The Potential of External Graphics with the Sonnet a Graphics Breakaway Box 650W

Using the eGPU with the Sonnet a Graphics Breakaway Box 650W, it's clear that external graphics have a lot of potential. The box itself is capable of handling powerful GPUs like the RX 580 and Vega 64, which significantly outperform the integrated graphics found on most Macs. When running benchmarks, such as Metal and OpenGL tests, the eGPU shows impressive results, with the Vega 64 delivering huge jumps in performance compared to the integrated graphics.

One notable test was the Heav'n benchmark, where the integrated GPU delivered only 11.3 frames per second, while the eGPU with the Vega 64 managed a much higher score. Another test, Cinebench R15, also showed significant improvements with the eGPU. These results indicate that external graphics have the potential to greatly enhance performance in various applications and games.

However, despite these promising results, there are still some limitations and areas for improvement. The main issue is the lack of support for external graphics in popular apps like Final Cut Pro 10. This lack of support makes it difficult to take full advantage of the eGPU's capabilities, which can be frustrating for users who want to experience improved performance.

It's worth noting that gaming performance will also benefit greatly from using an eGPU. While it won't match the performance of a modular Mac Pro with a dedicated graphics card, it still outperforms the integrated graphics found on most Macs. This is especially true for games that don't have Windows-specific requirements or limitations.

Another area where eGPUs are promising is in terms of their potential to support more complex and advanced features in video editing software like Final Cut Pro 10. The Luxmark test, which measures GPU performance in various video editing tasks, showed a huge difference in performance between the integrated graphics and the eGPU with the Vega 64. This suggests that eGPUs have the potential to greatly enhance performance in video editing apps.

However, there are also some drawbacks to consider when it comes to using eGPUs. One of the main issues is cost – eGPUs are currently extremely expensive, which may make them out of reach for many users. Additionally, Apple's current support for external graphics is limited, with no official support for boot camp setups or certain features like video editing software.

In conclusion, the Sonnet a Graphics Breakaway Box 650W is a powerful eGPU that shows impressive results in various benchmarks and tests. However, its potential is still somewhat limited by the lack of support for external graphics in popular apps and the high cost of the device itself. Despite these limitations, it's clear that eGPUs have a lot of promise, and users who are interested in taking advantage of this technology may want to wait and see how Apple supports external graphics with their apps and how the prices come down in the future.

As for now, if you're considering purchasing an eGPU like the Sonnet a Graphics Breakaway Box 650W, it's worth waiting and seeing how things develop. The device itself is certainly powerful and can deliver impressive results when paired with the right GPU. However, the cost may be prohibitively expensive for many users at current prices.

In terms of recommendations, the Sonnet a Graphics Breakaway Box 650W is definitely one of the best external graphics boxes available right now. However, it's worth noting that other options may be available in the future that could potentially offer similar or even better performance at lower prices. For now, though, this eGPU is certainly worth considering for anyone who wants to take advantage of external graphics and experience improved performance in various applications and games.

The Verdict

In conclusion, using the Sonnet a Graphics Breakaway Box 650W with an eGPU has shown impressive results in various benchmarks and tests. However, its potential is still somewhat limited by the lack of support for external graphics in popular apps and the high cost of the device itself. Despite these limitations, it's clear that eGPUs have a lot of promise, and users who are interested in taking advantage of this technology may want to wait and see how things develop.

If you're considering purchasing an eGPU like the Sonnet a Graphics Breakaway Box 650W, it's worth waiting and seeing how things develop. The device itself is certainly powerful and can deliver impressive results when paired with the right GPU. However, the cost may be prohibitively expensive for many users at current prices.

