We theoretically and experimentally perform a comparative study on performance of the linear standing-wave cavity and ring cavity for external cavity frequency doubling at the wavelength from 795 nm to 397.5 nm. The two cavities show obvious differences of the thermal effect of nonlinear crystal, cavity sensitivity, and maximum output power. The results show that ring cavity as the external enhancement cavity is a better choice than standing-wave cavity at short wavelength region. At last, a 397.5 nm violet laser with 408 mW corresponding to an input power of 992 mW is obtained by using the ring cavity, considering the original mode-matching efficiency of 98% between the 795 nm laser and frequency doubling cavity, the conversion efficiency is 41.9%.