The New $99 DEG1 eGPU Dock Will Transform The Way You Game

The Performance of the Min Forum D1 EGPU Dock with RTX 490 and Various Games

We are stating that the RTX 490 is scoring around a 36521, we're not that far off with that 32,000 but one thing I've noticed with any kind of eGPU, USB Thunderbolt or Oculink is with these synthetics they always definitely kind of score up really high it's not real world performance that's why they're called synthetic benchmarks so now we need to see how this thing handles real gaming.

First up, Cyberpunk 2077 Ultra, with DLSS set to Auto, and when we go up to that Ultra, raid tracing and automatically sets it there just to give you a look. This is pretty impressive what's going on right now but we've got a lot more that we can get out of this because we're not even using frame gen. If I had to guess, I mean I'd say DLSS is really going to be balanced in that auto mode in my opinion.

This is more than playable it's actually doing much better than I thought it would be. We're seeing an average of around 70 FPS and given that we're not getting the full potential out of this RTX 490, not bad at all given that we're basically maxed out here at 4K and remember I mean we're using that 8700G, that's actually only going up to around 65 watts in this unit right now. We could go higher but we've got such a small form factor it can get a little hot.

So, R tracing Ultra is working but what about Ray tracing Overdrive now this is very taxing even on the RTX 490 so I suspect you know with the way we've got it set up right now yeah, so we're under 60. I kind of expected this would happen with a vsync on this monitor actually does support G-Sync so we're not seeing any kind of tearing but man it looks absolutely amazing.

This is probably the third time I've ever tried uh R tracing overdrive but we could definitely stand to use a little bit of frame generation. So, we were seeing an average of around 53 without it and we'll just turn on it's the only thing we're going to change here and we've almost doubled that frame rate, I mean we're up in the 90s now with something like this yeah you could definitely get by with newer AAA games.

I mean this is pretty crazy that we're using R tracing overdrive on this little system now with that uh RTX 490 it does kind of make it a big system but but overall given that we're running this over Oculink, this is some really great performance.

Next up Horizon Forbidden West and I want to show you here we're not using any kind of frame generation and we're not even using DLSS we're at a native 4K resolution very high so we've got everything maxed out here with this game and this has been one of those games that just eats up systems but with this system here I'm seeing an average of around 91 FPS across the board.

And of course, we could get a lot more out of it enabling some DLSS or maybe even adding some frame gen here but we don't even need it with this RTX 490 connected to this Mini PC, it's pretty awesome.

I also ran the built-in Benchmark for Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Extreme settings no resolution scale so we're not using DLSS we're at a native 4K resolution frame gen is off average of 146 and our 1% low was only around 130.

Finally, one of my favorite games right now I've been playing the heck out of this. I did not play this on PlayStation 4 so going into it on PC is pretty great especially when you can jack those settings up and just like Horizon Forbidden West we're not using any kind of DLSS or frame generation with this car.

So, overall this new Oculink eGPU Dock from Min Forum does work out really well. What we saw in this video is overkill for a Mini PC I completely understand that usually I recommend something like an RTX 3060 but I'm going to go ahead and say it you know with the 4,000 series Nvidia card supporting Nvidia's frame gen, I think the 4060 is kind of the now goto for something like this.

