Recently I noticed some interesting developments in gaming hardware: External GPU devices, like the “Razer Core” and other brands like “BizonBOX” or “The Wolfe”. Essentially these devices seem to be external housings for arbitrary desktop grafix cards, which can be attached to your tiny ultrabook and perform like hellfire.
If it works like advertised, it’s a real game changer, isn’t it?
Anyone using this kind of hardware?
I had Core for couple of weeks. And sold it on ebay. 5 kg not portable at all. very noisy. because no hot-swap (at least with my dell precision) is not very practical for daily use.
I use Akitio Thunder 3 with my Dell XPS 13 9350 (i7 6560U) and Intel NUC Skull Canyon.
Box by Akitio fits small form-factor cards only, so I use Palit’s GTX 1050ti 4Gb. Small TDP of 1050ti is ok with Akitio’s original PSU which is just 72W.
Another option is small 1060 by zotac which still fits the case, but you have to change original PSU with smth more powerful, for instance Dell’s DA-2 12B 220W considered to be the best + some soldering and drilling to make breathing holes required.
Small cards by Gigabyte (it has GTX 1070 with 185W TDP) are not enough small to fit the box. It’s ok for home or office use but this particular setup with uncovered guts is far from portable.
BTW, I have several issues with connectivity. I’t ok to have 4 additional displays and 1 laptop screen via Thunder 3 with XPS 13, however Skull Canyon cant fire gtx’s video outputs.
Frame rate shows quite unobvious result. Max fps with Display Port output from the box and fps drops significantly via direct 1050ti to monitor connection.
As one can see, the box is small and quite heavy for it’s size (~2kg, empty)
We just got a BizonBox 2S with a GTX980ti in the office. Its thunderbolt 2 only, because we mainly have 2011-2014 Macs that we use with OS X and Windows.
The Box looks great and can fit large graphics cards up to GTX1080 and others.
Apart from the box itsself, which is slick, the experience is not quite as plug and play as they make it look (yet). For the older 2012 Macbook Pro you need some special software, which is definitely advanced level to install.
In the end I got it to work on that machine and the framerate with one of our tools with a DX11 renderer and lots of bells and whistles went from 8fps to 55fps, but with occasional “stuttering”. Not sure whats causing that, but it seems to be working as advertised.
The power supply (400W version) is not so nice as it has a noisy fan, which doesnt turn off unless you unplug it.
The Bizon is definitely designed around Macs, so you have to check compatibility with Dell XPS and the like beforehand. I’ll update if I gain new insights.
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