In my opinion, this is the future of a pretty decent slice of the market. The emergence of several of these (especially like this one with a standard TB3 connection) is pretty encouraging.
Not holding my breath, but sure would also be nice if Apple ever decided to create drivers supporting eGPUs...might actually provide incentive for developers to consider macOS for more demanding GPU-intensive applications (dare I say, VR?). Like I said, not holding my breath...
I'd have agreed with you when thunderbolt came out and the potential seemed so high (five years ago). But now we have faster wireless networking and streaming tech, so these boxes aren't reasonable for most gaming purposes when you could just spend 300 dollars and get a desktop.
Does anyone know what Intel is actually charging for the TB3 controllers? It must be a lot, because we still only see TB on higher end mobos and portables. That seems like it's going to be the biggest problem for this market. If you can pop one of these boxes into just about any modern laptop, then they've got a good chance. But if things stay as they are now, and you have to carefully choose and pay more for a TB3 laptop, then overpay for these enclosures (you could literally buy a case, PSU & entire motherboard for half the price of this TB3 enclosure)... then I can't see these ever becoming anything other than niche products suiting people who are prepared to pay significantly more for the particular benefits they bring.
The other problem, I suspect, is that we're seeing an increasing number of manufacturers producing pretty competent portable gaming laptops. Some of the recent 14" & 15" inch laptops with GTX 1060s, while of course bulkier than an ultrabook, still manage to be both relatively portable (~2/3" thick and under 4lbs) and extremely competent gaming machines. Many, as well, do this while costing far less in a single package than the laptop + GPU enclosure + GPU approach. We no longer live in a world where the only competent gaming laptops are 12lbs+ monstrosities.
Obviously there's a market for these enclosures, it just seems that with capable ~4lb gaming laptops, it's a pretty niche market.
I think the best use for these is paired with an ultrabook that has a capable CPU but uses integrated graphics. The ultrabook has long battery life so you can do the types of basic tasks you typically want to be able to do while mobile - browse the internet, check email, work on documents, etc.
Then when you want to sit down and play a game - which you'd usually do plugged in anyway - you plug into an external box like this (but preferably with those additional ports), that charges your laptop, provides connectivity for your external monitors, input devices, add-on storage for your game library, etc.
So basically you can get the best of both worlds. I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has owned gaming laptops in the past, and never really had a need or desire to use them as such while travelling - but I did wish I had better battery life and a more portable machine.
I carry my Skull canyon NUC between work and home nearly every day, as it's a far superior desktop the one my work got me. With an external GPU I could game on it at home in high quality.
$300 for an enclosure is painful, though. I lost the link but a while ago I saw an external adapter, not an enclosure, that was about $130 with external PSU.
You actually should read the test reviews it does not do wonders at all. If you expect desktop performance you better buy a real home pc and put in a decent card which performs as it should. You get mediocre laptop performance even if you put a monster card in that box.
BS. It does do wonders for CPU-capable machines/laptops. The Skull Canyon NUC has a very capable CPU, and an external GPU would run just as fast as a normal GPU connected via PCI-E.
Indeed. I can run a pair of Server 2012 R2 VMs with SQL Server and Visual Studio on the host OS at the same time. The one place it's a weak machine is the integrated graphics.
Yah Broman, there is a loss of performance when using an external gpu adapter as opposed to a direct to the motherboard connection of the gpu, in the case of the node it is 6-7%. But as far as mediocre laptop performance with an external gpu, you are wrong, if it was not better they would not make them. Not only that, i have a egpu on my skull canyon (which is basically a laptop without a screen), and i can tell you the performance is way better.
Nobody has to carry a desktop around anymore. It's the 21st century, we don't sync our Palm pilots, we don't run local exchange servers, and we don't need to have horse power on us at all times, you simply need to use Windows to go and continuum if you want a fast environment available remotely,
I don't want a fast environment available remotely, though. With a good keyboard and monitor both at home and at work, the NUC sets up and tears down as fast as a laptop. I get a significantly more powerful workstation at the office than my company would pay for, and at home I can do any gaming that doesn't <i>require</i> a high-end GPU, although an external one would take care of that, and, even if it's not as fast as it would be over an x16 link, it would probably still handily beat the Iris Pro 580.