As for now, if you're looking for an alternative to consider, there are other options available that could potentially offer similar or even better performance at lower prices.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhow's it goin ladies and gentlemen boys and girls this is Jeff Finn German with nine-to-five Matt this is episode number 8 back to the Mack and on this week's episode we are again talking about external graphics boxes because who doesn't love a GPUs this week we're talking specifically about this guy right here this is the sonnet a graphics breakaway box 650w now this is sort of like the flagship external graphics box for a number of reasons number one it has an apple recommendation number two is that it has a fairly hefty power supply in here it has a 650 watt SFX power supply in here and it's a modular power supply you can even swap it out if it goes bad or whatever the case may be it probably isn't gonna go bad but it's just nice that this thing is a modular so you could swap it out if necessary but their really cool thing about this external graphics box is that it's able to supply up to 87 watts of power to your MacBook Pro that means while connected to a 15-inch MacBook Pro it can charge it at full speed the next thing I like about the breakaway box 650 is that it is large enough to accommodate larger cards although it doesn't seem like overly large it is big enough to accommodate something like this right here which is just ridiculously ugly and big this is the asus republic of gamers RX 580 and it's just a very very large card even compared to the vega 64 I mean endorse the Vega 64 but yes this can with a little bit of shimmying and a little bit of contorting it can actually fit in this box with a little bit of room to spare not much I also like the fact that this box is really really quiet well outside of the GPU that is the GPU is gonna make a lot of noise regardless especially if you're really pushing it but this little fan inside isn't actually that bad I've ran into some very very terrible external graphics of fans in the past this one is not one of those that's actually fairly quiet and does a pretty good job of keeping things nice and cool now I'm not a really big fan of the case itself it is I mean it's just like your normal PC case like an African market PC case that has been fad specifically for external graphics so it's gonna have some sharp edges inside it's just not gonna look very pretty it's that same black metal that you find on your average run-of-the-mill PC case but it works but the most important thing is what we mentioned at first and that is the Apple recommendation Apple actually lists this thing on its website and yeah I mean you can't really go wrong there and because this thing has that beefy power supply it can power any Mac compatible GPU even the top tier and the Radeon Vega 64 you can actually get a bundle right now which is me it sounds crazy because it's $1,300 but it's actually a pretty good deal because as you guys know GPU prices are just ridiculous and of course people have debated as to why that is obviously the cryptocurrency madness that's going on right now contributes heavily to that but as far as who is to blame for the rise in prices obviously the GPU manufacturers have something to do with it and then the fact that there's just not enough supply they weren't really anticipating this huge demand on GPUs that's part of the reason as to why the prices have skyrocketed like they have I got this Radeon rx Vega 64 for I think like 650 dollars when it first came out maybe 700 I can't really remember out top of my head but now this thing is going for over a grand easily so that really kind of shows you how crazy the GPU market is right now now like I mentioned they are offering both the enclosure and the RX Vega 64 for $1300 which actually when you do the math as crazy as that sounds it's actually a pretty good deal considering the prices of these GPUs right now $1300 you subtract 450 you're looking at about 850 bucks for the Vegas 64 which is obviously high but a lot cheaper than you'll find it standalone so it's actually a pretty good deal it's crazy as that sounds ok let's get down to business we're going to unbox we're going to set up the sonnet egrets breakaway by 650w right now so let's do it okay so inside the box we have some instructions a power cable a Thunderbolt 3 cable which is important that's all the accessories so we'll just pull it out of the box like this and wrap it and here we go so you have a little window here on the other side you have your fan your case fan there's the front panel and the little sonnet logo will light up with a blue color once the unit is powered on on the bottom you have four rubber feet and then on the rear you have the power supply you also have your Thunderbolt 3 connection which goes to that Thunderbolt 3 controller from Intel and you have your PCIe slots you'll also notice several handy thumb screws so you don't need a screw driver to remove the cover from the case which is nice so we'll go ahead and do that right now oops a little carried away there alright so let's remove the cover again this just reminds me of one of those custom PC cases those relatively inexpensive PC cases not the nicest thing to remove there get some sharp edges here and there as well so keep that in mind so you will need a screwdriver to access the PCIe slots and there is the Intel Thunderbolt 3 controller as you can see it's a relatively simple deal you have your Thunderbolt 3 controller your power supply your fan and the chassis itself and here's the RX Vega 64 does require a dual six plus two pin connection there's the rear of the unit so we just slide that right in and connect it just like that alright once it's locked down into place we can just screw those screws back in to secure it in just like that I have this little plate back on use the thumb screw to secure it just like that and now you know what time it is time to connect the power so we got the two six plus two pin power connections there we go so now we'll put the cover back on always a fun thing to do all right so now we'll be secure the cover using the three thumb screws sped up obviously so there we go folks the Senedd Geographics breakaway