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  • Thrawn - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Does it provide power over the thunderbolt cable to charge the laptop at the same time? If so what wattage?
  • norderk - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Taken form wikipedia article of Thunderbolt; "Thunderbolt 3 ports implement 'USB Power Delivery', allowing the ports to source or sink up to 100 watts of power."
  • Gigaplex - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    That doesn't mean this box actually implements that feature...
  • dsumanik - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link

    It says it does in the specs, so I would assume so yes
  • frodesky - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Yes, 60W. It's enough to charge the laptop at idle and keep it from draining under full CPU load while gaming with the external GPU.
  • nirwander - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    One step closer to my setup with small fanless PC with occasional gaming @eGFX.
  • Ukyo - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    I'm curious, what fanless cpu setup do you have? If it's fanless, wouldn't it be the major bottleneck?
  • nirwander - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Intel i5-6600 and 32 GB DDR4@3000 in the mITX Streacom case.
  • melgross - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Jeez, this is as ugly as sin.
  • ddriver - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    The lame tribal logo is what truly ruins it.
  • BrokenCrayons - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Yup, ugly is an understatement. The protruding thumbscrews on the sides give it a Frankenstein neck bolts look and the folded sheet metal all around adds unnecessary product bulk. The PSU fan looks tiny and potentially noisy given the rated wattage. The worst part is the branding and logo plastered on the front. That's shameful and a bit of silver duct tape to cover it would be a huge improvement if the logo couldn't be somehow scraped off. This thing looks like it was designed on a Friday night at the bar when everyone was already too many drinks into their night to realize they were making something hideous. The only shred of good sense PowerColor is demonstrating here is making it a limited production run. I doubt with its revolting looks that these things are going to leap off the shelves.
  • melgross - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Ugh, gamer chic! My daughter is a very hard core gamer, and even she thinks this is fugly.
  • lewisl9029 - Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - link

    Sometimes beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I think we can conclude this thing is just objectively ugly, by anyone's standards.
  • ToTTenTranz - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    At these prices they're just making sure the interest for discrete GPU boxes withers away.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Jeez, that thing is big enough to be a full computer.
  • cigar3tte - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    So this isn't a device to let you connect to the laptop and play on the laptop screen? You'd need to connect to an external monitor?

    With Thunderbolt connection, I'm assuming it works for MacBook Pro?
  • val1984 - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    The MacBook Pro doesn't have a Thunderbolt 3 connector... Yet since it may be the case as soon as on Thursday.
  • zanon - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    >With Thunderbolt connection, I'm assuming it works for MacBook Pro?

    First, on the hardware side this needs Thunderbolt 3, the current rMBPs are only TB2. Presumably the models they'll announce in 3 days will be TB3 though. Second you still need software support. Nvidia's web drivers can be made to work with a 900 series, and macOS has some AMD 4xx support, so maybe that part could function. The 10xx are right out though for now, maybe indefinitely as long as Apple doesn't care to use Nvidia GPUs. The OS itself also needs to have it.

    New MBPs with TB3 will certainly work with this if they're booted into Windows, but the ability to use it with macOS at all is an open question. On the other hand, to the extent Mac users might ever hope to have the option to get good GPUs ever again these sorts of enclosures are the best shot. Apple choosing to completely kill the PCIe slot even in their "professional" desktop systems nuked the market, but they still sell lots of notebooks and a well done market in GPU docking stations might represent enough sales potential to make it worth it to Nvidia to bother updating their drivers again.
  • jsntech - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Good info...thanks!

    I'm not sure how much demand there is for high-power gaming in MacOS (thoughts, anyone?). I do think this could be really cool for Boot Camp gaming...plug a (TBA) TB3 MBP into this beast and boot up to eGPU goodness? Yes, please.

    Maybe it's just me, but this price doesn't seem unreasonable for *that* much flexibility and increased functionality.
  • zanon - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    >I'm not sure how much demand there is for high-power gaming in MacOS

    For the right price? I'm sure there's some, because Steam does alright despite the headwinds from Apple, and there are still significant numbers of Mac ports that seem to sell fine. Rebooting to another OS is a pain and carries a lot of overhead, most people in general prefer convenience unless there is a massive reason to do otherwise. Ultimately remember that when the profit margin is high enough and costs are amortized enough there don't need to be *that* many for the marginal value to be there. The cost of developing a GPU and most related aspects is already sunk anyway. The Mac market at least for now would definitely not be worth developing anything special for. But if they can take the 100% exact same hardware and just do a bit of a software shim and sell another few tens of thousands even? Might be worth it, it's a market with a lot of disposable income.

    Don't forget too that there's more use for GPUs then just gaming, and this particularly could benefit Nvidia because so much of the pro market is CUDA-based due to Nvidia's superior tooling, middleware, and general support. There are MBP users who would want to be able to take more advantage of that in scenarios that can't be offloaded to a cluster. Nvidia might even consider it strategically valuable beyond direct profit to help make sure there is no little corner where a competitor to CUDA might gain some oxygen.