The concept of eGPU is still good, it just needs to get down to portable levels. I don't need a top of the line GPU, I just want something that's significantly faster (and a little more robust) than Intel integrated. I don't need a 300W GPU. A small external box with a built-in (possibly mobile) GPU would be great for that, something that's small enough to transport and doesn't cost an arm and a leg just for infrastructure.
This. When an *enclosure* costs as much as a game console or a mainstream graphics card there is a BIG problem. Going through what a ballpark of the BOM is in my head and even factoring in R&D and a substantial profit margin, it just doesn't add up. I guess they figure most people with TB3 are Mac users who are easily parted with their money.
FWIW, the dock I saw that I can no longer find, was basically a laptop-style power brick (albeit much larger than modern-day laptop bricks--it's a Dell model that I think was used for desktops, but I don't remember the model, and a simple PCB with the PCIe slot, and the appropriate power connectors. IIRC the power supply was sold separately and the two components totaled around $130.
Why would Apple have to create the drivers? NVIDIA already does this, and you can buy external GPU-boxes for Macs. They're called Bizon Box and work with PCs too. We have two at work, and planning to buy more, but this seems better. Bizon Box is built using older versions of Akitio boxes and they are very expensive. Would rather cut the middle man out and get them straight from Akitio.
Días antes del lanzamiento oficial de Clash Royale Update, una fuga comenzó a propagarse en línea. Se reveló cuatro cartas que posiblemente se incluirán en las características de la próxima versión. http://juegodetruco.net/trucos-clash-royale-clash-...
Considering what the Power Color Devil Box offers, for only $80 more, the price for this should probably be cut a little. I'd expect at least a $100 retail price difference for those features.
Indeed the PowerColor can serve nicely just as an expansion dock as well. Although I do like the dedicated bandwidth and dedicated purpose of the AKiTiO box.
What I don't get is why AMD and Nvidia aren't at the forefront of making affordable Thunderboxes. It would expand the market for dedicated graphics cards.
That's if they're playing it wrong. If they're playing it right, they can get 2 GPU sales (mobile GPU + external GPU). This also serves as upgrade option. It's not like majority of people throw away their laptop every a year or two.
Because a GPU really does need more or less the full x4 bandwidth to avoid bottlenecking in a significant fraction of games.
Dropping to an PCIe 3.0 x2 equivalent (brown bars in the linked article) has a 8-9% average penalty vs x16 at 1080p. While that doesn't sound bad the average is a mix of games which are virtually un-impacted and others that get badly clobbered. COD4 was the worst with a 33% penalty, but there were several others that took hits of nearly 20%.
PS I wouldn't hold my breath for the situation improving significantly with TB4/PCIe4 in a few more years. The relative scaling from reduced lanes has held more or less constant since the first tests like this where done about a decade ago with PCIe 1.0 cards.
PPS if these manage to catch on enough that volume does start pushing down prices I suspect we probably will start seeing docking station/pass through models showing up a bit more widely as a way to differentiate in the market, but for gaming purposes I don't think the TB pass through will ever be a good idea. USB's another story since it's bandwidth normally only needs a tiny fraction of TBs bandwidth and smart drivers/controllers should be able to interleave its' packets into gaps in the PCIe traffic.
Yeah that's always my conclusion. The tech is great and cool but in real live not practical or cost efficient. If you go the light laptop + extensions route you need the laptop, the eGPU dock, the eGPU and also another laptop dock in this case (for Mouse, keyboard, network, USB...). The docks make this a bad deal full of compromise.I rather pay maybe a little more for a nice desktop and an even smaller (albeit less powerful) laptop.
In reality I haven't used my laptop in weeks. For coaching surfing smartphone is good enough mostly and for everything else I use my desktop. So you can just as well put most of the money in a desktop and the rest in a better smartphone or a tablet.
