SilverStone / Gigabyte External Graphics Enclosure at Computex

By Published June 02, 2016 at 6:51 am
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SilverStone / Gigabyte External Graphics Enclosure at Computex
Hardware

Years ago, at one of our earliest CES shows, we covered the SilverStone-ASUS external graphics enclosure. It was a joint-venture that never made it to production, a result of licensing issues relating to Intel and Thunderbolt. Now, with the market flooding with external dGPU enclosures, SilverStone has resurrected its killed product from the dead.

SilverStone is responsible for the chassis and power supply – a 450W, bronze-rated PSU housed in an aluminum tower – and Gigabyte is helping with the logic connecting the VGA to the laptop. The enclosure is fully made of aluminum and can fit effectively all video cards (as long as they're two-slot cards or smaller), and has two thunderbolt outputs for communication with laptops.

The PSU fan pulls air in (through the ventilated side panel) and expels it up-and-out, creating the usual closed-circuit cooling pathway for a PSU. The video card is cooled by breathing air from a 120mm side panel intake fan – pulling through the same ventilated side panel as the PSU – and then uses its normal cooling design to dissipate heat. A blower fan might actually make decent sense in this kind of configuration, as it'd push air up-and-out of the enclosure.

Because only a video card needs to be powered, a 450W PSU will be ample for any presently existing single-GPU solution on the market.

Immediate competitors include the Razer Core, ASUS XG Station 2, and the forthcoming PowerColor DevilBox.

Editorial: Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke
Video: Keegan “HornetSting” Gallick

Last modified on June 02, 2016 at 6:51 am
Steve Burke

Steve started GamersNexus back when it was just a cool name, and now it's grown into an expansive website with an overwhelming amount of features. He recalls his first difficult decision with GN's direction: "I didn't know whether or not I wanted 'Gamers' to have a possessive apostrophe -- I mean, grammatically it should, but I didn't like it in the name. It was ugly. I also had people who were typing apostrophes into the address bar - sigh. It made sense to just leave it as 'Gamers.'"

First world problems, Steve. First world problems.

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