box 650w ready to go I have my license television the 4k TV up there and there's my macbook pro and there is the e GPU all set up ready to go and power at home alright so let's talk about some of the really nice characteristics of the sonnet a graphics 650w obviously the big thing here is the power delivery eighty seven watts of power delivery I'm gonna show you that in a second you can see the Thunderbolt statistics under the about this Mac and system profiler let's let's go ahead and check out power now so you see power there we'll scroll down and you see right there eighty seven watts of potential power that we can deliver if you have a 15-inch MacBook Pros gotta be able to charge that 15-inch MacBook Pro at full speed which is really really nice okay so now let's talk about what really matters performance we're gonna run some benchmarks now folks first thing we're gonna do is run a Bruce X benchmark for Final Cut Pro 10 just to see if the e GPU helps out at all because a lot of people use Final Cut Pro 10 they're interested in EGP use well I got some disappointing news for you folks you're gonna see right here why this is so disappointing so we're running brew sex right now this is a very popular benchmark little utility and you can see nothing on the AMD rx Vegas 64 you see the Intel iris the integrated graphics handling all the heavy lifting the e GPU is doing nothing yeah Final Cut Pro 10 is not yet optimized to use external graphics just yet hopefully that will come soon I thought it was gonna be with ten point four point one but no but you can see here that the heav'n benchmark is definitely utilizing that EGP you its pegging out there you can see heavily using the e GPU so it works but it doesn't work yet for Final Cut Pro 10 big disappointment there we're gonna run some other benchmarks though let's start with the metal so you can see the integrated graphics you see the RX 580 and then you see that Vega 64 how it handles the three off-screen tests Manhattan 3.1 Manhattan and t-rex you see no question about it of those two external GPUs the rx 580 obviously huge jump over the integrated but the Vegas 64 also a pretty significant jump over the 582 gonna run some OpenGL tests now here with the heav'n benchmark valley and of course Cinebench r15 so you see that integrated eleven point three frames per second for heaven you see obviously does a lot better when you start stepping into the external graphics obviously that Vegas 64 is going to be really really good but the RX 580 is no slouch either but you had no question the Vegas 64 is going to be the best performing external GPU for the Mac at least right now so now we're doing an open CL test this is very interesting because of course Final Cut Pro uses OpenCL GPU acceleration so you can see the potential there that Lux mark text is really showing how much of a difference that Vegas 64 makes huge difference between the integrated graphics so that really makes me hope the Final Cut Pro 10 will be updated to support external graphics and really benefit from the power of an external GPU so what can we discern from all these benchmarks we just ran and all the tests and everything we talked about in this video well the main thing that I get from this is that external graphics have a lot of potential a lot of untapped potential because really is the software that's lacking right now the big thing that sticks out to me the lack of external graphics support in Final Cut Pro 10 which is kind of a disappointment considering that we know we just got this new version of Mac OS with a GPU support and then Final Cut Pro 10 just recently had a huge release with ten point four point one yet external graphics support has not baked in you would think that that would have been something to you know to have with this big Final Cut Pro 10 release to coincide with the official support of external graphics on Mac OS but that didn't happen so hopefully in the future in the near future we will see Final Cut Pro 10 be able to take advantage of these external graphics setups hopefully not just one a GPU hopefully it can take advantage of multiple external graphics setups at the same time I think we can also conclude that you know gaming performance is going to be benefited in a major way as well now obviously it's not as good as if you had you know a modular Mac Pro and you had a PCIe slot dedicated to graphics built right into that machine you're still using Thunderbolt 3 so there is going to be some bandwidth constraints in that regard it's not going to be the same as you know building your own PC and having a 1080 Ti in that PC you're just not going to get the same type of performance but an e GPU still crushes that dinky integrated graphics that you find on my 13-inch MacBook Pro there's just no question about it and games are gonna benefit heavily from that I think what we can conclude is that EGP use are very promising but it's still in its infancy Apple has made some significant strides over the last year and it's supported a GPUs I mean it is official support baked into mac OS but we still don't have things like in video support so that's sort of a bummer especially for gamer Apple doesn't support boot camp for EGP you set ups that's sort of a bummer because some of the games would like to play maybe windows-only or they perform better on Windows and really let's face it the elephant in the room eg PU setups are ridiculously expensive certainly more expensive than the benefit I think that you get out of it for most people especially since apps like Final Cut Pro 10 don't take advantage of external graphics just yet so yes the sonnet a graphics breakaway box is probably the best external graphics box you can buy right now however I would probably wait it out a little bit first of all to see how Apple supports external graphics with apps like Final Cut Pro 10 how other developers support it and also let's just be honest I would probably wait until eg PU prices or just GPU prices in general come back down to reality right now it's just crazy money that they're asking so ladies and gentlemen that has been a look at the sonnet a graphics breakaway box 650w let me know what you guys think down below in the comment section also if you appreciated this video