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Are there any Thunderbolt external GPUs on the horizon?
- Thread starter klover
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MSI and Village Instruments have units in development that will take a standard PCIe graphics card. Last I heard neither are anywhere near launch yet.
I believe I saw something about MSI working on one, should be out in the next quarter or so, but not sure.
Any reason in particular you would want to immobilise your Air with a bulky box hanging off it?
Any reason in particular you would want to immobilise your Air with a bulky box hanging off it?
Not really, a lot of NVIDIA and ATI cards, for example, work with MacPro machines by default. These cards would work easily in a thunderbolt GPU case, which I believe is essentially what MSI are working on, not so much a GPU, but a Thunderbolt to PCI-E converter with a box around it...
The only ones I've seen are EXTREMELY expensive...so not at all worth it. Why spend $1200 on a PCI-e external enclosure then $400 on a graphics card when you could just buy a desktop PC.
There are a lot of problems with something like this. Assuming you're buying the card an enclosure separately, one isn't tuned specifically for the other. It's likely to be noisy with enough heat dissipation to keep a reasonably powerful card cool. Many of the ones I've seen are limited on what cards they will accept. On a macbook air you're also running with one of the lighter thunderbolt chips, so overall bandwidth may be a bit lower.
The ideal situation for something like this would be a breakout box version of a graphics card so that cooling and power requirements can be tested with controlled hardware.
MSI says they're waiting for release of Ultrabooks and more Thunderbolt-equipped PC. Waiting sucks, and GTX 670 is da perfect graphics for this! 