But that's not all, if you're interested in learning a little more about the Min Forum D1 eGPU Dock or maybe even pick one up, I'll leave the link in the description and I'll also leave some links for some uh suggested power supplies on my end and some video cards uh if you really want to do this I would suggest heading over to eBay picking up something used if you don't already have a video card to go into this.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwith minus forms brand new egpu Doc I'm actually running cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with r tracing overdrive enabled on this Mini PC and it looks absolutely amazing what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime P here again today we're going to be taking a look at Min forum's brand new $99 oculink egpu dog now unfortunately this does not support Thunderbolt but I mean we've got the fastest connection that we can get right here with oculink and with all of the many PCs and handhelds on the market that include an oculink Port this could make sense to a lot of people out there using one of those devices and on the channel I've actually done a tutorial showing you how to create a cheap oculink egpu dock but nothing's going to come in as nice as this one here you can come in a bit cheaper just using a board from Amazon but this thing is set up really nicely and with a $99 price point it's actually a pretty decent deal when you take a look at all the parts on the market right now this will support up to a 3.5 slot GPU it also supports full size ATX power supplies and sfx power supplies and the way this all mounts up is actually pretty ingenious as you can see I mean we've got the dock we've got a little bit of Hardware in this bracket the bracket itself actually connects to whatever power supply you're going to be using with this unit and in turn that's going to be our GPU bracket over here on this side we've got our oculink Port over on the other side we've got a power button and of course with a dock like this you will have to add your own GPU and power supply I've kind of gone through a few trying to decide exactly what to do here but you know in the end I went with kind of the most powerful card that I have this fat boy right here the RTX 490 Overkill yes but I really wanted to see how this thing would perform over oculink and when it comes to the uh power supply itself again we've got a couple different options you can go with a fulls sizee ATX or you can go with an sfx a much smaller power supply and for this I'm going to be going with The Cooler Master v850 so A 850 wat sfx power supply and one of the big reasons I wanted to use this is the cables this came with are actually extra short so it's not going to be a Rat's Nest of wires once I've got everything connected here and assembly super easy so we're just going to place the power supply right here and it's actually labeled so ATX or sfx obviously we're going in that sfx just a much smaller power supply and with this all we're really going to need is that 24 pin motherboard connector and power to our GPU if your GPU requires it so again I went with this v850 because of the cabling it came with it's super short but it kind of makes it look like it was made specifically for this so we don't have a ton of wires hanging off the side of this thing I mean you could always kind of zip tie up whatever you want to do with it but something like this just makes it look really clean and and since we're going with that RTX 490 it does require the proprietary Nvidia 12 pin got one right here for it and this bracket system the way they've set this up I thought was really cool basically we've got this single bracket and this will work with the sfx or for the ATX power supply we're just going to place it right in here it's actually not going to scratch up your power supply because they've got a little rubber on it and now we can just put our GPU right here and that's going to be our bracket once it's all assembled looks a little something like this and yeah I mean we've got a massive GPU here I wouldn't recommend going with an RTX 490 over oculink but it is much faster than Thunderbolt or USB 4 just to give you an idea Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 can run it up to a maximum of 40 gigs a second when it comes to oculink this can run it up to 63 and in real world performance test that I've run Thunderbolt 4 or usb4 usually runs at about 31 to 32 gigs and that's on a really good day with a good cable on all of the oculink E gpus that I've tested I've been able to get anywhere from 41 up to 58 gigs a second that's real world performance so when you compare it to up to around 31 usually around 28 over USB 4 that's a big jump and it's going to make a huge difference especially with a much more powerful card like the RTX 490 not to mention that when you're connected like this it's basically pcie outside of the case as opposed to you know a USBC connection be it Thunderbolt 4 games are more compatible with something like this I've run into some newer games especially something like Horizon zero Dawn which just doesn't like egpus running over Thunderbolt or usb4 but it works perfectly fine over oculink even using the same exact GPU U so what I've got here is the new minus Forum msa1 Mini PC this has oculink obviously round back and it's actually powered by an AMD ryzen 8700g super small form factor with a the desktop CPU we've got that RTX 490 connected over oculate now one thing that this doc won't do is supply power to another device cuz there's no USB type-c to charge anything up so you're going to be stuck with just oculink and you know if you were to plug in let's say a handheld that had an oculink port you'd also need a separate power supply but I've actually been wanting to test out this card with this Mini PC so I figured I'd go ahead and put it in this video here but just to give you a look we've got that AMD ryzen 8700g 8 cores 16 threads 32 gigs of ddr5 we've still got access to the Radeon 780m igpu but instead of using that we've got the RTX 490 with 24 gigs of vram now one tool that I use whenever doing any kind of gpus be it Thunderbolt or oculink is cudy it's free to download and this will kind of give you a good idea of how fast your GPU is over whatever connection you have Thunderbolt or oculink and if you take a look right here whenever I'm doing