please leave me a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel this is Jeff with nine-to-five Mac youhow's it goin ladies and gentlemen boys and girls this is Jeff Finn German with nine-to-five Matt this is episode number 8 back to the Mack and on this week's episode we are again talking about external graphics boxes because who doesn't love a GPUs this week we're talking specifically about this guy right here this is the sonnet a graphics breakaway box 650w now this is sort of like the flagship external graphics box for a number of reasons number one it has an apple recommendation number two is that it has a fairly hefty power supply in here it has a 650 watt SFX power supply in here and it's a modular power supply you can even swap it out if it goes bad or whatever the case may be it probably isn't gonna go bad but it's just nice that this thing is a modular so you could swap it out if necessary but their really cool thing about this external graphics box is that it's able to supply up to 87 watts of power to your MacBook Pro that means while connected to a 15-inch MacBook Pro it can charge it at full speed the next thing I like about the breakaway box 650 is that it is large enough to accommodate larger cards although it doesn't seem like overly large it is big enough to accommodate something like this right here which is just ridiculously ugly and big this is the asus republic of gamers RX 580 and it's just a very very large card even compared to the vega 64 I mean endorse the Vega 64 but yes this can with a little bit of shimmying and a little bit of contorting it can actually fit in this box with a little bit of room to spare not much I also like the fact that this box is really really quiet well outside of the GPU that is the GPU is gonna make a lot of noise regardless especially if you're really pushing it but this little fan inside isn't actually that bad I've ran into some very very terrible external graphics of fans in the past this one is not one of those that's actually fairly quiet and does a pretty good job of keeping things nice and cool now I'm not a really big fan of the case itself it is I mean it's just like your normal PC case like an African market PC case that has been fad specifically for external graphics so it's gonna have some sharp edges inside it's just not gonna look very pretty it's that same black metal that you find on your average run-of-the-mill PC case but it works but the most important thing is what we mentioned at first and that is the Apple recommendation Apple actually lists this thing on its website and yeah I mean you can't really go wrong there and because this thing has that beefy power supply it can power any Mac compatible GPU even the top tier and the Radeon Vega 64 you can actually get a bundle right now which is me it sounds crazy because it's $1,300 but it's actually a pretty good deal because as you guys know GPU prices are just ridiculous and of course people have debated as to why that is obviously the cryptocurrency madness that's going on right now contributes heavily to that but as far as who is to blame for the rise in prices obviously the GPU manufacturers have something to do with it and then the fact that there's just not enough supply they weren't really anticipating this huge demand on GPUs that's part of the reason as to why the prices have skyrocketed like they have I got this Radeon rx Vega 64 for I think like 650 dollars when it first came out maybe 700 I can't really remember out top of my head but now this thing is going for over a grand easily so that really kind of shows you how crazy the GPU market is right now now like I mentioned they are offering both the enclosure and the RX Vega 64 for $1300 which actually when you do the math as crazy as that sounds it's actually a pretty good deal considering the prices of these GPUs right now $1300 you subtract 450 you're looking at about 850 bucks for the Vegas 64 which is obviously high but a lot cheaper than you'll find it standalone so it's actually a pretty good deal it's crazy as that sounds ok let's get down to business we're going to unbox we're going to set up the sonnet egrets breakaway by 650w right now so let's do it okay so inside the box we have some instructions a power cable a Thunderbolt 3 cable which is important that's all the accessories so we'll just pull it out of the box like this and wrap it and here we go so you have a little window here on the other side you have your fan your case fan there's the front panel and the little sonnet logo will light up with a blue color once the unit is powered on on the bottom you have four rubber feet and then on the rear you have the power supply you also have your Thunderbolt 3 connection which goes to that Thunderbolt 3 controller from Intel and you have your PCIe slots you'll also notice several handy thumb screws so you don't need a screw driver to remove the cover from the case which is nice so we'll go ahead and do that right now oops a little carried away there alright so let's remove the cover again this just reminds me of one of those custom PC cases those relatively inexpensive PC cases not the nicest thing to remove there get some sharp edges here and there as well so keep that in mind so you will need a screwdriver to access the PCIe slots and there is the Intel Thunderbolt 3 controller as you can see it's a relatively simple deal you have your Thunderbolt 3 controller your power supply your fan and the chassis itself and here's the RX Vega 64 does require a dual six plus two pin connection there's the rear of the unit so we just slide that right in and connect it just like that alright once it's locked down into place we can just screw those screws back in to secure it in just like that I have this little plate back on use the thumb screw to secure it just like that and now you know what time it is time to connect the power so we got the two six plus two pin power connections there we go so now we'll put the cover back on always a fun thing to do all right so now we'll be secure the cover using the three thumb screws sped up obviously so there we go folks the Senedd Geographics breakaway box 650w ready to go I have my license television the 4k TV up there and there's my macbook pro and there is the