I get a fairly good laptop at work (new 2016 MBP) which has amazeballs in CPU and SSD speeds for its form factor. Getting a ~$500-700 eGPU setup at home would give me the performance of a $1500+ standalone gaming system. For me it’s a really interesting options, once I know how well it works.
It’s probably similar for most other people who _need_ a decent laptop for work.
Compared to a dedicated gaming ITX it’s not cheap, of course. But that’s not their market. In fact, I’d guess people looking for "cheap" are as far removed from their market as it gets.
Depends on what you want to use it for. We're using a product like this for 3D renders. Even people with laptops can connect to them easily and boost render time by quite a lot. It's expensive, but very flexible. For gaming you are better off building a proper PC'N yes.
Once you've already dropped $1000 on a Skull Canyon (or, maybe an Ultrabook with a great CPU but lame GPU) you may not want to buy a whole nother computer just for gaming.
They’re not charging that much, but from what I know they are picky with who and what they certify.
I think it’s simpler than that; lack of competition. If you’re the only kid on the block you can charge $600. If you want to compete with the company charging $600, charging $500 will work.
We’re at $300 now, so here’s hoping that in 6 months or so we’ll get to $200.
Yeah, but even if it is $25 for the controller chip, then you add $50 or so for the SFX PSU, a few more for the fan and case, plus whatever amortized engineering costs...they're probably making a decent margin on this thing, but not the outrageous amount you'd think at first glance.
Sure, and as long as there isn’t much competition around they will continue to have higher margins. If enough people start buying those, prices will come down anyway. But yeah, something like that isn’t really comparable to a self-built franken-eGPU, so it’s a bit simplistic to calculate costs like was done above.
I love that they haven't included another Thunderbolt 3 port for daisy chaining or any other ports (USB, Ethernet, SATA, Audio, SD Card). For eGPUs you really want all the bandwidth from the PCIe 3.0 x 4 to be dedicated to the GPU. I can see a dock on the main image just infront of the HTC VR headset. When you think about it if you have more than 2 Thunderbolt ports ( as long as they dont share the same PCIe 3.0 X 4 lane) AkiTiO could actuall be selling you two seperate products for roughly price of the Razer Core. I don't see the point of trying to install a water cooled card as an eGPU since really is such devices are mainly used for gaming in environments where the fan noise from the GPU and 120mm won't be an issue. I'm really liking the turn of events for Thunderbolt, this third version has brought a lot ofjoy especially to Windows users. For me the biggest advantage is theThunderbolt Audio and Video interfaces that can now be used with Windows as well as Mac for production. Recently Intel indicated that they will natively support USB 3.1 in their chipsets, I wish they could support Thunderbolt natively on their chipsets too. I hope those Thunderbolt fibre cables come soon and at an affordable price. 2 meter copper cables are too short for some situations. The price of eGPUs should $200 or cheaper. In an article on here discussing Series 100 Chipsets/Motherboards and Skylake, Gigabyte mentioned that it costs around $20 for the Alpine Ridge controller.
No-one, not one single person, should buy these devices. Why not? The price. Just look at what's included above! £99 should be the price with smart looking devices being around £150. But WHY? You then have to buy the gpu which, frankly, are also over priced. By the time you've finished you might as well buy a laptop and desktop.
Excited that the prices are coming down but they aren't there yet in my opinion. Once these hit $150, I think that is where I start considering getting rid of my desktop.
It's nice that they continue to come down in cost, but there's still nothing to address a less "extreme" market segment. This thing is still huge, rather expensive, and overkill for something like a 970/1070. The 170 has a TDP of 150W, half of what this enclosure is designed for.
It'd be nice to see an external enclosure that was designed to take a standard sized upper midrange card, because not everybody who wants extra power for their NUC or laptop wants to run a Titan X.
