The AIO DUO Node is a Thunderbolt 3 external graphics unit (eGPU) designed for Mac computers. It's perfect for gamers because it provides much better performance in games when compared to the integrated Graphics. You can see this difference with benchmarks like Heaven and Valley, where you get around 78-73 frames per second using the eGPU, whereas with the integrated Graphics at Mac settings, you're usually maxing around 30 frames per second.

In the Heaven Benchmark, you can really see the difference that an eGPU can make. Notice the 1080 Ultra no anti-aliasing, where you're getting over 40 frames per second, whereas with the integrated Graphics, you're getting less than 20 frames per second. This is a huge difference in performance.

The same picture is painted with the Valley Benchmark. Notice the 4K low no anti-alias scene Benchmark, where you're getting over 30 frames per second, which is comparable to 1080 low no anti-aliasing with integrated Graphics. You can really see the difference that an external GPU makes.

Unfortunately, the latest version of Final Cut Pro 10 doesn't work with my eGPU setup, but I downgraded to 10.2.2 and you can really tell the difference. It's a huge difference in export time when you're using effects. You also get better performance in Geekbench 4 OpenCL Benchmark.

In the C open Benchmark, you can see the major difference between the RX480 and the Intel Iris 550. More than double the overall score of the integrated Graphics.

The big question is: is an eGPU worth it? Is it worth your money? The answer to that question is mixed. If you're a gamer, you'll be able to see tangible differences. For instance, here is Rocket League running on my 2016 MacBook Pro with the Iris 550 integrated GPU, and the frame rate is hovering around 30 frames per second sometimes it dips a little lower. This means that gaming is playable but not really the best experience.

If you have any more demanding games, you'll find even worse results at times. You do see those noticeable benefits when doing things like gaming. However, you need to consider other factors such as the time investment that it takes to set this whole thing up and the fact that the eGPU can't drive the MacBook Pro's internal display.

You need an external display, and there are other factors such as the unit size, which is a big box, and it will take up a lot of space on your desk. The AIO DUO Node doesn't provide you with a long enough Thunderbolt 3 cable to relocate the node to the floor. Until you get a longer Thunderbolt 3 cable, it'll be next to your MacBook Pro, which is not a good thing because the fans can get a little loud with the unit itself and graphics cards.

