seeing a lot of external GPU enclosures popping up on eBay and Marketplace. I also see a lot of GTX 3080s, too. Can someone refresh my memory on if these are worth it? I think I remember you lose 30% of the power of the card. Do you need another V-Ray license for each card? Right now, I have one 3080, so it would be safe to say I wouldn’t double my output. Can you get enclosures with more than one card slot? Just poking around thinking about getting one if it makes sense.
For that price, plus a card, why not just get a 4090? Extra cards only help with GPU rendering, whereas a new better card will increase your interactivity as well.
Oh, maybe your sig is a clue… laptop? I can’t work on a laptop. Not enough memory or GPU, poor cooling, and terrible keyboards! 8) Built-in UPS, though.
Are laptop GPUs still MUCH slower than their desktop counterparts? Then maybe adding an external real GPU would be a bigger improvement.
I have rendered everything on my laptop for about a year: an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I read someone tested a 4090 external GPU, and he couldn’t get more than 50% out of it. RAM, I have 64Gb on this laptop, and I have never come close to it not being enough. GPU, I had my machine crash once due to video RAM not being sufficient, but other than that, I haven’t had an issue. Things are getting smaller, so what is in the laptop is pretty much what you get in a desktop, just in a smaller package. Mark my words; we’ll render from our cellular phones in a decade. 
Don’t get me wrong laptops are amazing now. But I consider 64GB to be the minimum amount of memory for my particular work. Our workstations have 512GB now (which is indeed overkill most of the time, though compositing can use it for caching). 64GB seems to be enough for most render nodes, though that will eventually not be enough with 4K and higher and high memory VFX scenes like simulations.
Agreed that for a lot of stuff 64GB is plenty, though.
Keep in mind most laptops have laptop CPUs which are neutered compare to their desktop brethren. I used to have a Clevo with a desktop CPU. It was a beast, but very heavy (~11.5 lbs), and still ran into heat issues when rendering in a warm ambient temperature. It is indeed amazing how small things have gotten, and how much power we can now get. But instead of things becoming faster the scene just become more complex, and the render sizes/quality gets better until the rendering is just as slow as it ever was. 
I purchased this laptop to fill a gap between my move from MN to CA. I had a month when I was living out of my RV and needed to keep working. I thought I would be crippled, but my PC is still in storage and has been close to a year. V-Ray has also been an enormous help. Nothing for me takes more than an hour to render (4K). I use progressive and denoiser (.4). I don’t mind the noise in my images; it adds to its charm :). I have yet to have a client complain about noise, so I have learned to embrace it. I would like cleaner images and add film noise in post-production, but it isn’t worth the wait. The other day I rendered using buckets, and it took 7 hours. I let the same image bake for an hour in the progressive oven, and the images were almost identical.
Awesome. I am glad you are able to make it work. I’d like to take mine and work outdoors if I could. I used to do it when animating at least (not for rendering).
Hey Bobby!
Yes, I have used this for many years on both Windows and OSX
Many people specially the Octane C4D users rely on it
No, if it is setup correctly the rendering performance should be +90% for a 3090 compared to running it native at PCIe
No
Yes, up to 4 per box through Thunderbolt as well
Best,
Muhammed