On its own, the 2018 MacBook Air is a downright terrible gaming machine. Connected to my LG UltraWide 5K2K Display, the MacBook Air averages around 1-2 frames per second in Rocket League, and similarly abysmal scores in Unigine Heaven and Valley benchmarks. That’s no fault of the MacBook Air, as it’s a thin and light portable laptop built around maximizing battery life. In other words, it was never intended to be a gaming machine.

But if you own a MacBook Air and are looking for ways to get more out of your laptop, then an eGPU setup within a Windows Boot Camp environment can go a long way towards making that a reality. Watch our hands-on video walkthrough for the step-by-step details.

1. Apple does not officially support eGPUs within Windows Boot Camp.
2. The MacBook Air, with its single Thunderbolt 3 bus, can be extremely finicky when it comes to connecting other devices in addition to the eGPU.
3. Don’t connect the eGPU until Windows is booted; with this in mind, the power switch present on the Razer Core X is helpful.

Hardware

Here’s everything I used to build this setup. Feel free to swap out any of the parts to meet your specific needs:

• 2018 MacBook Air (base model) (review)
• LG UltraWide 5K2K Display (review)
• Razer Core X external graphics chassis (review)
• eVGA GeForce RTX 2080 GPU
• Samsung X5 SSD (review)
• Xbox Wireless Controller

Video walkthrough

Read more at 9to5mac.com