I have to say I'm a bit surprised at many of the posters complaining about the price point. I can only assume these people haven't been following this tech for long. The BizonBox starts at $599 and "offers" a few ports that will bottleneck an already bandwidth-starved GPU. The Razor Core is $499 and suffers the same issues. This is $200 cheaper and all of its bandwidth will be going where it's needed.
It's important to keep in mind just what this $300 purchase unlocks for the consumer, and comparing it to the cost of buying a tower PC completely misses the point. Many people have a need for the portability that a laptop offers, and also need the beefier capabilities of a desktop GPU when at their desk. $300 provides all of the tower components one would need - minus obviously the typically expensive GPU.
This means that the laptop may supply the desktop equivalent of the monitor, keyboard, peripheral hub/motherboard, wifi card, sound card/speakers, ram, hard drive(s), optical drive(s), webcam, and so forth. Enabling your laptop to provide all of that for your desktop is not a bad deal at $300, particularly if your laptop sports medium to high end hardware.
Adding to this is the fact that the laptop itself will avoid obsolescence much longer due to the upgradeability of the eGPU.
Both of these arguments combine to create a very compelling rationale for this product at $300 for a wide - albeit niche - audience. Take for example the Acer V17 Nitro Black, available for only $1200 at Costco (no affiliation): http://www.costco.com/Acer-V17-Nitro-Laptop---Inte...
For a very compelling $1200 price-point it offers a true 4k screen at a desktop-worthy 17" size. It also sports Thunderbolt 3. It offers a capable 4 GB GTX 960 for on-the-go use and an Intel Core i7-6700 HQ, along with 16 GB DDR4 Ram. Because it is unlikely to function well at 4k resolution with most games, it may be scaled to 1080p during mobile use, and 4k resolution any time an eGPU is attached. Future-proofing is essentially achieved, and the 4k resolution may be scaled back to 1080p long into the future when advanced games or other media programs begin to strain it even with the eGPU.
That's not mentioning that the owner's next laptop, when replacement becomes necessary, need not put much emphasis on the stock mGPU’s power, as the Node will provide the horsepower needed when heavy-lifting is a must. This fact saves the buyer considerable expense far into the future.
Anyone seeking the appropriate system configuration can take advantage of this product and recoup their $300 if they make intelligent, strategic choices.
There is no question that eGPUs are the future, as is the much wider umbrella of modular, plug-n-play computing. $300 puts this well into the reach of the mainstream, so long as the niche prerequisites that make it attractive are met.
If used with a desktop, does the installed GPU just appear as another display device to the OS? My interest is more in expanding the compute capability of my existing machine.
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jsntech - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
In my opinion, this is the future of a pretty decent slice of the market. The emergence of several of these (especially like this one with a standard TB3 connection) is pretty encouraging.Not holding my breath, but sure would also be nice if Apple ever decided to create drivers supporting eGPUs...might actually provide incentive for developers to consider macOS for more demanding GPU-intensive applications (dare I say, VR?). Like I said, not holding my breath...
MadDuffy - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
I'd have agreed with you when thunderbolt came out and the potential seemed so high (five years ago). But now we have faster wireless networking and streaming tech, so these boxes aren't reasonable for most gaming purposes when you could just spend 300 dollars and get a desktop.MadDuffy - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Competition is good, though. Get the prices down!rhysiam - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Does anyone know what Intel is actually charging for the TB3 controllers? It must be a lot, because we still only see TB on higher end mobos and portables. That seems like it's going to be the biggest problem for this market. If you can pop one of these boxes into just about any modern laptop, then they've got a good chance. But if things stay as they are now, and you have to carefully choose and pay more for a TB3 laptop, then overpay for these enclosures (you could literally buy a case, PSU & entire motherboard for half the price of this TB3 enclosure)... then I can't see these ever becoming anything other than niche products suiting people who are prepared to pay significantly more for the particular benefits they bring.The other problem, I suspect, is that we're seeing an increasing number of manufacturers producing pretty competent portable gaming laptops. Some of the recent 14" & 15" inch laptops with GTX 1060s, while of course bulkier than an ultrabook, still manage to be both relatively portable (~2/3" thick and under 4lbs) and extremely competent gaming machines. Many, as well, do this while costing far less in a single package than the laptop + GPU enclosure + GPU approach. We no longer live in a world where the only competent gaming laptops are 12lbs+ monstrosities.