e GPU all set up ready to go and power at home alright so let's talk about some of the really nice characteristics of the sonnet a graphics 650w obviously the big thing here is the power delivery eighty seven watts of power delivery I'm gonna show you that in a second you can see the Thunderbolt statistics under the about this Mac and system profiler let's let's go ahead and check out power now so you see power there we'll scroll down and you see right there eighty seven watts of potential power that we can deliver if you have a 15-inch MacBook Pros gotta be able to charge that 15-inch MacBook Pro at full speed which is really really nice okay so now let's talk about what really matters performance we're gonna run some benchmarks now folks first thing we're gonna do is run a Bruce X benchmark for Final Cut Pro 10 just to see if the e GPU helps out at all because a lot of people use Final Cut Pro 10 they're interested in EGP use well I got some disappointing news for you folks you're gonna see right here why this is so disappointing so we're running brew sex right now this is a very popular benchmark little utility and you can see nothing on the AMD rx Vegas 64 you see the Intel iris the integrated graphics handling all the heavy lifting the e GPU is doing nothing yeah Final Cut Pro 10 is not yet optimized to use external graphics just yet hopefully that will come soon I thought it was gonna be with ten point four point one but no but you can see here that the heav'n benchmark is definitely utilizing that EGP you its pegging out there you can see heavily using the e GPU so it works but it doesn't work yet for Final Cut Pro 10 big disappointment there we're gonna run some other benchmarks though let's start with the metal so you can see the integrated graphics you see the RX 580 and then you see that Vega 64 how it handles the three off-screen tests Manhattan 3.1 Manhattan and t-rex you see no question about it of those two external GPUs the rx 580 obviously huge jump over the integrated but the Vegas 64 also a pretty significant jump over the 582 gonna run some OpenGL tests now here with the heav'n benchmark valley and of course Cinebench r15 so you see that integrated eleven point three frames per second for heaven you see obviously does a lot better when you start stepping into the external graphics obviously that Vegas 64 is going to be really really good but the RX 580 is no slouch either but you had no question the Vegas 64 is going to be the best performing external GPU for the Mac at least right now so now we're doing an open CL test this is very interesting because of course Final Cut Pro uses OpenCL GPU acceleration so you can see the potential there that Lux mark text is really showing how much of a difference that Vegas 64 makes huge difference between the integrated graphics so that really makes me hope the Final Cut Pro 10 will be updated to support external graphics and really benefit from the power of an external GPU so what can we discern from all these benchmarks we just ran and all the tests and everything we talked about in this video well the main thing that I get from this is that external graphics have a lot of potential a lot of untapped potential because really is the software that's lacking right now the big thing that sticks out to me the lack of external graphics support in Final Cut Pro 10 which is kind of a disappointment considering that we know we just got this new version of Mac OS with a GPU support and then Final Cut Pro 10 just recently had a huge release with ten point four point one yet external graphics support has not baked in you would think that that would have been something to you know to have with this big Final Cut Pro 10 release to coincide with the official support of external graphics on Mac OS but that didn't happen so hopefully in the future in the near future we will see Final Cut Pro 10 be able to take advantage of these external graphics setups hopefully not just one a GPU hopefully it can take advantage of multiple external graphics setups at the same time I think we can also conclude that you know gaming performance is going to be benefited in a major way as well now obviously it's not as good as if you had you know a modular Mac Pro and you had a PCIe slot dedicated to graphics built right into that machine you're still using Thunderbolt 3 so there is going to be some bandwidth constraints in that regard it's not going to be the same as you know building your own PC and having a 1080 Ti in that PC you're just not going to get the same type of performance but an e GPU still crushes that dinky integrated graphics that you find on my 13-inch MacBook Pro there's just no question about it and games are gonna benefit heavily from that I think what we can conclude is that EGP use are very promising but it's still in its infancy Apple has made some significant strides over the last year and it's supported a GPUs I mean it is official support baked into mac OS but we still don't have things like in video support so that's sort of a bummer especially for gamer Apple doesn't support boot camp for EGP you set ups that's sort of a bummer because some of the games would like to play maybe windows-only or they perform better on Windows and really let's face it the elephant in the room eg PU setups are ridiculously expensive certainly more expensive than the benefit I think that you get out of it for most people especially since apps like Final Cut Pro 10 don't take advantage of external graphics just yet so yes the sonnet a graphics breakaway box is probably the best external graphics box you can buy right now however I would probably wait it out a little bit first of all to see how Apple supports external graphics with apps like Final Cut Pro 10 how other developers support it and also let's just be honest I would probably wait until eg PU prices or just GPU prices in general come back down to reality right now it's just crazy money that they're asking so ladies and gentlemen that has been a look at the sonnet a graphics breakaway box 650w let me know what you guys think down below in the comment section also if you appreciated this video please leave me a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel this is Jeff with nine-to-five Mac you\n"