WHY is this WATER COOLED??? - AORUS RTX 2080 Ti Gaming Box eGPU
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2020-05-05
·
1,385 words · ~6 min read
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- eGPUs. Are they going to power your next gaming rig? Probably not.
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They're limited to four PCI express lanes, but, that is pretty cool all the same,
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thanks to Thunderbolt. But they're are a dime a dozen aren't they?
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Except for this guy. This is what Aorus calls the world's first water cooling, external GPU.
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I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure why it needs water cooling since it's in its own enclosure.
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But I guess we'll find out today. As for what's in the box,
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I mean, presumably there's going to be the box, but, according to the package contents here,
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we've got a Aorus RTX 2080 Ti gaming box,
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which includes Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
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11 Gigabyte graphics card, Thunderbolt 3 Cable, oh, that's nice,
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power cord, also nice, installation guide. Driver CD, really guys?
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Okay, and it comes with a carry bag, okay. Quiet, water forest cooling system,
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for deep learning and AI, for real-time ray tracing game.
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Did they proofread this? Let's not get too negative on it so far.
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On the side here, they tell you how fast Thunderbolt is,
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which is nice. We've got our list of outputs here.
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HDMI, three DisplayPort, and one USB type C,
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which is the virtual link connector that NVIDIA introduced in, and as far as I know,
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haven't really done much with. Also, it has a USB 3.0 port on the front.
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That's a type A, which is a nice touch, although I would have preferred type C at this point.
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The power supplies a 450 watt. Interesting.
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I'm going to open that up and see exactly what power supply that is.
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But yeah, apparently it's just a Gigabyte Waterforce RTX 2080 Ti.
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So yeah, it does do power delivery, so I can free up an outlet right now if I want to.
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Well, let's open it up. It's a wee bit heavy.
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All right, there's that carrying bag. Presumably, it's already inside, nice.
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I guess it's all self-contained in the bag, so there's two extraneous boxes, they could have just sold this.
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Carrying strap for our bag, Thunderbolt cable, standard, run-of-the-mill,
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it's the C13, whatever it's called plug. This guy here is only about a foot.
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So I guess they expect you to have this on the desk, next to your laptop.
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And, the main event.
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It's not a bad looking little box actually.
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I didn't notice before, but there's actually a Ethernet port here,
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along with two more USB type As. That's quite a lot better, that makes this more of a dock,
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which I mean, realistically an eGPU should be
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if you've got a laptop like this guy here.
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It looks like the screws are very proprietary. In fact, I'm not sure if I would be able to get these off.
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The outer screws however, are, just the standard Phillips.
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So let's see if I can see what that power supply is.
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Yeah, as expected, that's our 280 millimeter rad.
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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.
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It also looks like there's a bit of a mesh behind the panel as well.
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And that should hopefully help with dust and sound, but it is a little bit too open, for like, proper seal.
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So hopefully it's got decent air flow with that cooler.
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Same thing on the other side, except this seems to be basically a solid piece,
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I think it's the, whatever they're using for Ethernet and USB.
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Let me just quickly crack this open and take a look. Oh, it's actually a removable dust filter.
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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,
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but I was right, it seems like this here, is a power distribution, and I guess hub board
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where we have the USB controller and the Ethernet controller inside.
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You can access these without taking the panels off, that's a really nice touch.
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So let's get this back together, and I'll fire it up and see how it works.
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One thing that may or may not affect your particular use case, is this cable is a little short.
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Now it's perfect, if you just have your eGPU right next to your laptop, like this,
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no extra cable, no mess. But if your laptop's port is bad,
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like this one's is, then chances are it's not long enough.
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So we've gone ahead and grabbed a longer cable,
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and now, we should be good. Okay, so we're sitting here at 1080p,
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running Quake II RTX, getting about 30ish FPS with everything maxed out,
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and that's actually not bad. This thing is making some noise though.
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(fans blowing)
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Not sure if that's necessarily quieter
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than what a standard air-cooled GPU would do.
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I'll have to get a point of comparison in a moment just to see what the performance is like
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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
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the full performance out of the 2080 Ti that we would normally get in a desktop computer,
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and that is because we're running on the Thunderbolt link,
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which is only PCI express four lanes. Whereas we probably need at least eight lanes
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to get like really close to normal performance out of the 2080 Ti.
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So with that being said, again I'm not entirely sure what the advantages to having the water cooling.
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It's kind of louder. It's not necessarily going to perform better,
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than a regular 2080 Ti, and an eGPU.
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Pretty chilly actually, 49 degrees. I feel like they're a little bit
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too aggressive on the fan then. Let's let it warm up a little bit more for a second here
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and then go back and see what it looks like. Yeah, 52 degrees.
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Now, I'm not sure what the ambient temperature is in here right now. It feels a little bit chilly,
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so that might be helping it. But at the same time, I feel like that fan curve is a little bit too aggressive,
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for something with this much cooling. It should really be targeting that 80 degree mark,
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where most, you know, desktop GPUs would be targeting.
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That being said, maybe that's allowing it to boost more aggressively, but at the same time,
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that's going to be hindered by the PCI express 4x link.
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So, it's a curious choice to have water cooling in an eGPU.
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Again, this isn't really for everyone. If you've got a gaming PC,
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you're not going to go out and buy this, unless you want to harvest the GPU for some reason.
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No, this is more for people, who again,
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have something like this, a ultra portable laptop,
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like say for example, a college student who doesn't have a whole lot of space,
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but who wants to game. And there's no real way to get that
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ultra portable experience along with the gaming,
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without an eGPU as of today. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't personally go out
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and get this unless I had something like this,
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but, I can see who it's for. The thing though, is that I again,
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I think they really should have gone with just an air cooler or really toned down the fans,
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as far as the noise goes, because it is pretty noisy.
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Despite the fact that it doesn't get all that hot. It kind of falls short of a pure recommendation.
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But, if the allure of carrying around a water-cooled GPU,
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in its own carrying bag, speaks to you in a way that it doesn't speak to me,
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Well, who's stopping you? Thanks for watching, subscribe to ShortCircuit.