You raise an excellent point.

TBH I am both lazy, and a bit paranoid/afraid of dealing with Nvidia rendering issues (even if using my IGP for desktop work), but it would probably be fine and I'm... just being lazy and paranoid.

I don't think it would make it worse for compute work.

An external 3rd partition does sound appealing, though one quirk is that CP2077 does really like SSDs. I have a slow external SSD, but it still might muddy an A/B test.