Obviously there's a market for these enclosures, it just seems that with capable ~4lb gaming laptops, it's a pretty niche market.
twtech - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
I think the best use for these is paired with an ultrabook that has a capable CPU but uses integrated graphics. The ultrabook has long battery life so you can do the types of basic tasks you typically want to be able to do while mobile - browse the internet, check email, work on documents, etc.Then when you want to sit down and play a game - which you'd usually do plugged in anyway - you plug into an external box like this (but preferably with those additional ports), that charges your laptop, provides connectivity for your external monitors, input devices, add-on storage for your game library, etc.
So basically you can get the best of both worlds. I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has owned gaming laptops in the past, and never really had a need or desire to use them as such while travelling - but I did wish I had better battery life and a more portable machine.
bronan - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Log in which port you want to try to plugin ... The ultrabooks i have seen only have 1 port available for EVERYTHINGEden-K121D - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
$8.51_rick - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
I carry my Skull canyon NUC between work and home nearly every day, as it's a far superior desktop the one my work got me. With an external GPU I could game on it at home in high quality.$300 for an enclosure is painful, though. I lost the link but a while ago I saw an external adapter, not an enclosure, that was about $130 with external PSU.
bronan - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
You actually should read the test reviews it does not do wonders at all.If you expect desktop performance you better buy a real home pc and put in a decent card which performs as it should. You get mediocre laptop performance even if you put a monster card in that box.
negusp - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
BS. It does do wonders for CPU-capable machines/laptops. The Skull Canyon NUC has a very capable CPU, and an external GPU would run just as fast as a normal GPU connected via PCI-E.1_rick - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Indeed. I can run a pair of Server 2012 R2 VMs with SQL Server and Visual Studio on the host OS at the same time. The one place it's a weak machine is the integrated graphics.Nunyabz - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link
Yah Broman, there is a loss of performance when using an external gpu adapter as opposed to a direct to the motherboard connection of the gpu, in the case of the node it is 6-7%. But as far as mediocre laptop performance with an external gpu, you are wrong, if it was not better they would not make them. Not only that, i have a egpu on my skull canyon (which is basically a laptop without a screen), and i can tell you the performance is way better.Samus - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Nobody has to carry a desktop around anymore. It's the 21st century, we don't sync our Palm pilots, we don't run local exchange servers, and we don't need to have horse power on us at all times, you simply need to use Windows to go and continuum if you want a fast environment available remotely,damianrobertjones - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
"we don't run local exchange servers," - A lot of companies do as they'd prefer NOT to pay the monthly charge and be ripped off.1_rick - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
I don't want a fast environment available remotely, though. With a good keyboard and monitor both at home and at work, the NUC sets up and tears down as fast as a laptop. I get a significantly more powerful workstation at the office than my company would pay for, and at home I can do any gaming that doesn't <i>require</i> a high-end GPU, although an external one would take care of that, and, even if it's not as fast as it would be over an x16 link, it would probably still handily beat the Iris Pro 580.Nunyabz - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link
The external adapter you probably saw was a Bplus pe4c, I currently use one of these on my skull canyon with a gtx 960. It uses a dell da-2 psu.ET - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
The concept of eGPU is still good, it just needs to get down to portable levels. I don't need a top of the line GPU, I just want something that's significantly faster (and a little more robust) than Intel integrated. I don't need a 300W GPU. A small external box with a built-in (possibly mobile) GPU would be great for that, something that's small enough to transport and doesn't cost an arm and a leg just for infrastructure.cwolf78 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
This. When an *enclosure* costs as much as a game console or a mainstream graphics card there is a BIG problem. Going through what a ballpark of the BOM is in my head and even factoring in R&D and a substantial profit margin, it just doesn't add up. I guess they figure most people with TB3 are Mac users who are easily parted with their money.xype - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
> Going through what a ballpark of the BOM is in my head and even factoring in R&D and a substantial profit margin, it just doesn't add up.Care to share those numbers and how you came up with them?
