![external gpu enclosure review external gpu enclosure review](https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/2231/images/razer-book-9.jpg)
- External gpu enclosure review install#
- External gpu enclosure review drivers#
- External gpu enclosure review upgrade#
- External gpu enclosure review software#
External gpu enclosure review software#
The software also lets you monitor the card and tweak it. There’s also RGB lighting down the bottom of the front which should help boost FPS, and it can be controlled through the software that came on the CD, or downloading it through the Aorus product page is easier if you’re like me and haven’t had a disc drive for a decade. The front has the Aorus logo in the middle and a third USB Type-A port towards the bottom, so easier access if you need to connect something. On the bottom there are some rubber feet to reduce movement and vibration as well as some vents. Underneath here we can see the 240 radiator used as part of the AIO cooling solution, there are two 120mm fans underneath it which exhaust air up and out. The top is the air exhaust, and again just a bunch of holes. On the right there’s a fan to aid airflow, the 450 watt power supply is down the bottom which offers two 8 pin power cables for the GPU, and we can just see the block and tubes on the GPU. The left and right sides have holes and act as air intakes, and both sides have dust filters.
External gpu enclosure review upgrade#
The downsides of this are that I don’t think you’ll be able to upgrade the GPU down the line, as the back panel has predefined cutouts for the GPU I/O, but maybe you could still do it with the back panel off, it just wouldn’t be ideal. It’s all matte black metal, and the size is on the smaller side compared to other eGPU enclosures I’ve used, owing to the fact that it’s been designed around their waterforce 2080 Ti, so it doesn’t have to be larger to cater to other options. Let’s take a closer look at the gaming box itself before diving into some benchmarks. If your laptop supports charging over Type-C, the gaming box will also charge the laptop with up to 100 watts of power delivery, so it can really be a nice single cable docking solution. The 2080 Ti also has three DisplayPort outputs and HDMI. It’s got ethernet and USB support too, so you can connect external storage, devices like mice and keyboard, and even gigabit network, all of which will become available just by connecting that single Thunderbolt cable to your laptop. This sort of setup also works well because of the rest of the I/O available on the gaming box. If not, just expect some performance loss using the laptop screen. For this reason, in a docking scenario I think it’s completely practical to also have a larger monitor on your desk connected to the gaming box. The idea of an external graphics enclosure is that it sits at home on your desk, you can travel with a thinner and lighter laptop, come home and hook it up with one cable. For this reason, I’ll be testing with an external monitor connected to the Gaming Box, as this will offer a performance improvement, and honestly, better experience. We could play games with the laptop screen, however this will result in worse performance as there’s more overhead involved as the laptop needs to send data to the GPU over Thunderbolt, then the GPU needs to send the display signal back over Thunderbolt to the laptop. From here you should be good to go, I’m testing with the Eluktronics MAX-17 gaming laptop.
External gpu enclosure review install#
From here Windows might start automatically grabbing an outdated Nvidia graphics driver, so get the latest from Nvidia and install that.
External gpu enclosure review drivers#
At this point you might need to run Windows update if you don’t have the necessary Thunderbolt drivers installed, then simply open up the Thunderbolt Control Center and approve the device. Setup is extremely simple, just connect the Gaming Box to your laptop with the included Type-C Thunderbolt cable and connect the box to power.
![external gpu enclosure review external gpu enclosure review](https://www.akitio.com/media/com_hikashop/upload/akitio-node-pro-angle-1920_1035918654.jpg)
![external gpu enclosure review external gpu enclosure review](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/12071/1-enclosure_678x452.jpg)
It comes with a 50cm Thunderbolt cable and power cable. It’s even got a carrying case if you want to take it somewhere like a LAN party with your laptop. The Aorus RTX 2080 Ti Gaming Box comes ready to go out of the box, so the 2080 Ti graphics is included and inside. There are various overheads associated, but essentially this does allow you to get some nice GPU power on a machine that doesn’t otherwise have any. Aorus Gaming Box first water cooled graphics enclosure I’ve seen, so let’s test it out and see if it makes any difference to performance compared to a standard air cooled eGPU.īriefly for those that don’t know, an external graphics enclosure like this connects to your laptop with Thunderbolt 3, allowing you to use the power of desktop graphics cards in your thin and light laptop which may not even have discrete graphics.