Gigabyte Serves Up Killer Aorus GeForce RTX 3090/3080 Water-Cooled eGPU Enclosure
Ultrabook laptops are typically not the best performers when it comes to anything outside of casual browsing or light workloads. They may have a decent CPU, but the GPU almost always lacks for people who want to game or do some heavy work, such as editing. Therefore, GPU enclosures are incredibly handy, as you can just plug them into a laptop and have the full power of a GPU at your disposal when needed. Gigabyte has now kicked things up a notch with the AORUS RTX 3090/3080 GAMING BOX, the “world’s 1st water-cooled external graphics” enclosure.
The AORUS Gaming Box is equipped with either a liquid-cooled NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 or GeForce RTX 3080 that connects to your laptop via a Thunderbolt 3 port. By default, both cards are absolute monsters, as we saw in our reviews of the RTX 3090 and the RTX 3080. As they will be liquid-cooled, they should allow for additional overclocking headroom. Moreover, being able to plug them into an ultrabook could change the game for the people who do work by day and game by night.
Gigabyte claims that the Gaming Box is a “solution that combines performance and comfort, allowing users to enjoy a quiet and comfortable environment while handling heavy work.” The card will have a 240mm radiator to dissipate all the heat from the GPU, VRAM, and MOSFET, generated when gaming or handling workloads.
If this eGPU enclosure sounds interesting to you, you may need to wait until pricing is out. Pricing and availability have not been announced (perhaps due to the scarcity of 3080/3090s to begin with), but the enclosure is not expected to be cheap by any means. For the NVIDIA RTX 3090 Gaming Box, users could be looking at a price in the neighborhood of $2,500. The NVIDIA RTX 3080 Gaming Box would likely come in about $1,500, but we will have to see what happens. This is only speculation, so stay tuned to HotHardware and Gigabyte for future updates when we get availability and pricing.