a thunderbolt egpu this is sitting at about 2,800 and that's a really good connection as you can see with this we're up to 6300 so we've got a much faster connection from our PC over to the egpu and I usually use use this when I'm getting new uh Thunderbolt 4 cables not all cables are created equal and sometimes you only see this running at around 1,600 over USB 4 another thing I like to check here is GPU now this isn't going to be running at PCI ex16 this is actually running at PCI EX4 4.0 Thunderbolt would be running at PCI EX4 3.0 so that's another good tool just to make sure you're getting the maximum connection over whatever connection you're using here and the last thing I always like to take a look at is Just Fur Mark I want to make sure that you know we're kind of maxing out this GPU sometimes you'll run into a connection where it's just not giving us 100% of that GPU fur Mark is actually a really good tool so we can go ahead and open it right here make sure that the egpu is selected and we're just going to max out this resolution I've got After Burner up in the top leftand corner and you can see that this GPU is now pulling around 450 Watts that's not all this GPU can pull it can actually go much higher but this will give you an idea of what this GPU is doing and we are at 100% utilization 450 Watts on this RTX 490 but this doesn't tell the whole story because while we're gaming there's a little more going on with the GPU so when we get into gaming at 4k on this unit we'll probably see that wattage jump up on this external GPU now it's time to see how this thing performs and we're going to start out here with some GPU benchmarks checking out three Rd Mark steel Nomad we're coming in with a pretty impressive score of 9,037 and this isn't one I run much on igpus so let's check out fire strike 46345 and just to put this into perspective for you I have run this Benchmark on this Mini PC with the built-in Radeon 780m igpu we're scoring pretty respectable 8,12 when it comes to an igpu but yeah I mean this performance jump is crazy and finally we've got 3D Mark time spy 25,000 616 and with just running the built-in igpu our time spy score is around 3,325 now there's one last thing I wanted to take a look at here our graphic score so over oculink right now with time spy 32362 and over on 3D Mark's website they're stating that the RTX 490 is scoring around a 36521 we're not that far off with that 32,000 but one thing I've noticed with any kind of egpu USB Thunderbolt or oculink is with these synthetics they always definitely kind of score up really high it's not real world performance that's why they're called synthetic benchmarks so now we need to see how this thing handles real gaming so first up cyberpunk 2077 Ultra raid tracing 4K dlss is set to Auto when we go up to that Ultra raid tracing and automatically sets it there just to give you a look this is pretty impressive what's going on right now but we've got a lot more that we can get out of this because we're not even using frame gen and if I had to guess I mean I'd say dlss is really going to balanced in that auto mode in my opinion this is more than playable it's actually doing much better than I thought it would we're seeing an average of around 70 FPS and given that we're not getting the full potential out of this RTX 490 not bad at all given that we're basically maxed out here at 4K and remember I mean we're using that 8700g that's actually only going up to to around 65 watts in this unit right now we could go higher but we've got such a small form factor it can get a little hot so R tracing Ultra is working but what about Ray tracing overdrive now this is very taxing even on the RTX 490 so I suspect you know with the way we've got it set up right now yeah so we're under 60 and I kind of expected this would happen with a vsync on this monitor actually does support gsync so we're not seeing any kind of tearing but man it looks absolutely amazing this is probably the third time I've ever tried uh R tracing overdrive but we could definitely stand to use a little bit of frame generation so we were seeing an average of around 53 without it we'll just turn it on it's the only thing we're going to change here and we've almost doubled that frame rate I mean we're up in the 90s now with something like this yeah you could definitely get by with newer AAA games I mean this is pretty crazy that we're using ra tracing overdrive on this little system now with that uh RTX 490 it does kind of make it a big system but but overall given that we're running this over oculink this is some really great performance next up Horizon forbidden West and I want to show you here we're not using any kind of frame generation and we're not even using dlss we're at a native 4K resolution very high so we've got everything maxed out here with this game and this has been one of those games that just eats up systems but with this system here I'm seeing an average of around 91 FPS across the board and of course we could get a lot more out of it enabling some dlss or maybe even adding some frame gen here but we don't even need it with this RTX 490 connected to this Mini PC it's pretty awesome I also ran the built-in Benchmark for Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Extreme settings no resolution scale so we're not using dlss we're at a native 4K resolution frame gen is off average of 146 and our 1% low was only around 130 and finally one of my favorite games right now I've been playing the heck out of this I did not play this on PlayStation 4 so going into it on PC is pretty great especially when you can jack those settings up and just like Horizon forbidden West we're not using any kind of dlss or frame generation with this car so yeah overall this new oculink egpu Doc from Min Forum does work out really well and what we saw in this video is overkill for a Mini PC I completely understand that usually I recommend something like an RTX 3060 but I'm going to go ahead and say it you know with the 4,000 series Nvidia card supporting nvidia's frame gen I think the 4060 is kind of the now goto for something like this but that's going to wrap it up for this one if you're interested in learning a little more about the Min Forum D1 egpu doc or maybe even pick one up I'll leave the link in the description and I'll also leave some links for some uh suggested power supplies on my end