5 ms·

Huh. 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/1060,107

Huh. 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 ago
Their 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 ago
Ever 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 ago
The 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.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  > The 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. I don't think that's true in this case. The upgradeable part would just be an PCIe enclosure. PCIe 2.0 is over ten years old and would still be sufficient for many GPU applications with little performance loss. PCIe 3.0 is eight years old and fast enough that we will likely not see 4.0 for many years in desktops (or mobiles) [also 4.0 needs more expensive materials for all involved planars, so... yeah... not doing that for +-0 %].
  - ntsplnkv2 8y ago
    It's interesting seeing arguments about how valuable upgrade-ability is, and yet comments like this further outline how upgrade-ability is overrated. Clearly technology isn't advancing like it used to. I've been running a machine since 2011 when I built it. 15 years ago I maybe would've upgraded every 4 years. Now I'm almost 8 years strong. Now everyone has different needs, and I think Apple and similar products haven't really been aligned with those needs perfectly, but how much, from now, can graphics REALLY improve, for most use-cases?
  - themagician 8y ago
    It’s never “fast enough.” PCI-E motherboards are actually out now. In three years we will have either PCI-E 4.0 or 5.0 as a standard. And you’re right—PCIe 3.0 cards out today have plenty of performance for today’s applications. That why you would get a PCIe 3.0 card today. But it doesn’t matter if it’s fixed because you aren’t going to upgrade it.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      > It’s never “fast enough.” Actually that's not true. When PCIe 3.0 was introduced, it took quite some time before the (still marginal) performance improvements materialized. We're talking about a few percent at most in games and benchmarks (many are just neutral) between PCIe 2.0 and 3.0, simply because it's not a bottleneck. For not overly data-intensive GPGPU applications (e.g. video things) I reckon that's the case as well. Yes, sure, there are applications you can run on a GPU where PCIe is a bottleneck. PCIe bandwidth benchmarks, for example. Don't expect PCIe 4.0 consumer-ish (i.e. what this is about) GPUs soon (2019 earliest). It's wholly unclear whether you'll see any performance improvements at all from that — just look at the bus utilization in games and benchmarks, you'll be hard pressed to see more than 10-20 % (which is precisely why running a GPU on a x8 interface (or 2.0) is not an issue).
denkmoon 8y ago
"Yeah boss I need that $3000.00 laptop" "and I absolutely need extra graphical horsepower to perform my job" "but let's get the Razer core and fuck around for days getting it to work instead of buying the one advertised on the apple site because raisins".
- Bokagha 8y ago
  Razer Core X is plug and play with Macbooks. https://www.razer.com/gaming-laptops/razer-core-x https://www.razer.com/gaming-laptops/razer-core-x Now if you use a NVIDIA GPU, instead of an AMD one, then you need to do extra configuration.
  - future1979 8y ago
    Can u run cuda with egpus? How about cudnn, etc.?
sitharus 8y ago
Four years ago I bought a desktop gaming PC (I'm normally a Mac user) with the idea that I could upgrade it over the years to keep it current but avoid replacing the whole thing. Turns out in practice technology changes enough over that time to only leave the case, and perhaps the PSU. The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now. The SSD can be reused but newer technology is much faster. I don't know what gets saved by upgrading parts rather than the machine. The same amount of electronics are disposed of (or sold on the second hand market)
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  > The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now. The SSD can be reused but newer technology is much faster. Unless you got a bulldozer CPU, I don't believe you. I bet that upgrading just the graphics card would give you 90% of the effect of upgrading everything.
  - Yizahi 8y ago
    I have a Vishera CPU and it is definitely NOT obsolete. If anything it ages much better that Intels due to better multicore support in modern apps.
- flukus 8y ago
  > The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now How is that at all possible unless it was under powered in the first place? Maybe it can't play some of the latest titles at max settings but a 4 year old machine should be able to run just about everything decently. What's stopping you from upgrading the graphics card? Looks like plenty of high end cards have PCIe3 support. RAM can always be upgraded, though few games will makes use of the 8GB that was pretty standard in gaming PC's nearly a decade ago. A new CPU won't gain you much gaming wise. Most games target PS4 level specs anyway, which is now a 5 year old machine.
- ryan-allen 8y ago
  I got the top-end i7 about 5 years ago, it's still fast. I have tried to justify upgrading it many times but I just can't see the benefit in replacing it with something that's just a bit quicker. I can at least upgrade the SSD and GPU without throwing the whole damn thing out, but even then it's hard to justify.
rsynnott 8y ago
If it really is quieter than the others, there's a market for that. Quite a lot of eGPU boxes are _very_ noisy.

