Razer Core and other external GPU enclosures

My MSI GTX 970 does not turn any fans while on the desktop. Pretty quiet even when gaming too.
 
Yeah even the high end cards draw little power and make zero noise when not in use. 970/980's don't start spinning fans until they hit 60deg.
 
Anyone who is willing to put a gaming desktop together instead of this obviously isn't their market. There are many who would pay that for the convenience if the performance is right.
 
I believe AMD has one of tehse coming out for the new thunderbolt. IF it was price at $100 and I could put my own gpu (which they said I can) into it. Then I could see myself buying it in the future if the port comes to the surface line up. I know i'd be cpu limited in a bunch of stuff but at the same time , I upgrade my gpu often . Right now I have a 290 in my tower. When I upgrade lter this year or early next year to a new gpu , I can put the 290 in this thing and use it on say a new surface or a new laptop and get much better performance out of it. If they keep it close in size to the card itself , it shouldn't be that bad to travel with. I wouldn't bring it on short trips but i'd bring it to the shore house since i'm there for weeks at a time in the summer
 
It's official now, the Core is $500, or $400 if you buy it with a Razer Blade or Razer Blade Stealth.

There's also good news for those who already bought the Blade Stealth:

AnandTech said:
Razer also notes that this offer is also retroactive for customers whom already purchased a Blade Stealth earlier this year, as the ultrabook and the Core were announced together at CES and the company doesn’t want to penalize early buyers who were intending to grab the Core anyhow.
 
$500 for a case with a 500W PSU, a USB hub and an ethernet controller is nothing short of ridiculous.


Not that I was expecting Razer to release a cost-conscious product, though.
I'm not worried. We'll have MSI, Gigabyte, Asus and many others for that.
 
It'll be interesting to see what price other companies come in at. I'm sure they will be cheaper but I'm cautious about being too optimistic as thunderbolt stuff has never been cheap and some of the price may well be the technology itself (cables, controllers, etc).
 
Looks like there's a new external PCIe connector coming. Might help with external GPUs and external solid-state storage.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/pcie-4.0-power-speed-express,32525.html

Actually, the OCuLink standard for cable+connectors has already existed since mid-2015 but no company picked it up so far. At least not for consumer models.
The biggest disadvantage to Thunderbolt 3 is that OCuLink doesn't use the USB-C standard. Beyond that, it should have similar performance. Notice how the current OCuLink hasn't been updated to PCIe 4.0 because the specs in the slides say it only does 8GT per lane to a maximum of 4 lanes, which is the same as Thunderbolt 3. And the cable itself doesn't even carry 12V, only 3.3V and 5V.

If they update OCuLink to PCIe 4.0 to twice the bandwidth per lane and a sufficient power delivery on 12V then we might get a real winner because no thunderbolt controller would be needed (which increases price and complexity).
Until then, USB-C GPU enclosures with external power bricks is the best we can have.
 
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