Finally, the 1060 in the i5-8400 box:
Core i5-8400, B360, 16GB 2666MHz CL13-13-13-35, MSI Gaming X GTX 1060-6GB
15-16% hit in overall FPS at 1080p when swapping the 1060 from a gaming desktop to an eGPU. Not too bad. But a 20% hit to 1% lows as you might expect with the reduced throughput and added latency of PCIe-TB3-PCIe translation.
Compare to 23-24% hit in overall FPS at 1080p when swapping the 1080 from a gaming desktop to an eGPU. However the difference here is that the 4c8t CPU in the NUC now becomes the limitation in NPC-heavy areas with a 1080, which leads to about 37% reduction in 1% lows. If I had the 6c12t NUC10i7, that would give a more apples-to-apples comparison but yeah, that one's pretty expensive...
OK and I've played a few games on the 1080 in the NUC+eGPU compared to the gaming PC i5-8400 and here's what I see:
Ark:SE - model pop-in is bad in this game in general and is noticeably worse in the eGPU with obvious frame drops. However most of the time, it plays pretty similarly to the gaming desktop with only a slightly lower FPS at 1440p with my medium-high custom settings.
Control - Notably worse FPS but no pop-in problems. This game is pretty GPU-heavy yet easy on the CPU, but they must "talk" a lot as the average FPS is notably lower at 1440p Medium, like ~53fps in the gaming PC to ~35 fps in the NUC+eGPU. I did not expect this.
DiRT Rally - FPS a little lower at 1440p Ultra yet still high enough not to be noticeable, feels the same. No pop-in problems though the FPS in the first 10 seconds of a race
are notably lower - texture load-ins? but no dropped frames, just noticeably lower overall FPS at that time which is then alleviated in about 10 sec.
Of course I haven't actually *played* SotTR yet as I'm still working on RotTR but I haven't played that on the NUC+eGPU yet. Maybe tonight.