and some video cards uh if you really want to do this I would suggest heading over to eBay picking up something used if you don't already have a video card to go into this but that's it for this one like always thanks for watchingwith minus forms brand new egpu Doc I'm actually running cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with r tracing overdrive enabled on this Mini PC and it looks absolutely amazing what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime P here again today we're going to be taking a look at Min forum's brand new $99 oculink egpu dog now unfortunately this does not support Thunderbolt but I mean we've got the fastest connection that we can get right here with oculink and with all of the many PCs and handhelds on the market that include an oculink Port this could make sense to a lot of people out there using one of those devices and on the channel I've actually done a tutorial showing you how to create a cheap oculink egpu dock but nothing's going to come in as nice as this one here you can come in a bit cheaper just using a board from Amazon but this thing is set up really nicely and with a $99 price point it's actually a pretty decent deal when you take a look at all the parts on the market right now this will support up to a 3.5 slot GPU it also supports full size ATX power supplies and sfx power supplies and the way this all mounts up is actually pretty ingenious as you can see I mean we've got the dock we've got a little bit of Hardware in this bracket the bracket itself actually connects to whatever power supply you're going to be using with this unit and in turn that's going to be our GPU bracket over here on this side we've got our oculink Port over on the other side we've got a power button and of course with a dock like this you will have to add your own GPU and power supply I've kind of gone through a few trying to decide exactly what to do here but you know in the end I went with kind of the most powerful card that I have this fat boy right here the RTX 490 Overkill yes but I really wanted to see how this thing would perform over oculink and when it comes to the uh power supply itself again we've got a couple different options you can go with a fulls sizee ATX or you can go with an sfx a much smaller power supply and for this I'm going to be going with The Cooler Master v850 so A 850 wat sfx power supply and one of the big reasons I wanted to use this is the cables this came with are actually extra short so it's not going to be a Rat's Nest of wires once I've got everything connected here and assembly super easy so we're just going to place the power supply right here and it's actually labeled so ATX or sfx obviously we're going in that sfx just a much smaller power supply and with this all we're really going to need is that 24 pin motherboard connector and power to our GPU if your GPU requires it so again I went with this v850 because of the cabling it came with it's super short but it kind of makes it look like it was made specifically for this so we don't have a ton of wires hanging off the side of this thing I mean you could always kind of zip tie up whatever you want to do with it but something like this just makes it look really clean and and since we're going with that RTX 490 it does require the proprietary Nvidia 12 pin got one right here for it and this bracket system the way they've set this up I thought was really cool basically we've got this single bracket and this will work with the sfx or for the ATX power supply we're just going to place it right in here it's actually not going to scratch up your power supply because they've got a little rubber on it and now we can just put our GPU right here and that's going to be our bracket once it's all assembled looks a little something like this and yeah I mean we've got a massive GPU here I wouldn't recommend going with an RTX 490 over oculink but it is much faster than Thunderbolt or USB 4 just to give you an idea Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 can run it up to a maximum of 40 gigs a second when it comes to oculink this can run it up to 63 and in real world performance test that I've run Thunderbolt 4 or usb4 usually runs at about 31 to 32 gigs and that's on a really good day with a good cable on all of the oculink E gpus that I've tested I've been able to get anywhere from 41 up to 58 gigs a second that's real world performance so when you compare it to up to around 31 usually around 28 over USB 4 that's a big jump and it's going to make a huge difference especially with a much more powerful card like the RTX 490 not to mention that when you're connected like this it's basically pcie outside of the case as opposed to you know a USBC connection be it Thunderbolt 4 games are more compatible with something like this I've run into some newer games especially something like Horizon zero Dawn which just doesn't like egpus running over Thunderbolt or usb4 but it works perfectly fine over oculink even using the same exact GPU U so what I've got here is the new minus Forum msa1 Mini PC this has oculink obviously round back and it's actually powered by an AMD ryzen 8700g super small form factor with a the desktop CPU we've got that RTX 490 connected over oculate now one thing that this doc won't do is supply power to another device cuz there's no USB type-c to charge anything up so you're going to be stuck with just oculink and you know if you were to plug in let's say a handheld that had an oculink port you'd also need a separate power supply but I've actually been wanting to test out this card with this Mini PC so I figured I'd go ahead and put it in this video here but just to give you a look we've got that AMD ryzen 8700g 8 cores 16 threads 32 gigs of ddr5 we've still got access to the Radeon 780m igpu but instead of using that we've got the RTX 490 with 24 gigs of vram now one tool that I use whenever doing any kind of gpus be it Thunderbolt or oculink is cudy it's free to download and this will kind of give you a good idea of how fast your GPU is over whatever connection you have Thunderbolt or oculink and if you take a look right here whenever I'm doing a thunderbolt egpu this is sitting at about 2,800 and that's a really good connection as you can see with this we're up to 6300 so we've got a much faster connection from our PC over to the egpu and I usually use use this when I'm