- THUNDERBOLT™ 3 EGFX EXTERNAL GPU ENCLOSURE I DRIVER
- THUNDERBOLT™ 3 EGFX EXTERNAL GPU ENCLOSURE I FULL
- THUNDERBOLT™ 3 EGFX EXTERNAL GPU ENCLOSURE I WINDOWS 10
THUNDERBOLT™ 3 EGFX EXTERNAL GPU ENCLOSURE I FULL
And finally, with 2015's Thunderbolt 3, which uses the same connector as USB 3.1 and offers full compatibility with the USB standard, the PC industry seems to be properly on board with eGFX. The arrival in 2013 of Thunderbolt 2, which doubled the available bandwidth to 20Gbps, triggered the start of viable external graphics solutions. The first iteration of Thunderbolt in 2011 only supported up to 10Gbps of bandwidth, which wasn't quite enough for external GPUs. That changed with the launch of Apple and Intel's Thunderbolt standard, which had support for external PCIe devices baked in.
THUNDERBOLT™ 3 EGFX EXTERNAL GPU ENCLOSURE I DRIVER
Neither offered anywhere near the sort of bandwidth required to drive a graphics card properly, nor any official driver support from AMD and Nvidia. Others still came up with wacky solutions that used internal mini-PCIe slots with carefully placed cables. Later, others launched graphics cards linked to ExpressCard slots, which offered just a single lane of PCIe bandwidth. Fujitsu Siemens' Graphics Booster is one of the rare commercial examples.Įnlarge / The Fujitsu Graphics Booster was one of the first commercially available external graphics cards. Other connectivity standards at the time didn't have the bandwidth to support a graphics card, yet few laptop manufacturers implemented XGH. This is far cry from the early days of eGFXs when AMD launched the XGH external graphics standard, which essentially took the pins from PCIe slot and passed them through to an external connector (a solution used by Alienware for its proprietary Graphics Amplifier).
THUNDERBOLT™ 3 EGFX EXTERNAL GPU ENCLOSURE I WINDOWS 10
Still, there are reasons to be excited, not least of which is that the eGFX finally works without the need for complex driver setups (on Windows 10 at least), and can be hot-swapped without crashing your system. That's not to mention that, in a world where the likes of a GTX 1050 Ti or GTX 1060 can fit inside a slim laptop, the eGFX isn't quite as alluring as it once was. While admittedly not the most attractive of devices (if at least understated compared to the ROG XG Station 2), the eGFX Breakaway Box is perfectly functional, pairing a 350W SFX power supply with one eight-pin (6+2) and one six-pin PCIe power connector for use with a graphics card TDP of up to 300W.īut there are are limits to what can be done over Thunderbolt 3, with diminishing returns the more GPU power you pipe over the cable.
Sonnet, a US-based company that makes all manner of Thunderbolt expansion chassis for PC and Mac, has released the eGFX Breakaway Box, a compact Thunderbolt 3 dock for PCIe graphics cards that costs just $300 (UK price TBC).
When paired with a decent graphics card like an Nvidia GTX 1070 or an AMD RX 580, a full eGFX setup runs just shy of £900/$900, not including the price of a laptop to pair it with.įortunately, there's now another option. Meanwhile, the Asus ROG XG Station 2-which is most certainly not beautifully designed-costs £400/$400. The Razer Core, as beautifully designed as it is, costs a whopping £500/$500 without a graphics card-and that's if it's even in stock. Thus far the limiting factor, aside from some potential performance bottlenecks and driver support, has been price. You can even whack a PCIe video capture card or a production-ready audio interface in that external box, if you so wish. So the theory goes, you can now take most laptops with a Thunderbolt 3 port, plug in a box containing a power supply and your GPU of choice, and enjoy better visuals and higher frame rates in games, and faster rendering in production tasks. Thanks to Thunderbolt 3-which offers up to 40Gbps of bandwidth, the equivalent of four PCIe 3.0 lanes-consumers finally have access to enough bandwidth in a universal standard to make eGFX a viable option.
The external graphics card (or eGFX), long the pipe dream of laptop-touting gamers the world over, has finally come of age. Specs at a glance: Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box
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