1_rick - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
FWIW, the dock I saw that I can no longer find, was basically a laptop-style power brick (albeit much larger than modern-day laptop bricks--it's a Dell model that I think was used for desktops, but I don't remember the model, and a simple PCB with the PCIe slot, and the appropriate power connectors. IIRC the power supply was sold separately and the two components totaled around $130.Beatnutz_ - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Why would Apple have to create the drivers? NVIDIA already does this, and you can buy external GPU-boxes for Macs. They're called Bizon Box and work with PCs too. We have two at work, and planning to buy more, but this seems better. Bizon Box is built using older versions of Akitio boxes and they are very expensive. Would rather cut the middle man out and get them straight from Akitio.jameskatt - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
AMD cards should work.scasfw2 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Días antes del lanzamiento oficial de Clash Royale Update, una fuga comenzó a propagarse en línea. Se reveló cuatro cartas que posiblemente se incluirán en las características de la próxima versión.http://juegodetruco.net/trucos-clash-royale-clash-...
prisonerX - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Soon PCIe will take over the world as the universal local interconnect.cygnus1 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Considering what the Power Color Devil Box offers, for only $80 more, the price for this should probably be cut a little. I'd expect at least a $100 retail price difference for those features.Huacanacha - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Indeed the PowerColor can serve nicely just as an expansion dock as well. Although I do like the dedicated bandwidth and dedicated purpose of the AKiTiO box.tipoo - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
What I don't get is why AMD and Nvidia aren't at the forefront of making affordable Thunderboxes. It would expand the market for dedicated graphics cards.zepi - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
And reduce the market for mobile GPU's that have higher margins than the external GPUs?WorldWithoutMadness - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
That's if they're playing it wrong. If they're playing it right, they can get 2 GPU sales (mobile GPU + external GPU). This also serves as upgrade option. It's not like majority of people throw away their laptop every a year or two.xype - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
"Works best/only with our mobile GPU line for reasons that are maybe technical" there you go. :)abrowne1993 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Glad to see more of these but they're still too expensive for me.sorten - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Good to see more competition in the eGPU market. If the SP5 doesn't have a TB3 connector I'll be switching to a Dell XPS or something similar.DanaGoyette - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
This is yet another device that lacks the daisy-chaining ability. Why do companies leave that out?DanNeely - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Because a GPU really does need more or less the full x4 bandwidth to avoid bottlenecking in a significant fraction of games.Dropping to an PCIe 3.0 x2 equivalent (brown bars in the linked article) has a 8-9% average penalty vs x16 at 1080p. While that doesn't sound bad the average is a mix of games which are virtually un-impacted and others that get badly clobbered. COD4 was the worst with a 33% penalty, but there were several others that took hits of nearly 20%.
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/R9_Fury_X_...
PS I wouldn't hold my breath for the situation improving significantly with TB4/PCIe4 in a few more years. The relative scaling from reduced lanes has held more or less constant since the first tests like this where done about a decade ago with PCIe 1.0 cards.
PPS if these manage to catch on enough that volume does start pushing down prices I suspect we probably will start seeing docking station/pass through models showing up a bit more widely as a way to differentiate in the market, but for gaming purposes I don't think the TB pass through will ever be a good idea. USB's another story since it's bandwidth normally only needs a tiny fraction of TBs bandwidth and smart drivers/controllers should be able to interleave its' packets into gaps in the PCIe traffic.
Lolimaster - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
With this huge things is just cheaper and more convenient to build yourself a miniITX pc and a cheapo laptop.beginner99 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Yeah that's always my conclusion. The tech is great and cool but in real live not practical or cost efficient. If you go the light laptop + extensions route you need the laptop, the eGPU dock, the eGPU and also another laptop dock in this case (for Mouse, keyboard, network, USB...).The docks make this a bad deal full of compromise.I rather pay maybe a little more for a nice desktop and an even smaller (albeit less powerful) laptop.
