Magma Expressbox 3T Thunderbolt External PCIe Enclosure Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,149 words · ~5 min read
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welcome to an unboxing and first look that is more exciting due to what it
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represents in the future than it is necessarily for its practicality today
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for gamers this is the magma Express box 3T this is quite simply a Thunderbolt
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external enclosure that has two PCIe 8X
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and one PCIe 4X slots inside of it it
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has a 250 W power supply and it is capable of installing pretty much
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anything that you would normally install in a PCI Express slot inside your
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computer so right now driver support is
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a bit of a challenge it comes with a carrying case so you can take it around
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with you on the road think of this guys laptops that you can install up to three
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full-size PCI Express expansion cards in
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essentially okay just mind blown right
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okay so uh comes with a blower that you can install if you have something like a
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Quadro graphics card that you want to use to accelerate Cuda applications
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although right now you can't use it as a display output yet and that's mostly
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supported on on Apple at the time or at this time uh here are is a quick start
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guide I've actually already opened this and I've already tinkered with it a fair
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bit so that's why there's like PCI slot
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covers in here because I've already installed cards in it but
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right so what makes it more useful in the future than it is today because for
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general consumers you're going to find that Hardware compatibility is a bit of
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a challenge with not just this one but with all of the Thunderbolt PCI Express
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expansion uh expansion Bays that you can
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obtain so here it is it's crafted out it's very beautiful I mean it's very
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appes the way that it's constructed it's got a nice matte aluminum finish over
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the whole thing with a simple magma logo on both sides it's got a perforated
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front to the enclosure that has a power indicator it's a button but generally
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speaking you won't even use it because it's automatically activated as soon as
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a Thunderbolt connection is detected and the computer is booted up so you can
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just leave it plugged in and leave it on all the time and it'll automatically
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turn itself on and off with your computer should you desire that there's
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also a cooling fan behind here it's an 80 mil cooling fan so you can install
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power hungry things graphics cards to go along with that 250 wat power supply the
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bottom again is quite simple you've just got four rubber feet so that it doesn't
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go anywhere and once you load this thing up with expensive Hardware you're going
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to want it to not really go anywhere so I've got three cards in here right now
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one of them is an ASUS Zonar uh uh Zen
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it's a Zen sound card so this is for the
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uh the split out for more analog connectors I've also got a Blackmagic
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capture card that's an HDMI capture card it's an intens Pro and last but not
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least I have some random LSI raid card
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that I decided to throw in here and see what happened I tried a number of
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graphics cards it looks like the challenge right now is that the graphics
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card manufacturers need to release drivers that will support running over
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Thunderbolt so that Thunderbolt connection is 10 gbit per second and you
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can daisy chain this device for multiple
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Express boxes or storage devices or whatever else remember Thunderbolt Daisy
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chains up to six times um and that gives
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you enough bandwidth these are all PCIe 2.0 ports so it has there you go two 8X
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slots and a 4X slot with one of those 8X slots having an open back so you can
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install a 16x card so I tried a bunch of different graphics cards GeForce cards
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Radeon cards uh I even had a Quadro 6000
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that I put in but unfortunately on the Windows platform I wasn't able to
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leverage that but out of the cards that are in here the black magic intensity
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Pro worked flawlessly so if you wanted to say for example have a portable
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capture station so you had like a nice powerful ivybridge laptop with a
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Thunderbolt port and you wanted to carry one of these guys around with you with I
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mean it wouldn't consume much power in that configuration so you have a small
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UPS or something battery backup that you run it off of you could actually do
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multiple camera captures all at the same time do live to tape recording on set
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somewhere so that's fascinating you could install three of those cards
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capture up to three sources at the same time very cool stuff power is provided
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by two Molex connector so you could adapt those to PCI Express if you were
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running a Mac which apparently runs completely driverless you just throw the
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quadro 6000 in there you plug in the power so you use a PCIe adapter and you
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install it right there um so you get two
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of those and a 250 watt power supplies I mentioned before the raid C didn't
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really get detected and the Zonar zense
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works it works but the ASUS control
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panel wouldn't install so what I've encountered is everything from stuff
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that doesn't get detected at all to stuff that Tex and works perfectly like
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the black magic I even captured video to stuff that works but doesn't quite work
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so we're almost there this is extremely exciting technology because what I am
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waiting for CU I like notebooks I like
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portability but I hate how gutless notebook Graphics are and how horrible
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generally speaking notebook onboard sound is how limited the expansion
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options are now all of a sudden through the magic of Thunderbolt you could just
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sit down at your desk at home plug in your notebook one cable hot pluggable
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have a graphics card a beast sound card
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and like an awesome external ra like raid card that runs off to like some
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storage array or something like that and the whole thing could run off your notebook you disconnect it you go on the
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road and you're ready to go so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first
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look at the magma Express box 3T I am so
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excited for the future of devices like this right now they're also quite
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expensive don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews
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and other other computer videos