A lot of things to consider here. Make sure you read the full post over at 9 to 5 Mac because I tried to break it all down there, and I have some additional information for you to read.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: encan an external Graphics box like the aidio node provide a Major Performance boost to the 2016 MacBook Pro over thunderbow 3 in this video we'll show you the answer so the aido node is a thunderbolt 3 e Graphics box so basically an external Graphics box or external GPU or egpu uh that connects via Thunderbolt 3 to your MacBook Pro so this means that you can put a full-size Gra graphics card inside of the aido node and tap into the power of that graphics card right from Mac OS now for this particular test I'm using the AMD Radeon rx480 this one's from Sapphire uh thanks to the folks over at Sapphire for providing this for us uh to test this egpu setup out so the AMD Polaris line of cards is actually supported somewhat in Mac OS Sierra so that is why I chose this in particular on the other hand the Pascal cards from Nvidia like the GT TX 1080 and the 1070 are not supported in Mac OS so that is one thing that you want to keep in mind if you're trying to use an egpu setup you're going to be able to use the Pascale cards in Windows if you use a boot camp installation but you're not going to be able to use them in Mac OS so keep that in mind okay so let's go ahead and unbox the node right now so just going to take this off okay so here is the front panel of the aido node of course you have the aido logo right smack in the middle you have the Thunderbolt 3 text right here at the bottom and then you have this perforated design here that allows airflow to get get through the aidio node uh so the front is fairly simple now let's turn it around to the side here so on the left side you have this little panel here which is going to allow air to get through the unit as well uh that's pretty much all that's on that side so let's flip it around again to this side and the only thing you'll see on this side here is the fan for the power supply unit which is built in to the aido node you have a 400 watt power supply unit sfx unit built right into the node so you don't have to worry about supplying power to this thing externally so finally on the rear of the node you have two little openings for your PCI either single width or double width card you have a thunderbolt 3 Port right here single Thunderbolt 3 Port you have of course your power connector and then you have your power switch and that's pretty much it outside of a handle for carrying this thing around you're probably not going to want to carry it around too much cuz it's fairly bulky and fairly large and then you have these two thumb screws here to take the cover off so they you're able to install the GPU okay so now we're going to undo these thumb screws here so that we can get to the inside of the unit there's one here and there's one on the other other side as well now removing the cover is a little strange you actually have to push in on this uh handle or on the back of the unit in order to push towards the front of the case so that you're able to remove the cover so basically like that all right so we're going to just continue to remove this now inside the case it's pretty straightforward and simple you have your pcie slot down here you have your main board you have your sfx power supply this is a 400 W power supply you have two 6 plus2 pcie Molex connectors to go directly to your graphics card if need be you have the fan in the front here uh which is going to help with airf flow and then of course you have room for a double width graphics card if necessary here in front so uh everything that you're going to need is is here to power a graphics card externally and this thing is big enough it's wide enough as you can see to fit a full-size graphics card I'm going to actually put that rx480 in here in just a second to show you guys okay so now what we need to do is just unscrew these two thumb screws and then we're prepared to insert the GPU just remove the little plate we're good to go and as I mentioned earlier the folks over at Sapphire provided us with the Radeon rx480 uh for this test so we appreciate that shout out to the folks over at Sapphire for helping us out so now let's go ahead and unbox the graphics card here so here it is sapphires rx480 um this is a fullsize graphics card it is dual width and it has two HDMI ports it has a DVI port and it also has two display port connections it also has LED lighting uh embedded behind the sapphire logo which is kind of cool so there's a little button here you press that and you can change the color of the logo and just another little side point this card does come with a back plate as well okay so let's go ahead and install the rx48 inside the aido node now so all you need to do is simply line up the graphics card pcie connector with the pcie slot right here um then of course you want the two openings right here on the back of the aido node to line up as well and then you'll screw them down with those thumb screws so let's go ahead and do it all right so now it's secure right in there just like that so now we'll just tighten the thumb screws down okay got it in there okay so the last part of the installation involves simply plugging in the power connector uh you have the 6 plus 2 setup here you want to plug in the smaller one first on the outside like this and then that allows you to plug in the six pin adapter like this all right so now we're ready to go so we can put the case back on all right okay so now we'll just screw in the two screws here all right we are good to go can you can find the power cable and Thunderbolt 3 cable inside the box that comes with the node so here's your power cable no power brick because the PSU is inside the node itself which is nice and then you have a thunderbolt 3 cable as well along with documentation stickers and some cable ties in the future you're probably going to want to get a longer Thunderbolt 3 cable because nine times out of 10 you're not going to want the node right next to your MacBook while you work so now that everything is hooked up correctly we just want to turn on the Node like this and now you simply plug in the Thunderbolt 3 cable like that now early versions of the IO note come with firmware that needs to be updated to the latest version and you can download this from mido's website we have a link in the post on 9 to5 Mac as well once you download that you're going to run the firmware update tool you'll see it right here aidio T3 node update tool so we just double click on that and select yes but you're going to run into this error if you don't have your Thunderbolt drivers updated on Windows it's going to say SDK service not found Thunderbolt service doesn't exist uh this was really perplexed me at first but uh eventually I was able to figure it out and get the right Thunderbolt 3 driver download uh to work so what we'll do I'll show you how to do that now and I've also included a link to the Thunderbolt driver in the posto 9 to5 Mac as well so we're just going to open up this Intel Thunderbolt driver here so what we want to do here is we want to double click where it says setup and we want to select run and accept and then install and then yes all right so it complet it successfully so you just click finish here and to verify we can go into device manager close this out we can go under system devices and it should say Thunderbolt controller 15 D2 so that's what it should say for that controller all right so now what we can do is we can run the firmware update tool again from aido and we should see something different this time around now there you go so you can see the tool is loaded it did recognize the aidio node and then you can just select it and then choose next and go through the update now I've already done this update so I don't need to do