- eGPUs. Are they going to power your next gaming rig? Probably not.
They're limited to four PCI express lanes, but, that is pretty cool all the same,
thanks to Thunderbolt. But they're are a dime a dozen aren't they?
Except for this guy. This is what Aorus calls the world's first water cooling, external GPU.
I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure why it needs water cooling since it's in its own enclosure.
But I guess we'll find out today. As for what's in the box,
I mean, presumably there's going to be the box, but, according to the package contents here,
we've got a Aorus RTX 2080 Ti gaming box,
which includes Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
11 Gigabyte graphics card, Thunderbolt 3 Cable, oh, that's nice,
power cord, also nice, installation guide. Driver CD, really guys?
Okay, and it comes with a carry bag, okay. Quiet, water forest cooling system,
for deep learning and AI, for real-time ray tracing game.
Did they proofread this? Let's not get too negative on it so far.
On the side here, they tell you how fast Thunderbolt is,
which is nice. We've got our list of outputs here.
HDMI, three DisplayPort, and one USB type C,
which is the virtual link connector that NVIDIA introduced in, and as far as I know,
haven't really done much with. Also, it has a USB 3.0 port on the front.
That's a type A, which is a nice touch, although I would have preferred type C at this point.
The power supplies a 450 watt. Interesting.
I'm going to open that up and see exactly what power supply that is.
But yeah, apparently it's just a Gigabyte Waterforce RTX 2080 Ti.
So yeah, it does do power delivery, so I can free up an outlet right now if I want to.
Well, let's open it up. It's a wee bit heavy.
All right, there's that carrying bag. Presumably, it's already inside, nice.
I guess it's all self-contained in the bag, so there's two extraneous boxes, they could have just sold this.
Carrying strap for our bag, Thunderbolt cable, standard, run-of-the-mill,
it's the C13, whatever it's called plug. This guy here is only about a foot.
So I guess they expect you to have this on the desk, next to your laptop.
And, the main event.
It's not a bad looking little box actually.
I didn't notice before, but there's actually a Ethernet port here,
along with two more USB type As. That's quite a lot better, that makes this more of a dock,
which I mean, realistically an eGPU should be
if you've got a laptop like this guy here.
It looks like the screws are very proprietary. In fact, I'm not sure if I would be able to get these off.
The outer screws however, are, just the standard Phillips.
So let's see if I can see what that power supply is.
Yeah, as expected, that's our 280 millimeter rad.
I can kind of see the power supply through this panel, but I don't think it has any markings on it that I can see.
It also looks like there's a bit of a mesh behind the panel as well.
And that should hopefully help with dust and sound, but it is a little bit too open, for like, proper seal.
So hopefully it's got decent air flow with that cooler.
Same thing on the other side, except this seems to be basically a solid piece,
I think it's the, whatever they're using for Ethernet and USB.
Let me just quickly crack this open and take a look. Oh, it's actually a removable dust filter.
How about that? The holes are pretty big though, all the same. So I guess this is what's on the other side as well,
but I was right, it seems like this here, is a power distribution, and I guess hub board
where we have the USB controller and the Ethernet controller inside.
You can access these without taking the panels off, that's a really nice touch.
So let's get this back together, and I'll fire it up and see how it works.
One thing that may or may not affect your particular use case, is this cable is a little short.
Now it's perfect, if you just have your eGPU right next to your laptop, like this,
no extra cable, no mess. But if your laptop's port is bad,
like this one's is, then chances are it's not long enough.
So we've gone ahead and grabbed a longer cable,
and now, we should be good. Okay, so we're sitting here at 1080p,
running Quake II RTX, getting about 30ish FPS with everything maxed out,
and that's actually not bad. This thing is making some noise though.
(fans blowing)
Not sure if that's necessarily quieter
than what a standard air-cooled GPU would do.
I'll have to get a point of comparison in a moment just to see what the performance is like
with the integrated GPU, I don't think it would be anywhere close to this. But it is worth noting that we're not getting quite
the full performance out of the 2080 Ti that we would normally get in a desktop computer,
and that is because we're running on the Thunderbolt link,
which is only PCI express four lanes. Whereas we probably need at least eight lanes
to get like really close to normal performance out of the 2080 Ti.
So with that being said, again I'm not entirely sure what the advantages to having the water cooling.
It's kind of louder. It's not necessarily going to perform better,
than a regular 2080 Ti, and an eGPU.
Pretty chilly actually, 49 degrees. I feel like they're a little bit
too aggressive on the fan then. Let's let it warm up a little bit more for a second here
and then go back and see what it looks like. Yeah, 52 degrees.
Now, I'm not sure what the ambient temperature is in here right now. It feels a little bit chilly,
so that might be helping it. But at the same time, I feel like that fan curve is a little bit too aggressive,
for something with this much cooling. It should really be targeting that 80 degree mark,
where most, you know, desktop GPUs would be targeting.
That being said, maybe that's allowing it to boost more aggressively, but at the same time,
that's going to be hindered by the PCI express 4x link.
So, it's a curious choice to have water cooling in an eGPU.
Again, this isn't really for everyone. If you've got a gaming PC,
you're not going to go out and buy this, unless you want to harvest the GPU for some reason.
No, this is more for people, who again,
have something like this, a ultra portable laptop,
like say for example, a college student who doesn't have a whole lot of space,
but who wants to game. And there's no real way to get that
ultra portable experience along with the gaming,
without an eGPU as of today. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't personally go out
and get this unless I had something like this,
but, I can see who it's for. The thing though, is that I again,
I think they really should have gone with just an air cooler or really toned down the fans,
as far as the noise goes, because it is pretty noisy.
Despite the fact that it doesn't get all that hot. It kind of falls short of a pure recommendation.
But, if the allure of carrying around a water-cooled GPU,
in its own carrying bag, speaks to you in a way that it doesn't speak to me,
Well, who's stopping you? Thanks for watching, subscribe to ShortCircuit.