In reality I haven't used my laptop in weeks. For coaching surfing smartphone is good enough mostly and for everything else I use my desktop. So you can just as well put most of the money in a desktop and the rest in a better smartphone or a tablet.
xype - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I get a fairly good laptop at work (new 2016 MBP) which has amazeballs in CPU and SSD speeds for its form factor. Getting a ~$500-700 eGPU setup at home would give me the performance of a $1500+ standalone gaming system. For me it’s a really interesting options, once I know how well it works.It’s probably similar for most other people who _need_ a decent laptop for work.
Compared to a dedicated gaming ITX it’s not cheap, of course. But that’s not their market. In fact, I’d guess people looking for "cheap" are as far removed from their market as it gets.
negusp - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
There isn't Mac eGPU support, and there may never be.xype - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Yeah, Google tells me something different. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rl...Beatnutz_ - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Depends on what you want to use it for. We're using a product like this for 3D renders. Even people with laptops can connect to them easily and boost render time by quite a lot. It's expensive, but very flexible. For gaming you are better off building a proper PC'N yes.1_rick - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
Once you've already dropped $1000 on a Skull Canyon (or, maybe an Ultrabook with a great CPU but lame GPU) you may not want to buy a whole nother computer just for gaming.Lolimaster - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Things things should MXM gpu's and external power brick.farzher - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
Why the heck is an EMPTY BOX that holds a graphics card more expensive than a graphics card? x_xThese need to be around 100$
The m.2 eGPU setups cost around 30$
Why is the thunderbolt price such a ripoff?
beginner99 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
You are right but if Intel charges you $100 per TB3 controller...then there isn't much room.xype - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
They’re not charging that much, but from what I know they are picky with who and what they certify.I think it’s simpler than that; lack of competition. If you’re the only kid on the block you can charge $600. If you want to compete with the company charging $600, charging $500 will work.
We’re at $300 now, so here’s hoping that in 6 months or so we’ll get to $200.
A5 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Yeah, but even if it is $25 for the controller chip, then you add $50 or so for the SFX PSU, a few more for the fan and case, plus whatever amortized engineering costs...they're probably making a decent margin on this thing, but not the outrageous amount you'd think at first glance.xype - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Sure, and as long as there isn’t much competition around they will continue to have higher margins. If enough people start buying those, prices will come down anyway. But yeah, something like that isn’t really comparable to a self-built franken-eGPU, so it’s a bit simplistic to calculate costs like was done above.KimGitz - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I love that they haven't included another Thunderbolt 3 port for daisy chaining or any other ports (USB, Ethernet, SATA, Audio, SD Card). For eGPUs you really want all the bandwidth from the PCIe 3.0 x 4 to be dedicated to the GPU.I can see a dock on the main image just infront of the HTC VR headset. When you think about it if you have more than 2 Thunderbolt ports ( as long as they dont share the same PCIe 3.0 X 4 lane) AkiTiO could actuall be selling you two seperate products for roughly price of the Razer Core.
I don't see the point of trying to install a water cooled card as an eGPU since really is such devices are mainly used for gaming in environments where the fan noise from the GPU and 120mm won't be an issue.
I'm really liking the turn of events for Thunderbolt, this third version has brought a lot ofjoy especially to Windows users.
For me the biggest advantage is theThunderbolt Audio and Video interfaces that can now be used with Windows as well as Mac for production.
Recently Intel indicated that they will natively support USB 3.1 in their chipsets, I wish they could support Thunderbolt natively on their chipsets too.
I hope those Thunderbolt fibre cables come soon and at an affordable price. 2 meter copper cables are too short for some situations.