    I still think it's unlikely to gain any huge support in the near future, but it's a better shot then there has been in a while. Notebooks are by far the biggest percentage of PC sales, and a big internal GPU involves major tradeoffs in thermals, battery life, and physical size. On the other hand CPUs don't tend to be so limited these days, with even very high end portable ones having a fraction of the TDP of a full fat GPU and are mostly capable of keeping it fed. Being able to have great size, battery and so forth on the go then sit down in the desk and have direct attached workstation class graphics (and networking, storage, maybe even power) with one cable and only one system to manage isn't unattractive in principle. They'll have to get all the UI and pricing reasonably right, but I don't see why there wouldn't be money to be made there.
  • Eletriarnation - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    If Apple comes out with a Macbook Pro that supports TB3 maybe. Right now they're all TB2, but we'll see what they show us tomorrow.
  • Death666Angel - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    "So this isn't a device to let you connect to the laptop and play on the laptop screen? You'd need to connect to an external monitor?"
    As far as I read about it when the Razer Core was introduced, it depends on the laptop implementation. The Core can connect to a Stealth and feed the image back to the internal laptop display, no need to attach external monitors.
  • BrokenCrayons - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Besides the previously discussed stupid looks and poor functional design decisions, it's too bad these things are still niche products. Some competition would do the pricing some good. After all, there's no reason some cheap, bent sheet metal, a controller board with TB hardware and a PCIe slot, and a 500W PSU should retail for $380. You can buy a much larger desktop PC case with essentially the same components, materials, design requirements, and whatnot with a power supply for $50. The only difference is that any given desktop case is forced to compete with a variety of alternative products from a large number of manufacturers in a cost-sensitive context.
  • Ej24 - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Glad to see power color moving the price down. I don't see how these are so expensive. Are they not just usb to pcie adapters in a box with a cheap psu? Is there even any complex compute or controllers housed in there? It seems a lot of what you're paying for is the Thunderbolt licensing and licensing of other IP like USB and hdmi etc
  • rocky12345 - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    It looks ok but as others have stated the logo needs to go and while we are at it being able to select different colors would be nice as well unless I missed that in the above write somewhere.
  • DanaGoyette - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Another problem with these devices: no daisy-chaining output. What if I want to attach more devices after it?
  • Toadster - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    can you hook up a Xeon Phi to do parallel compute experiments as well?
  • negusp - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    I just want a frickin TB3 controller that interfaces a PCI-E port with a power connector and possibly a cheap-ass PSU for $150 at most. I don't care about a stupidly stylized grey box with a jacked up $380 price tag. A cardboard box would even work as an enclosure.
  • lmcd - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Razer should thank them for this. Just proves that Core is worth the price.
  • zodiacfml - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    We can build a decent system without a graphics card at this price. I wonder if Thunderbolt 3 is possible if I am going to build one.
  • frodesky - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    I'd love to see what kind of "decent" system without a GPU you'd build for 400 bucks.
  • Calista - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link

    Considering he price/performance of desktop parts as compare to mobile parts it would be a walk in the park to build a system sans GPU more than capable to beat also a high end laptop for 400 dollar.
  • Lolimaster - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    This thins should use mobile gpu's. Using desktop ones are stupid, whats the difference between this and a full fledged miniITX PC. That PSU is not going to be silent.
  • scook9 - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    I would love if someone just released a m-ITX sized and shaped PCB that hosts some I/O (USB and GbE interface) and a PCIe slot with the needed TB3 connector so that we could build our own external enclosure in the case of our choosing. I would buy that board for $100-$150 in a heartbeat vs this fugly thing. The Core vs this is definitely a purchase for the core but the price is just ridiculous(er?) on that too.
  • digiguy - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    For the same price (thus less than the Razer core) I recently bought a full pc with I7-4770, 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD (the GPU inside was not very powerful, but this thing comes without a GPU anyway). So yes price needs to go down. I think the price of the Dell Graphics Amplifier ($200) is more realistic.
  • digiguy - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    PS and you cannot do SLI on these enclosure, contrary to a PC
  • Jambe - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Apart from the hideous tribal tattoo on the front of the thing, I rather like the aesthetics. Seems like it'd be straightforward to occasionally hit with a compressor, too.
  • sorten - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    These things have to drop to $200 before I'm interested. The design and name for this offering fall a bit short.
  • nickb64 - Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - link

    Yeah, the only one of these things that seems like it makes any sense is the Dell/Alienware one since it's $199 iirc. At that price, I could maybe see picking one up if you had a laptop or that NUC that supports these external GPU boxes
  • Aerodrifting - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    So we have to pay $400 out of pocket BEFORE the discreet video card comes in just for a $500 PSU and mounting? Are you serious? Not to mention the loss performance and the size of this thing is almost the same as a MINI ITX computer.
  • futuration - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link

    Just hope that devil box can work with the coming macbook pro on win10 bootcamp.
    Well, not even exactly sure (though hopefully) whether there will be an usb-c th3 port.
    I am just wondering which model of win laptops are qualified for eGFX-certified? XPS-15?
  • milkod2001 - Tuesday, November 1, 2016 - link

    At the price it sells it is a joke not to mention how especially ugly it is. I'd say gaming laptop with 1060/1070/1080 mobile GPU on board would be much better buy they this box, desktop GPU and weak laptop.
  • milkod2001 - Tuesday, November 1, 2016 - link

    than

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