getting new uh Thunderbolt 4 cables not all cables are created equal and sometimes you only see this running at around 1,600 over USB 4 another thing I like to check here is GPU now this isn't going to be running at PCI ex16 this is actually running at PCI EX4 4.0 Thunderbolt would be running at PCI EX4 3.0 so that's another good tool just to make sure you're getting the maximum connection over whatever connection you're using here and the last thing I always like to take a look at is Just Fur Mark I want to make sure that you know we're kind of maxing out this GPU sometimes you'll run into a connection where it's just not giving us 100% of that GPU fur Mark is actually a really good tool so we can go ahead and open it right here make sure that the egpu is selected and we're just going to max out this resolution I've got After Burner up in the top leftand corner and you can see that this GPU is now pulling around 450 Watts that's not all this GPU can pull it can actually go much higher but this will give you an idea of what this GPU is doing and we are at 100% utilization 450 Watts on this RTX 490 but this doesn't tell the whole story because while we're gaming there's a little more going on with the GPU so when we get into gaming at 4k on this unit we'll probably see that wattage jump up on this external GPU now it's time to see how this thing performs and we're going to start out here with some GPU benchmarks checking out three Rd Mark steel Nomad we're coming in with a pretty impressive score of 9,037 and this isn't one I run much on igpus so let's check out fire strike 46345 and just to put this into perspective for you I have run this Benchmark on this Mini PC with the built-in Radeon 780m igpu we're scoring pretty respectable 8,12 when it comes to an igpu but yeah I mean this performance jump is crazy and finally we've got 3D Mark time spy 25,000 616 and with just running the built-in igpu our time spy score is around 3,325 now there's one last thing I wanted to take a look at here our graphic score so over oculink right now with time spy 32362 and over on 3D Mark's website they're stating that the RTX 490 is scoring around a 36521 we're not that far off with that 32,000 but one thing I've noticed with any kind of egpu USB Thunderbolt or oculink is with these synthetics they always definitely kind of score up really high it's not real world performance that's why they're called synthetic benchmarks so now we need to see how this thing handles real gaming so first up cyberpunk 2077 Ultra raid tracing 4K dlss is set to Auto when we go up to that Ultra raid tracing and automatically sets it there just to give you a look this is pretty impressive what's going on right now but we've got a lot more that we can get out of this because we're not even using frame gen and if I had to guess I mean I'd say dlss is really going to balanced in that auto mode in my opinion this is more than playable it's actually doing much better than I thought it would we're seeing an average of around 70 FPS and given that we're not getting the full potential out of this RTX 490 not bad at all given that we're basically maxed out here at 4K and remember I mean we're using that 8700g that's actually only going up to to around 65 watts in this unit right now we could go higher but we've got such a small form factor it can get a little hot so R tracing Ultra is working but what about Ray tracing overdrive now this is very taxing even on the RTX 490 so I suspect you know with the way we've got it set up right now yeah so we're under 60 and I kind of expected this would happen with a vsync on this monitor actually does support gsync so we're not seeing any kind of tearing but man it looks absolutely amazing this is probably the third time I've ever tried uh R tracing overdrive but we could definitely stand to use a little bit of frame generation so we were seeing an average of around 53 without it we'll just turn it on it's the only thing we're going to change here and we've almost doubled that frame rate I mean we're up in the 90s now with something like this yeah you could definitely get by with newer AAA games I mean this is pretty crazy that we're using ra tracing overdrive on this little system now with that uh RTX 490 it does kind of make it a big system but but overall given that we're running this over oculink this is some really great performance next up Horizon forbidden West and I want to show you here we're not using any kind of frame generation and we're not even using dlss we're at a native 4K resolution very high so we've got everything maxed out here with this game and this has been one of those games that just eats up systems but with this system here I'm seeing an average of around 91 FPS across the board and of course we could get a lot more out of it enabling some dlss or maybe even adding some frame gen here but we don't even need it with this RTX 490 connected to this Mini PC it's pretty awesome I also ran the built-in Benchmark for Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Extreme settings no resolution scale so we're not using dlss we're at a native 4K resolution frame gen is off average of 146 and our 1% low was only around 130 and finally one of my favorite games right now I've been playing the heck out of this I did not play this on PlayStation 4 so going into it on PC is pretty great especially when you can jack those settings up and just like Horizon forbidden West we're not using any kind of dlss or frame generation with this car so yeah overall this new oculink egpu Doc from Min Forum does work out really well and what we saw in this video is overkill for a Mini PC I completely understand that usually I recommend something like an RTX 3060 but I'm going to go ahead and say it you know with the 4,000 series Nvidia card supporting nvidia's frame gen I think the 4060 is kind of the now goto for something like this but that's going to wrap it up for this one if you're interested in learning a little more about the Min Forum D1 egpu doc or maybe even pick one up I'll leave the link in the description and I'll also leave some links for some uh suggested power supplies on my end and some video cards uh if you really want to do this I would suggest heading over to eBay picking up something used if you don't already have a video card to go into this but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching\n"