There is at least one NUC-like box with a 1060 now:
Looks like $999 on newegg with no memory / drive / OS. There’s even a 1070 version for $200 more. But then…
The ugly
- Having to buy a whole new PC when the GPU becomes obsolete
Hey @stusser when are any of these mythical thunderbolt 3 external GPU boxes ever going to be available? Because to be honest, fuck it, I’m going for full on 60fps 4k gaming on my current TV if I’m gonna bother with anything that involved.
The razer core has been out for a couple of months already. It works with your skull canyon NUC. Problem is it costs $500 for the enclosure alone.
Powercolor’s “Devil Box” is coming out right now and should be on Newegg in the next week or two for $379.
Prices are still too high; $300 is a reasonable top-end for this sort of thing, but with only two on the market that’s not surprising. More will come and I expect prices to drop precipitously when the chinese start churning them out.
That Zotac is very cool, and would be incredibly attractive if it was $800. At $1000, meh.
Ultimately I don’t expect external enclosures for desktop graphics cards to be what really drives adoption. They’re for serious no-compromise enthusiasts. I expect to see sleek/slim TB3 docks with tons of ports and integrated lower-end GPUs like that GTX 1060 starting around $350. Around a $100 markup over the desktop graphics card. Asus, EVGA, MSI, Powercolor, Gigabyte, etc, they’ll all make 'em, just like Western Digital and Seagate sell external hard drives today. And those will be _hella-_sweet.
@wumpus Those Zbox’s look interesting. My big-case desktop PC died a couple months ago and I’ve seen no need to replace it with. The way my house is, I just never used my gaming PC since it was up in the den and my wife and I are practically never there.
Even if those Zbox devices are more expensive than a custom gaming PC I could build, it could easily replace the Alienware Alpha I currently have under the TV alongside my consoles.
I already have an SSD I can transfer over, and same with an OS license. So $1200 for a gaming PC with a 1070 in it? That doesn’t seem too awful or overpriced at all? Especially for the custom form factor?
That Zotac box has a 1060, not a 1070, and it doesn’t clock very high. And it’s $999. You could build a mATX box for $400 easy and drop a $250 1060 in it, saving a whopping $350 and getting higher performance. Admittedly in a much larger form factor.
Or you could drop in a $400 1070 and get dramatically higher performance and still save $200.
Or a $650 1080 and just plain smoke it. For an extra fifty bucks.
I’m not about to go and purchase it now of course, but the $1200 I mentioned is a response to wumpus saying “there’s even a 1070 version for $200 more”.
The form factor is really important to me right now. I’ve built computers for a decade and a half, I know how to do it and how to price things out. After my PC catastrophically failed a few months ago due to a busted power supply that took out my motherboard, I’m OK paying a bit more for a mostly pre-built system (other than OS/storage) in a small form factor.
Ahh, I didn’t notice that.
Pre-built computers can fail too. I’ve had much better experiences building myself from quality parts. But YMMV, and you can’t build your own in that form factor.
When pre-built computers fail, I have someone to turn to for returns and repairs.
For my own PC, I had to spend days/weeks buying a new PSU first, connecting the PSU, realizing that the PC still didn’t work even with the new PSU.
Then considering that my CPU and ram are 4+ years old, I’d need to buy a new (old) motherboard, completely take everything apart, swap in the new (old) motherboard, just to see whether my GPU / CPU / Ram were also busted. And if the PC still didn’t work, I’d need to then swap out the GPU / CPU / RAM one at a time to see which of those were busted too.
Luckily, I have a PC repair shop near me that did all that grunt work for me for $35 so I didn’t need to buy a new motherboard and all that extra hassle, and they determined that my CPU / GPU / RAM are still in good working order and that it was “only” the motherboard that the PSU destroyed, but I’ve still spent hours across weeks just to get to this point now, including lugging my PC to and from that PC repair shop.
So now I still either have to buy a new (old) motherboard just to continue using my old stuff and spend a long time taking everything apart and putting it all back together, or sell the parts which are still good. But who really wants to buy a used 3750k, GTX 680, and 16GB of 4+ year old ram that’s no longer compatible with modern CPUs?
