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From the FAQ: > Can I upgrade the GPU chip in the Blackmagic eGPU? > No, the design has been optimized for quiet operation so it’s better suited for creative
by whichdan 8y ago
From the FAQ:
> Can I upgrade the GPU chip in the Blackmagic eGPU?
> No, the design has been optimized for quiet operation so it’s better suited for creative customers. This means the design is not a simple chassis with a PCIe card plugged in, but an integrated electronics, mechanical and cooling design that cannot have the GPU chip upgraded or changed.
$699 and no ability to upgrade makes it pretty clear that they're targeting business customers.
- samcat116 8y agoThere are tons of other eGPU enclosures on the market that take normal PCIe GPUs. This one is interesting because you can use it with the UltraFine 5k Display which connects via Thunderbolt.
- chx 8y agoOr buy a Dell UP2715K or Philips 275P4VYKEB both of which connect via dual DisplayPort... Heck, even the Iiyama XB2779QQS can be a good candidate for most eGPU -- it requires a DisplayPort 1.4 but that is now a feature of many video cards, it's cheap because it's only 6-bit + A-FRC.
- rsynnott 8y agoThe Dell and Phillips parts seem to have been discontinued, and were in any case more expensive than the LG one. The Iiyama might be okay if you were okay with its limitations.
- pvg 8y agoThey're targeting DaVinci Resolve users. It's not a great deal for gamers and related nerds but there are lots of Apple-compatible enclosures out now. https://egpu.io/ https://egpu.io/ is a good resource.
- dharma1 8y agoI'm wondering how much work in Davinci you can do with the AMD ipgu in the new 15" mbpro.. enough to grade 4k raw footage? Or do you need an egpu?
- pvg 8y agoI don't know anything about DaVinci Resolve but if you scroll through the horrible unlinkable site you'll get to a performance graph and that graph has a tab for the new 15" MBP - it claims the eGPU is about twice faster for various operations in Resolve. If you look up the parts themselves, the Pro 580 (in the eGPU box) is roughly 2-3 times faster than the RX 560X that you can get in the new 15" MBP.
- cosmojg 8y ago> $699 and no ability to upgrade Sounds like a perfect fit for the Apple ecosystem.
- cozzyd 8y agoThey should charge double for something that's 20% thinner but 30% slower.
- dmix 8y agoI'd bet 99.9% of people buying PC Laptops never upgrade a single chip... Apple's non-pro lines are likely not much different. Apple largely sacrificed that ability (in a few product lines) in favour of creating some of the thinnest laptops available. I don't remember them ever doing that before Macbook Air, for now reason. That said, in this case, I don't see what is being gained by not making the GPU swappable or at least accessible (although it might very well still be). I'm assuming they could simply only offer official support for the one it contains but let people do whatever they want with it (which again might be the case in practice, they just aren't announcing it officially).
- angott 8y agoI miss so much my 2009 MacBook Pro, where you could take out the DVD drive and replace it with an additional SSD for a performance boost.
- PinguTS 8y agoYou mean the old PowerBook Series where you could easily swap the batteries on the go and swap the DVD drive for an additional battery.
- gargravarr 8y agoStill have my G3 500MHz somewhere - used that for my entire first year at university in 2008. Battery life was amazing.
- 8y ago
- djsumdog 8y agoHuh. They're targeting ... people who don't know any better? I want to see rendering benchmarks (both 1080p/2160p) of this vs external Thunderbolt GTX/1060,1070,1080 enclosures (and AMDGPU equivalents). I mean if it works better and you do a lot of video, then yea, go for it. If it's only marginally better, buy something with a real PCIe slot that's upgradable. Even business customers should not buy this if the benchmarks don't align. Seriously you're hurting everyone, even if you can afford it. Stop that. Planned obsolescent is terrible. Pay more and buy something you can upgrade, fix and repair. Throwing out electronics after four years hurts the planet.
- pvg 8y agoTheir site describes who this is for at great length. I'm not sure where the GP got the 'business customer' idea, it's not accurate.
- 101km 8y agoEver been to a place with a fancy receptionist exclusively running Google Calendar in one browser tab taking up less than 35% of a HUGE iMac screen? A pretty enclosure can be worth more than its contents, just accept it as a piece of furniture. I'm sure you wouldn't scoff at PC gaming rigs with pretty flashing LED lights after all.
- themagician 8y agoThe value in the ability to upgrade is often misperceived as being worth more than it really is. If you buy something mid-to-top range you are really only going to be able to get a single upgrade cycle out of it out (where there is some substantial marginal benefit for the cost) before the rest of the system starts to obsolete itself. If you watch things closely and the tick-tock cycles are aligned then maybe you get two. It’s a fun hobby. And if you have the cash to spend on always having the best GPU then you probably don’t care that for $1,000 you only get an extra 10 FPS or so. These days I can’t even remember how old a machine is let alone what GPU it even has. “Why is this box so slow? It’s four years old? Holy shit, when did that happen?” Even when I had a rig and was reading Tom’s and Anand daily I don’t think I actually ever upgraded a video card twice. Maybe it happened once? The cycles might have been longer back then, but by the time cards had advanced two generations we were moving from AGP 4x to 8X or to PCI-E or multi core whatever. I could easily just go back in time and buy whatever middle of the road Dell lunchbox was available and just replaced the whole thing every year or two and probably saved money for the same performance. These days I’ll take a non upgradable whatever it is as long as it has a good warranty.
