AORUS Releases The World’s First External AIO Water-cooled NVIDIA RTX 2080TI Gaming Box

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Image Credit: GIGABYTE



GIGABYTE’s AORUS brand is their premium line of gaming products. They cover a wide variety of niche lines. From a 15,000 MB/s PCIe 4.0 SSD, to the newly announced Gigabyte Z490 Aorus Xtreme, or the PCIe 4.0 Quadro NVMe AIC, they have solutions for the most extreme enthusiast builds. Now they are taking it a step further with NVIDIA’s fastest gaming GPU the RTX 2080 Ti.

Image Credit: GIGABYTE



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[Grimlakin]

Man if you're stuck on a powerful laptop with a dated non upgradeable video solution... AND have a thunderbolt 3 type c or whatever it's called port... then you might want this as long as you don't mind setting up a desk to game on...

Yea that's pretty niche market there. I'm sure they will sell some though. Would love to hear from someone who actually buys and uses one.

Of course if they want to be truly next level they will build it so the end user can upgrade the gpu in it.

 

[Zarathustra]

Heh. This is kind of funnny considering we were all DIY:ing these things with cheap expresscard to PCIe slot adapters 11 years ago.

If you didn't like modding, you could buy a more aesthetically pleasing finished solution named ViDock for $259 from a company called Villagetronic. Unfortunately they seem defunct at this point.

It came with an Expresscard adapter, a case, a power brick power supply. All you needed to do was to insert the GPU of your choice.

You could get surprisingly good performance considering Expresscard was just 1x. Here is some benchmark testing I did on my own with a Radeon 6850 and a mobile Core i5-520 back in the day:

3dmark 2006: 12994
3Dmark Vantage: 7051
Resident Evil 5 Variable Benchmark: 84.0fps
Devil May Cry 4: 40.5fps

 

[Brian_B]

I cringe to type this but, if that price includes the GPU (and looking at the build it appears to) - that isn’t a horrible price for the external box ~and~ AIO cooled 2080Ti.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I cringe to type this but, if that price includes the GPU (and looking at the build it appears to) - that isn’t a horrible price for the external box ~and~ AIO cooled 2080Ti.

I agree. In for a penny . . . .

If I'd had an appropriate device to use this with when the 2080 Ti's came out I would've considered one. I spent close to the same for my Strix 2080 Ti OG. Hoping someone out there gets one for a review. I'm really curious about the OC potential and what overall temps are.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I've increasingly kept an eye on external GPU solutions over the last 5 years due to how they offer a useful option for laptops. The inclusion of the newer thunderbolt standard is a game changer for them. My only real complaints so far have been most solutions are limited to specific cards, or card sizes. This one seems to be completely proprietary to the card but at least its a card you could not otherwise use in a laptop. Kind of a shame it's so late in the game getting to the market but at least it's timed with the release of so many new and powerful mobile CPU's that could actually benefit from such a thing.

edit: Like most x80 Ti owners I've seen how they can be very useful for 3-4+ years. My 1080Ti was recently brought back to life for an older build and it's 3 years old now. Still see quite a bit of users rocking their 980 Ti's. The 2080 Ti has every reason to have a similar lifespan.

 

[Zarathustra]

I've increasingly kept an eye on external GPU solutions over the last 5 years due to how they offer a useful option for laptops. The inclusion of the newer thunderbolt standard is a game changer for them. My only real complaints so far have been most solutions are limited to specific cards, or card sizes. This one seems to be completely proprietary to the card but at least its a card you could not otherwise use in a laptop. Kind of a shame it's so late in the game getting to the market but at least it's timed with the release of so many new and powerful mobile CPU's that could actually benefit from such a thing.

edit: Like most x80 Ti owners I've seen how they can be very useful for 3-4+ years. My 1080Ti was recently brought back to life for an older build and it's 3 years old now. Still see quite a bit of users rocking their 980 Ti's. The 2080 Ti has every reason to have a similar lifespan.

I agree that the new Thunderbolt standard is an improvement, but as I mentioned earlier, even back when we were hacking it using Expresscard adapters (essentially Gen 1 X1 bandwidth) the performance losses compared to running at x16 gen 2 (which was the latest at the time) were surprisingly minimal. low single digit percentage in Framerates, if I recall, when I tested side by side with the same GPU.

Now, things have likely changed. A 2080ti is a completely different beast than a Radeon 6850, but it does serve to show that PCIe bandwidth matters a hell of a lot less than most people think.

 

[Grimlakin]

I don't have anything that can use this and my personal laptop and work laptop both do not have a thunderbolt port on them. That's going to limit a lot of people.

but for this target market... you could make an amazing laptop to game on the go with and game BETTER with at home.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I agree that the new Thunderbolt standard is an improvement, but as I mentioned earlier, even back when we were hacking it using Expresscard adapters (essentially Gen 1 X1 bandwidth) the performance losses compared to running at x16 gen 2 (which was the latest at the time) were surprisingly minimal. low single digit percentage in Framerates, if I recall, when I tested side by side with the same GPU.

Now, things have likely changed. A 2080ti is a completely different beast than a Radeon 6850, but it does serve to show that PCIe bandwidth matters a hell of a lot less than most people think.

I agree on how the older gens rocked things and how most over estimate what a GPU needs for PCIe speeds. I used to be one of them until I did a lot of testing with 2x 1080's in SLI at 1440p/144HZ and 4K/60Hz in a rig that had PCIe 3.0 x16 on both slots. Maybe used 20-30% at most. The 2080 Ti, however, is a completely different beast. Early benches release from TPU showed it nearly maxing 2.0 x16 in 4K. More than a few people were surprised to see that. If the rumors about the next gen following it do manage a 30-40% performance increase they'll edge closer, but still shy of, maxing 3.0 x16. I have my doubts NV or AMD will go that far. More than happy to be wrong about that though!

I don't have anything that can use this and my personal laptop and work laptop both do not have a thunderbolt port on them. That's going to limit a lot of people.

I agree and probably most of us out there are the same. I'm not even sure if my new x570 MOBO supports it. Wasn't something I was really looking at then TBH. For any future laptops, however, it will be a personal requirement for things like this but my current MSI GT80 2QE Titan still has some life left for a while. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of money I poured into it keeps me from letting it go for anything at the moment. I think that some current high end 8C/16T mobile CPU's are the types that will perform well for years to come as opposed to being severely out of date in a few later. 2020 seems to be an awesome year to upgrade for laptop owners, especially if they have something really old.

 

[Zarathustra]

I cringe to type this but, if that price includes the GPU (and looking at the build it appears to) - that isn’t a horrible price for the external box ~and~ AIO cooled 2080Ti.

You know, that wasn't my initial reaction, but I had forgotten how ridiculously overpriced this generation of TI cards had become.

With approximately $1,200 being the norm for a 2080ti, for $299 more you are getting both a fancy enclosure with a power supply and all requisite connections, AND an AIO cooling setup.

All that considered, it really isnt that bad.

Too bad those 2080 ti's cost about double as much as what used to be considered an outrageous price.