Sunday, July 11th 2021
GIGABYTE's 2021 AORUS Gaming Box eGPU Packs RTX 3080 Ti, Liquid Cooling
The 2021 GIGABYTE AORUS Gaming Box external GPU was debuted late last week. It introduces many firsts for a market less addressed this generation, particularly due to the GPU shortage. The lineup debuts with a model based on NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and introduces a liquid-cooling. The box uses an all-in-one, closed-loop liquid cooler to tame the RTX 3080 Ti, using a 240 mm x 120 mm radiator and a pair of 120 mm fans located inside the box, while additional fans ventilate the rest of its innards.
For all its might, the card is bound to be bottlenecked by its interface—a single 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 3 connection that gives the GPU the equivalent of a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface. Our RTX 3080 non-Ti PCI Express Scaling article shows that the GPU loses 12% performance on PCI-Express 1.1 x16 (comparable bandwidth to PCIe 3.0 x4). Other features of the AORUS Gaming Box include a USB 3.0 hub, and addressable RGB lighting that you can control using the RGB Fusion software. The company didn't reveal pricing or availability, but one can expect a roughly $300-400 markup over whatever the running rate of an RTX 3080 Ti these days, is. GIGABYTE is expected to carve out more Gaming Box products based on the same chassis, but using different GPUs.
Source:
HotHardware
For all its might, the card is bound to be bottlenecked by its interface—a single 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 3 connection that gives the GPU the equivalent of a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface. Our RTX 3080 non-Ti PCI Express Scaling article shows that the GPU loses 12% performance on PCI-Express 1.1 x16 (comparable bandwidth to PCIe 3.0 x4). Other features of the AORUS Gaming Box include a USB 3.0 hub, and addressable RGB lighting that you can control using the RGB Fusion software. The company didn't reveal pricing or availability, but one can expect a roughly $300-400 markup over whatever the running rate of an RTX 3080 Ti these days, is. GIGABYTE is expected to carve out more Gaming Box products based on the same chassis, but using different GPUs.
11 Comments on GIGABYTE's 2021 AORUS Gaming Box eGPU Packs RTX 3080 Ti, Liquid Cooling
And for the price of a GPU + $300-400 that's quite a bit cheaper than going with another secondary full system.
The one eGPU that make sense to me is the Asus Flow X13 where you can carry the eGPU along with the laptop in your backback
Could you perhaps rephrase it for me?A positive for some, a negative for others. I don't think that's either a good or bad thing necessarily, so I didn't bother pointing it out. Most people I would assume want to have everything on one machine, but I know other people will curse me out for that and say "keep work and personal stuff separate!!".
I just don't see the utility in buying a expensive proprietary box just to be able to turn your laptop into a gaming machine when a SFF build takes the same foot print. I also think the whole liquid cooling system is such a waste when it probably wont even preform as good as a regular air cooled desktop 3080 due to the bandwidth bottleneck. I agree with an earlier comment about the ASUS E-GPU that has a 3080 in it being much more interesting (Portable and it has pcie Gen3 8x) and I would have considered it if I didn't already build my ITX pc.