I’m running Ollama on 2 eGPUs over Thunderbolt. Works well for me. You’re still dealing with an NVDIA device, of course. The connection type is not going to change that hassle.

Thank you for the validation. As much as I don't like NVIDIA's shenanigans on Linux, having a local LLM is very tempting and I might put my ideological problems to rest over it.

Though I have to ask: why two eGPUs? Is the LLM software smart enough to be able to use any combination of GPUs you point it at?

Yes, Ollama is very plug-and-play when it comes to multi GPU.

llama.cpp probably is too, but I haven't tried it with a bigger model yet.

Even today some progress was released on parallelizing WAN video generation over multiple GPUs. LLMs are way easier to split up.

You would still need drivers and all the stuff difficult with nvidia in linux with a egpu. (Its not nessecarily terrible just suboptimal) Rather just add the second GPU in the Workstation, or just run the llm in your AMD GPU.

Oh, we can run LLMs efficiently with AMD GPUs now? Pretty cool, I haven't been following, thank you.

I've been running LLM models on my Radeon 7600 XT 16GB for past 2-3 months without issues (Windows 11). I've been using llama.cpp only. The only thing from AMD I installed (apart from latest Radeon drivers) is the "AMD HIP SDK" (very straight forward installer). After unzipping (the zip from GitHub releases page must contain hip-radeon in the name) all I do is this:

llama-server.exe -ngl 99 -m Qwen3-14B-Q6_K.gguf

And then connect to llamacpp via browser to localhost:8080 for the WebUI (its basic but does the job, screenshots can be found on Google). You can connect more advanced interfaces to it because llama.cpp actually has OpenAI-compatible API.

IDK about "efficiently" but we've been able to run llms locally with AMD for 1.5-2 years now

Yes - I'm running a LM Studio on windows on a 6800xt, and everything works more-or-less out of the box using always using Vulkan llama.cpp on the gpu I believe.

There's also ROCm. That's not working for me in LM Studio at the moment. I used that early last year to get some LLMs and stable diffusion running. As far as I can tell, it was faster before, but Vulkan implementations have caught up or something - so much the mucking about isn't often worth it. I believe ROCm is hit or miss for a lot of people, especially on windows.

llama.cpp and lmstudio have a Vulkan backend which is pretty fast. I'm using it to run models on a Strix Halo laptop and it works pretty well.

Sure, though you'll be bottlenecked by the interconnect speed if you're tiling between system memory and the dGPU memory. That shouldn't be an issue for the 30B model, but would definitely be an issue for the 480B-sized models.