Does the external GPU works alright? I have a T530 with a NVidia that I use dual monitor. But it's old, and Blender doesn't use it for rendering. Been thinking about one of these little egpu adapters, but don't know anyone that used it actually.
The gpus from that generation are quite shit. Nonetheless, the igpu version is better for battery life and linux. I changed my motherboard from w530 to t530 (igpu version) to get rid of nvidia.