I get that other costs and problems come with buying prebuilt PCs. But at this point I think I’d rather have those problems than the problems I’ve dealt with for the last few months. Especially considering the form factor and how my entertainment center is currently configured.
Here is the AMD 480 version of same
No price though, but shipping soon (this month) apparently.
Indeed but compatibility looks spotty:
Have you seen a review that used it with Skull Canyon? I guess since so many press events showed the Razer Core and the Skull Canyon NUC together they should work. And I did install those thunderbolt firmware updates a while back. I found a video, so…
Maybe when I upgrade to the 1080 Ti next year I’ll try this out with my old 1080. (also OMG enough with the stupid LED gimmicks Jesus Razer! )
As expected though, the perf difference between desktop and external thunderbolt narrows at 1440p and above…
Brief article showing the Devil Box and Skull Canyon working together
Also this thing for $299
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10828/akitio-introduces-node-thunderbolt-3-egfx-box-for-299
That’s great since there is a clear downward trend: $499 razer → $379 devil box → $299 akitio node
Cool! $300 is getting close to a reasonable price-point, if it includes a couple extra USB-A and C ports, audio-out, and an ethernet port. Which this one does not.
Why would it need those ports?
So it works as an awesome all-in-one dock, where you plug-in your thin/light notebook and get charging, all the ports you need, and a beefy enthusiast GPU with a single cable. That’s the dream.
This is fascinating, hacking an external gpu into a mac laptop!
http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2016/12/31/cheap-and-painless-egpu-thrills-on-a-2013-macbook-pro/
Nice, new Kaby Lake NUCs have more Thunderbolt
Not really, given that he paid >$200 for a TB2 enclosure with only 75w power that only fits short video cards when you can buy a $300 TB3 enclosure with a 400w PSU that will fit an enthusiast 11" card. Like I said on HN, it’s mostly interesting academically.
A small update on the Skull Canyon NUC experiment. Intel’s video drivers are decent, but definitely quirkier than nVidia or AMD.
This was apparent to me for a while, but became much easier to see after I added the Razer Core and a real nvidia GPU via thunderbolt 3.
For example (just off the top of my head):
using madVR eventually caused the display driver to crash and other oddities
Trials Fusion crashed immediately on launch with the latest Intel video drivers. Same exact game install works like a charm with the nvidia GPU and booted up first time.
MPC-HT x64 playing videos (using the default system codec, no MadVR) at 4k would eventually hang the video subsytem after a few hours. Switching to 1080p worked fine.
Some Steam games see you have “Intel GPU” and freak out about it, forcing you to use really low settings or generally giving you grief, assuming your video is crap.
Now, on the whole, most games worked fine with the Intel GPU. Driver updates over time helped. But even today it is a little quirky, and I can’t say I will miss those quirks as I switch over to the eGPU and an Nvidia GPU and drivers.
Even the modest $150 GTX 1050 Ti I have in there right now is quite a powerhouse, as “only” a 75w card with no power connectors versus the Iris Pro 580:
Bioshock Infinite 15 fps → 79 fps
Rise of the TR 12 fps → 49 fps
Overwatch 43 fps → 114 fps
I think you are … kinda totally wrong about this.
Notice I am running my Razer Core with a 75w video card, single slot, and it’s clobbering (like 3x-5x) the best on-board GPU Intel has ever shipped. And unless your laptop has a mobile 1060 gtx or better, it’s not gonna be a step up from this.
It’s also sort of shocking how much heat “only” a 75w card generates under extended gameplay. I am starting to reconsider my plans to stuff my old 1080 in there when I finally get my 1080 Ti… given that it’ll suck down 180w under load, that’s 2.4x this card’s heat budget. Putting it “inside” any kind of cabinet might be a non-starter…
I think a cheap 75w TB3 box with a built in 1050 Ti or maybe even a 1060 would be a HUGE seller.
The price paid was a key component of my evaluation there.