The price of eGPUs should $200 or cheaper. In an article on here discussing Series 100 Chipsets/Motherboards and Skylake, Gigabyte mentioned that it costs around $20 for the Alpine Ridge controller.
damianrobertjones - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
No-one, not one single person, should buy these devices. Why not? The price. Just look at what's included above! £99 should be the price with smart looking devices being around £150. But WHY? You then have to buy the gpu which, frankly, are also over priced. By the time you've finished you might as well buy a laptop and desktop.xype - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I, too, want a MacBook Pro for $999. But I guess both of us can dream. :Pingwe - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Excited that the prices are coming down but they aren't there yet in my opinion. Once these hit $150, I think that is where I start considering getting rid of my desktop.Guspaz - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
It's nice that they continue to come down in cost, but there's still nothing to address a less "extreme" market segment. This thing is still huge, rather expensive, and overkill for something like a 970/1070. The 170 has a TDP of 150W, half of what this enclosure is designed for.It'd be nice to see an external enclosure that was designed to take a standard sized upper midrange card, because not everybody who wants extra power for their NUC or laptop wants to run a Titan X.
Andromedus - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I have to say I'm a bit surprised at many of the posters complaining about the price point. I can only assume these people haven't been following this tech for long. The BizonBox starts at $599 and "offers" a few ports that will bottleneck an already bandwidth-starved GPU. The Razor Core is $499 and suffers the same issues. This is $200 cheaper and all of its bandwidth will be going where it's needed.It's important to keep in mind just what this $300 purchase unlocks for the consumer, and comparing it to the cost of buying a tower PC completely misses the point. Many people have a need for the portability that a laptop offers, and also need the beefier capabilities of a desktop GPU when at their desk. $300 provides all of the tower components one would need - minus obviously the typically expensive GPU.
This means that the laptop may supply the desktop equivalent of the monitor, keyboard, peripheral hub/motherboard, wifi card, sound card/speakers, ram, hard drive(s), optical drive(s), webcam, and so forth. Enabling your laptop to provide all of that for your desktop is not a bad deal at $300, particularly if your laptop sports medium to high end hardware.
Adding to this is the fact that the laptop itself will avoid obsolescence much longer due to the upgradeability of the eGPU.
Both of these arguments combine to create a very compelling rationale for this product at $300 for a wide - albeit niche - audience. Take for example the Acer V17 Nitro Black, available for only $1200 at Costco (no affiliation): http://www.costco.com/Acer-V17-Nitro-Laptop---Inte...
For a very compelling $1200 price-point it offers a true 4k screen at a desktop-worthy 17" size. It also sports Thunderbolt 3. It offers a capable 4 GB GTX 960 for on-the-go use and an Intel Core i7-6700 HQ, along with 16 GB DDR4 Ram. Because it is unlikely to function well at 4k resolution with most games, it may be scaled to 1080p during mobile use, and 4k resolution any time an eGPU is attached. Future-proofing is essentially achieved, and the 4k resolution may be scaled back to 1080p long into the future when advanced games or other media programs begin to strain it even with the eGPU.
That's not mentioning that the owner's next laptop, when replacement becomes necessary, need not put much emphasis on the stock mGPU’s power, as the Node will provide the horsepower needed when heavy-lifting is a must. This fact saves the buyer considerable expense far into the future.
Anyone seeking the appropriate system configuration can take advantage of this product and recoup their $300 if they make intelligent, strategic choices.
There is no question that eGPUs are the future, as is the much wider umbrella of modular, plug-n-play computing. $300 puts this well into the reach of the mainstream, so long as the niche prerequisites that make it attractive are met.
1_rick - Thursday, November 17, 2016 - link
"Many people have a need for the portability that a laptop offers, and also need the beefier capabilities of a desktop GPU when at their desk. "An important additional component in the consideration is "and you don't want to have two PCs".
Impetuous - Monday, November 21, 2016 - link
If used with a desktop, does the installed GPU just appear as another display device to the OS? My interest is more in expanding the compute capability of my existing machine.Nunyabz - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link
If your desktop has thunderbolt 3 you should be able to use it for a second/additional display.