- neya 8y agoI think it's not the best deal, but it's so much better than other jokers in this space, because, the alternative I've found is Razor Core series (https://www.razer.com/sg-en/gaming-laptops/razer-core-v2 https://www.razer.com/sg-en/gaming-laptops/razer-core-v2) which is a joke - $500+ ($750 where I live) and it doesn't even include a GPU in it! I'm seriously interested if there's some sort of DIY out there wherein you could just buy a bunch of chips from eBay, put together some enclosure yourself and use your own graphics card. That'd be the dream. Any money not spent on enclosures is money well spent on a good GPU.
- cupofjoakim 8y agoThe best resource for DIY projects in this space seems to be egpu.io. I found their guide kind of helpful: https://egpu.io/build-guides/ https://egpu.io/build-guides/
- jasonjs 8y agoEven before the more polished products existed, people have hacked together external GPU enclosures, often interfaced to the host's PCIe bus via ExpressCard slots or ribbon cables hanging off of Mini PCIe slots. And more recently, with the interest in cramming many dual-slot GPUs onto a single motherboard for cryptomining rigs, you can find cheap, "barebones stand-alone PCIe slots" (for lack of a better term) for hanging GPUs off of. A quick search turned up a couple of examples: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-PCI-E-to-PCI-E-1X-Expansion-Riser-Card-for-Laptop-External-Graphics-Video-Card/32678046394.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-PCI-E-to-PCI-E-1X-Expan... https://www.aliexpress.com/item/60CM-PCI-Express-1X-To-16X-PCIE-Riser-Card-For-BTC-Miner-Machine-Overcurrent-Protection-USB/32838193524.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/60CM-PCI-Express-1X-To-16X-P... (Ingeniously, on this one, they've re-purposed USB 3.0 cables to carry the high-speed PCIe lanes).
- dogma1138 8y agoThese are for mining USB 3.0 cables are the standard they have the correct number of pins for a single lane and have decent shielding.
- 8y ago
- ekianjo 8y agoNo ability to upgrade? Sounds very familiar for every Apple user out there.
- pdpi 8y agoOTOH $699 sounds like a reasonable price for a GPU in that class? You're just trading an internal interface for an external one.
- cptskippy 8y agoExcept that the GPU they've got in their should have a retail price of $200-300. So there's a $400 markup for a PSU and usb hub.
- pdpi 8y agoHmmm, you're right. I was under the impression the Pro had higher specs than the RX 580 but the numbers they published really don't seem to differ from the RX 580. Damn.
- rsynnott 8y agoThere's probably a market for an eGPU enclosure which can sit in a shared office without sounding like a small jet engine, though. Some of them are quite noisy.
- DonHopkins 8y ago"Creative customers" sounds like some kind of patronizing euphemism.
- ibrault 8y agoIn what way? Plenty of designers & photographers I know frequently refer to themselves and peers as "creatives." Creative is being used as a noun in the phrase.
- cptskippy 8y agoIt would have been nice if the GPU and active cooling were an upgradable module even if proprietary. There's a $400+ markup for what's effectively a USB hub and PSU.
- anentropic 8y ago"the design has been optimized for quiet operation" this is important to me, glad to hear it!
- everyone 8y agoI dont get really this.. I have a stock air-cooled asus GTX 970, and for almost all use cases on my PC it is completely silent. The fans only turn on when the card temp goes over a certain value. The only thing that causes this is a modern taxing AAA type game (eg. The witcher 3). And when I'm playing a game like that Ive got my headphones on. I can be running Unity, visual studio, adobe premier, illustrator, photoshop, discord, trello, github + a million browser tabs and whatnot and it maketh not a peep. So, unless ure AAA gaming an average of the shelf GPU these days is passively cooled already.
- nottorp 8y agoIf you have to wear headphones when the GPU is at max, it can be more quiet...
- everyone 8y agoI dont have to. In any situation where the fans have come on. I already am, cus I'm playing a game.
- nottorp 8y agoOk, I'll elaborate. It's very nice that you wear headphones when you're playing a game. Me, and probably a lot of other people, don't. You not being able to hear the GPU when using headphones does not mean it's quiet. It means you can't hear it. Incidentally, any other people in the room or maybe even in the adjacent rooms would be able to hear it very well.
- vokep 8y agoits likely targeted to video editing or vfx work where you're gonna need some rendering power