welcome to an unboxing and first look that is more exciting due to what it
represents in the future than it is necessarily for its practicality today
for gamers this is the magma Express box 3T this is quite simply a Thunderbolt
external enclosure that has two PCIe 8X
and one PCIe 4X slots inside of it it
has a 250 W power supply and it is capable of installing pretty much
anything that you would normally install in a PCI Express slot inside your
computer so right now driver support is
a bit of a challenge it comes with a carrying case so you can take it around
with you on the road think of this guys laptops that you can install up to three
full-size PCI Express expansion cards in
essentially okay just mind blown right
okay so uh comes with a blower that you can install if you have something like a
Quadro graphics card that you want to use to accelerate Cuda applications
although right now you can't use it as a display output yet and that's mostly
supported on on Apple at the time or at this time uh here are is a quick start
guide I've actually already opened this and I've already tinkered with it a fair
bit so that's why there's like PCI slot
covers in here because I've already installed cards in it but
right so what makes it more useful in the future than it is today because for
general consumers you're going to find that Hardware compatibility is a bit of
a challenge with not just this one but with all of the Thunderbolt PCI Express
expansion uh expansion Bays that you can
obtain so here it is it's crafted out it's very beautiful I mean it's very
appes the way that it's constructed it's got a nice matte aluminum finish over
the whole thing with a simple magma logo on both sides it's got a perforated
front to the enclosure that has a power indicator it's a button but generally
speaking you won't even use it because it's automatically activated as soon as
a Thunderbolt connection is detected and the computer is booted up so you can
just leave it plugged in and leave it on all the time and it'll automatically
turn itself on and off with your computer should you desire that there's
also a cooling fan behind here it's an 80 mil cooling fan so you can install
power hungry things graphics cards to go along with that 250 wat power supply the
bottom again is quite simple you've just got four rubber feet so that it doesn't
go anywhere and once you load this thing up with expensive Hardware you're going
to want it to not really go anywhere so I've got three cards in here right now
one of them is an ASUS Zonar uh uh Zen
it's a Zen sound card so this is for the
uh the split out for more analog connectors I've also got a Blackmagic
capture card that's an HDMI capture card it's an intens Pro and last but not
least I have some random LSI raid card
that I decided to throw in here and see what happened I tried a number of
graphics cards it looks like the challenge right now is that the graphics
card manufacturers need to release drivers that will support running over
Thunderbolt so that Thunderbolt connection is 10 gbit per second and you
can daisy chain this device for multiple
Express boxes or storage devices or whatever else remember Thunderbolt Daisy
chains up to six times um and that gives
you enough bandwidth these are all PCIe 2.0 ports so it has there you go two 8X
slots and a 4X slot with one of those 8X slots having an open back so you can
install a 16x card so I tried a bunch of different graphics cards GeForce cards
Radeon cards uh I even had a Quadro 6000
that I put in but unfortunately on the Windows platform I wasn't able to
leverage that but out of the cards that are in here the black magic intensity
Pro worked flawlessly so if you wanted to say for example have a portable
capture station so you had like a nice powerful ivybridge laptop with a
Thunderbolt port and you wanted to carry one of these guys around with you with I
mean it wouldn't consume much power in that configuration so you have a small
UPS or something battery backup that you run it off of you could actually do
multiple camera captures all at the same time do live to tape recording on set
somewhere so that's fascinating you could install three of those cards
capture up to three sources at the same time very cool stuff power is provided
by two Molex connector so you could adapt those to PCI Express if you were
running a Mac which apparently runs completely driverless you just throw the
quadro 6000 in there you plug in the power so you use a PCIe adapter and you
install it right there um so you get two
of those and a 250 watt power supplies I mentioned before the raid C didn't
really get detected and the Zonar zense
works it works but the ASUS control
panel wouldn't install so what I've encountered is everything from stuff
that doesn't get detected at all to stuff that Tex and works perfectly like
the black magic I even captured video to stuff that works but doesn't quite work
so we're almost there this is extremely exciting technology because what I am
waiting for CU I like notebooks I like
portability but I hate how gutless notebook Graphics are and how horrible
generally speaking notebook onboard sound is how limited the expansion
options are now all of a sudden through the magic of Thunderbolt you could just
sit down at your desk at home plug in your notebook one cable hot pluggable
have a graphics card a beast sound card
and like an awesome external ra like raid card that runs off to like some
storage array or something like that and the whole thing could run off your notebook you disconnect it you go on the
road and you're ready to go so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first
look at the magma Express box 3T I am so
excited for the future of devices like this right now they're also quite
expensive don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews
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