pvg 8y ago

Their 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 ago

Ever 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 ago

The 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.

blattimwind 8y ago
> The 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. I don't think that's true in this case. The upgradeable part would just be an PCIe enclosure. PCIe 2.0 is over ten years old and would still be sufficient for many GPU applications with little performance loss. PCIe 3.0 is eight years old and fast enough that we will likely not see 4.0 for many years in desktops (or mobiles) [also 4.0 needs more expensive materials for all involved planars, so... yeah... not doing that for +-0 %].
- ntsplnkv2 8y ago
  It's interesting seeing arguments about how valuable upgrade-ability is, and yet comments like this further outline how upgrade-ability is overrated. Clearly technology isn't advancing like it used to. I've been running a machine since 2011 when I built it. 15 years ago I maybe would've upgraded every 4 years. Now I'm almost 8 years strong. Now everyone has different needs, and I think Apple and similar products haven't really been aligned with those needs perfectly, but how much, from now, can graphics REALLY improve, for most use-cases?
- themagician 8y ago
  It’s never “fast enough.” PCI-E motherboards are actually out now. In three years we will have either PCI-E 4.0 or 5.0 as a standard. And you’re right—PCIe 3.0 cards out today have plenty of performance for today’s applications. That why you would get a PCIe 3.0 card today. But it doesn’t matter if it’s fixed because you aren’t going to upgrade it.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    > It’s never “fast enough.” Actually that's not true. When PCIe 3.0 was introduced, it took quite some time before the (still marginal) performance improvements materialized. We're talking about a few percent at most in games and benchmarks (many are just neutral) between PCIe 2.0 and 3.0, simply because it's not a bottleneck. For not overly data-intensive GPGPU applications (e.g. video things) I reckon that's the case as well. Yes, sure, there are applications you can run on a GPU where PCIe is a bottleneck. PCIe bandwidth benchmarks, for example. Don't expect PCIe 4.0 consumer-ish (i.e. what this is about) GPUs soon (2019 earliest). It's wholly unclear whether you'll see any performance improvements at all from that — just look at the bus utilization in games and benchmarks, you'll be hard pressed to see more than 10-20 % (which is precisely why running a GPU on a x8 interface (or 2.0) is not an issue).

denkmoon 8y ago

"Yeah boss I need that $3000.00 laptop" "and I absolutely need extra graphical horsepower to perform my job" "but let's get the Razer core and fuck around for days getting it to work instead of buying the one advertised on the apple site because raisins".

Bokagha 8y ago
Razer Core X is plug and play with Macbooks. https://www.razer.com/gaming-laptops/razer-core-x https://www.razer.com/gaming-laptops/razer-core-x Now if you use a NVIDIA GPU, instead of an AMD one, then you need to do extra configuration.
- future1979 8y ago
  Can u run cuda with egpus? How about cudnn, etc.?

sitharus 8y ago

Four years ago I bought a desktop gaming PC (I'm normally a Mac user) with the idea that I could upgrade it over the years to keep it current but avoid replacing the whole thing. Turns out in practice technology changes enough over that time to only leave the case, and perhaps the PSU. The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now. The SSD can be reused but newer technology is much faster. I don't know what gets saved by upgrading parts rather than the machine. The same amount of electronics are disposed of (or sold on the second hand market)

Dylan16807 8y ago
> The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now. The SSD can be reused but newer technology is much faster. Unless you got a bulldozer CPU, I don't believe you. I bet that upgrading just the graphics card would give you 90% of the effect of upgrading everything.
- Yizahi 8y ago
  I have a Vishera CPU and it is definitely NOT obsolete. If anything it ages much better that Intels due to better multicore support in modern apps.
flukus 8y ago
> The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now How is that at all possible unless it was under powered in the first place? Maybe it can't play some of the latest titles at max settings but a 4 year old machine should be able to run just about everything decently. What's stopping you from upgrading the graphics card? Looks like plenty of high end cards have PCIe3 support. RAM can always be upgraded, though few games will makes use of the 8GB that was pretty standard in gaming PC's nearly a decade ago. A new CPU won't gain you much gaming wise. Most games target PS4 level specs anyway, which is now a 5 year old machine.
ryan-allen 8y ago
I got the top-end i7 about 5 years ago, it's still fast. I have tried to justify upgrading it many times but I just can't see the benefit in replacing it with something that's just a bit quicker. I can at least upgrade the SSD and GPU without throwing the whole damn thing out, but even then it's hard to justify.

rsynnott 8y ago

If it really is quieter than the others, there's a market for that. Quite a lot of eGPU boxes are _very_ noisy.