Introducing the Node: AKiTiO's Thunderbolt 3 eGFX Box

[Raevenlord]

AKiTiO has introduced its new, Thunderbolt 3-powered external graphics box. Akin to Powercolor's Devil Box ($379), Razer's Core ($499) or ASUS' XG2, the AKiTiO Node is meant to house an external graphics card, delivering true discrete-graphics-class performance to your laptop, AIO or SFF PC. One thing the Node has going for it, though, is pricing: this eGFX Box comes in at only $299. At this price-point, the Node makes away with extra connectors found in some of its competitors, like Ethernet or USB 3.0, keeping it as simple and to-the-point as possible: the only port is for its Thunderbolt 3 connection.

The AKiTiO Node is 428mm long, 145 mm wide and 227 mm high, making it compatible with a variety of dual-slot, full-length AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards (up to 312 mm long, 170 mm high [with power cables] and 44 mm wide), and sports an upgradeable, integrated 400 W SFX PSU, as well as one 120 mm fan for extra cooling capability.



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[Prima.Vera]

Thunderbolt 3 is still not good enough to fully power a GPU. Those boxes are overly and callously expensive.

 

[Captain_Tom]

Make this $200, and come with a full hub of connectivity so I can make this my "Dock".

Then I will actually consider just getting 1 laptop and an external GPU box.

 

[Caring1]

So it can take a Graphics card that uses a 6 & 8 pin power connector?
I see it needs a 6 pin connected to the board for the PCI-e slot too.

 

[phanbuey]

razer's core performs terribly...

it seems like there is some overhead with the thunderbolt solutions (or maybe razer drivers suck), but the alienware PCIE one works well but its proprietary...

so instead of spending $200, you can just sell the NUC and build a cheap rig around a gfx card... you can even make it mini itx so the footprint is the same lol.

 

[Kasika]

Still too expensive for what is essentially a box and a PSU...