Computex: Silverstone T004 External PCIe Graphics Card Expansion Case
Silverstone are the kings of the compact chassis market, they seen to be able to bend and twist components into some of the slimmest cases on the market and their engineering and ergonomics are second to absolutely no one. Now it seems they’re looking to do something a little different with an external graphics card enclosure that uses Thunderbolt to hook up an external GPU to your system, effectively meaning you could run a GTX Titan on any laptop equipped with Thunderbolt!
While the front panel is finished off with just a Silverstone logo, the side label shows a slight slope in the base unit, giving the case an offset design. There is a large vertical air intake and behind that we can see a cooling fan at the bottom as well as what looks like the PSU fan behind and above that.
Slim case or not, Silverstone have sill left plenty of breathing room in here and you can see that graphics card runs almost the full length of the chassis, with an airflow channel right through the middle of the case. It also looks like the Silverstone logo doubles as the power switch, something we have seen on more Silverstone products recently.
Aluminium construction, room for a large GPU, an SFX PSU and a small overall footprint, this system is ideal for those with limited space, or people would just want something that looks cool next to their laptop, it’s just an added bonus that it can provide your Thunderbolt system with some extra performance!
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Image(s) courtesy of eTeknix at Computex
Had they put the PSU at the bottom, they might have been able to put two cards in there with the space they had.
I wonder how many of those you could string together? Imagine the computing power you’d be able to throw at a GPU-specific problem with a dozen of those!
Seems rather useless to string them if you could just use a server solution.
I partially agree on the uselessness – most of the people interested in this probably won’t need more than 2 for a super-gaming laptop platform. However, I’dbe willing to bet there’d be more than a few people interested in trying the idea – and I’d be willing to bet that a few aren’t too broke to do it. We’ll probably even see it crop up a lot more if such test prove fruitful and prices on both computers with it and the parts themselves.
It has its uses. Especially those who use a light ultrabook and still need to utilize a CUDA compute device. Not everything is about gaming.
I would say it’s a waste of space. Not so good design.
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but wouldn’t effective use for CUDA computing still require a lot of bandwidth that would saturate the TB connection with just one sufficiently powerful graphics card (assuming it had the computational power to actually make use of 16 PCIe lanes)? I was under the general impression that 16x PCIe graphics cards actually have the capability of saturating more than the 4 lanes that TB2 would give them access to, so you’d already be bottlenecked with just one.
Or does CUDA computing just pass relatively small amounts of data back and forth to the card?
It’s a good practical application of otherwise good-for-nothing thunderbolt technology for general users.
If this works without problems, it would make absolute sense to buy a MacBookPro Retina and connect this via thunderbolt to upgrade your graphics. It would literally be the ultimate solution.
I am not too sure about stringing together graphic cards though >_<"… Right now I am doubting it's efficiency of transferring extreme amounts of data through one graphic card…. But only time will tell 😀 !!
This idea has been floating around for a long time now. I would definitely be interested if it indeed worked. However my current laptop is not thunderbolt. There are very few choices on the market right now for thunderbolt outside of Apple. Perhaps in one or two more years this will actually be for sale and will work fine. I would think twice at that moment of getting a dedicated gaming rig.
There was already a solution to this gpu extender thing, its based on on this: PE4H-EC2C ver2.4 Package Contents weblink: http://www.hwtools.net/eGPU.html the cable used to connect is hdmi instead of thinderbolt
how can i buy that silverstone T004…
plz tell me… i need that…. pplz
the article is 5 years old, don’t think it’s available anymore. There are, however, plenty of external GPU enclosures available these days via Thunderbolt 3 connection
I have a macbook pro 2011 early