Sparkle eGPU Studio-G Enclosure Series Updated with Thunderbolt 5

[T0@st]

Sparkle debuted its new eGPU Studio-G 850 enclosure at last week's CES trade event—sporting a clear upgrade, obvious when inspecting the nearby product placard: a bump up to Thunderbolt 5 connectivity. The Hardwareluxx team managed to get the scoop on this one during their visit to Sparkle's Las Vegas suite—the latter's latest development joins the already released Thunderbolt eGPU Studio-G 750 (black finish) model, that makes do with Thunderbolt 3. The newer standard (offering up to 120 GB/s upstream/downstream) is emerging across a number of new products (mostly premium-tier laptops), but industry experts believe that adoption rates are relatively slow—Intel revealed the TB5 "Barlow Ridge" specification back in September 2023.

Sparkle's newly unveiled white-shelled eGPU Studio-G 850 is generously proportioned (403 x 200 x 237 mm) enough to house 3.5-slot discrete desktop graphics cards—taking a different approach to the likes of ASUS ROG and their XG Mobile model. An integrated handle grants a modicum of portability. Reports from CES suggest that Sparkle did not divulge any details about pricing or upcoming launch windows, but the demonstration sample seemed to be in finalized form. As the model's moniker denotes, the pre-installed internal power supply is an 850 W unit featuring 16-pin connectivity.



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[MachineLearning]

It's adorable that they used an EVGA 30-series GPU for one of the renders. Also, I'd guess that's a DeepCool PSU considering the square exhaust holes?

 

[Daven]

Thunderbolt 5 is about equivalent to PCIe Gen 3 x16 so any performance hit going external should be minimal.

 

[SL2]

It's adorable that they used an EVGA 30-series GPU for one of the renders.

That's way too modern considering that Silverstone 2010-style design lol

 

[Cheeseball]

but industry experts believe that adoption rates are relatively slow—Intel revealed the TB5 "Barlow Ridge" specification back in September 2023.

Thats because the physical implementation of this technology is not exactly there yet. We are just getting certified USB4/TB4/TB5 cables that can handle power delivery at 240W alongside 80Gbps/120Gbps data transfer.

Then there are also the signal redrivers, retimers and other smaller controllers to keep data transfer stable at various distances that need to be implemented either on the host device or on the component side.

If it was just a simple controller+cable implementation, adoption would've been a lot quicker but with the inclusion of higher bandwidth (especially PCI-E tunnelling) and power delivery, there's a lot of technological hurdles that are slowly being pushed through.