it now but just in case you do um this is the way you do it and you actually have to do this in order for your node to be recognized successfully so before you do anything else make sure that your firmware is up to date with the latest version so that's all you need Windows for in this particular exercise and you can use a boot camp installation to do all this then we want to shut down our MacBook complet completely and disconnect the aido nodes thunderbow 3 cable now we want to boot the MacBook into recovery mode to do that you want to hold the command key and the r key at the same time while powering on the MacBook once you're booted into recovery mode what you want to do is go to utilities and then go to terminal and once the terminal loads as you can see here you want to type in CSR Ule space disable semicolon reboot and then press return on your keyboard okay so now comes the fun part using the automate egpu script you can find the details on the post on 9 to5 Mac the first thing you want to do is to connect the aido note to your MacBook using the Thunderbolt 3 cable so just plug that in and then boot up your Macbook to Mac OS once you're up you're want to go to the Post on 95 Mac we're going to copy and paste all these commands into the terminal and it's very easy I have it right here for you so this script is basically adding the device ID for the GPU to the kernal extension file found in the system folder on Mac OS so the first terminal command downloads the the automate egpu script the second command gives it execute privileges the third command switches to your desktop folder and this fourth command will execute the script and once we do so it's going to ask for the password your administrator password put that in press return and then you will see something that looks like this so you can see that it detected the external GPU the radon rx480 it didn't download any Nvidia web drivers because I'm not using an Nvidia car and you can see where it added that device ID to system Library extensions and the ad AMD Radeon 4100c so now it's rebuilding the cache and now it's asking us to restart so thanks to go Q script it really is simple of course you could do this manually if you want it to um but this script makes it so easy and it works with a variety of cards including AMD and Nvidia cards so it really just takes a lot of the the leg work out of making this whole thing work so now we want to shut down our computer and we'll go to the next step so before proceeding I just wanted to remind you guys that if you like this video please leave me a thumbs up because it helps a lot and also subscribe for more videos If you like this type of thing let's get on with the tutorial shall we okay so I have this display port connector coming from my 32in 4k aocc monitor and I'm going to go directly into the rx480 right here on the aidio Node so let's do it all right so we're connecting Ed now here's something that's a little different you're going to need a USBC device plugged into the adjacent USBC Port um right next to the Thunderbolt 3 cable going to the aido node for Hardware acceleration to work if you try to boot up like this you're going to get a display on your monitor on your external monitor but it's going to be without Hardware acceleration it's going to be real just real jerky real slow to load and it's definitely not the experience you so make sure you have a USB C device like this aie SD card USBC reader or Apple's own USBC to USB adapter you can use either of those you just plug it right into the adjacent port and then you're good to go so now when you boot up you should get an external display with Hardware acceleration so now that we have everything connected and plugged in it's time to power up the aidio node so let's do it okay so we're going to boot up for the first time here we're going to see what happens now as Mac OS is booting you're going to hear a little whoosh sound from the graphics card indicating that things are working properly you can see the light come on for the external display and there we go folks look at that beautiful I don't know if you can see this but right now I'm running at about 78 frames per second 68 80 89 frames per second and you can run High settings at 60 frames per second um or at least close to that generally in some of the benchmarks like heaven and with um Valley as well so it really is no surprise that the egpu is perfect for gamers because you're going to get much better performance in games when using this external GP U you can see there around 78 73 frames per second you're usually maxing around 30 frames per second using the integrated Graphics at Mac settings now here's the heaven Benchmark and you can really see the difference that an egpu can make with gaming performance notice the 1080 Ultra no anti-aliasing you're getting over 40 frames per second whereas with the integrated Graphics you're getting well less of 20 frames per second so you're going from non-playable to playable basically when using the external GPU and the same picture is painted with the valley Benchmark notice the 4K low no anti-alias scene Benchmark you're getting over 30 frames per second which is comparable to 1080 low no anti- alosine with integrated Graphics so you can really see the difference that an external GPU makes now unfortunately the latest version of Final Cut Pro 10 doesn't work with my egpu setup but I downgraded to 10.2.2 and you can really tell the difference here man it's a huge difference in export time when you're using effects and then you have the geek bench 4 opencl Benchmark you can see the major difference between the rx480 and the Intel Iris 550 more than double the overall score of the integrated and finally the C open Benchmark you can see the difference there paint it very clear as well you're going to get much better frame rate when you're using an external GPU when compared to the integrated graphics on the 13-in MacBook Pro that Intel Iris 550 so the big question is is an egpu worth it is it worth your money is it worth your time investment and the answer to that question is mixed if you're a gamer then you will be able to see tangible differences for instance here is rocket League running on my 2016 MacBook Pro with that Iris 550 integrated GPU and the frame rate is hovering around 30 frames per second sometimes it dips a little lower uh depending on what's going on on screen as you can see right here so that is playable but it's not really the best experience and if you have any more demanding games you're going to find uh even worse results at times so you do see those noticeable benefits when doing things like gaming and even with Final Cut Pro 10 granted the newest version doesn't quite work yet with this egpu setup so you will have to downgrade to 10.2.2 but the differences are there now the question is is it worth the price uh because it is an investment you're going to pay around 250 for the node you're going to pay somewhere around 250 for a graphics card like the rx480 um but you do see those benefits there look at the frames per second with rocket League using the egpu but that is not the only thing you need to consider you need to consider the time investment that it takes to set this whole thing up and you need to consider other factors such as the fact that the egpu can't drive the MacBook Pros in internal display so you need an external display and there are other factors such as the unit size it's a big box and it's going to take up a lot of space on your desk and aido doesn't provide you with a long enough Thunderbolt 3 cable to relocate the node to the floor so until you get a longer Thunderbolt 3 cable it'll be next to your MacBook Pro which is not a good thing because the fans can get a little loud with the unit itself and graphics cards so a lot of things to consider here make sure you read the full post over at 9 to5 Mac because I Tred to break it all down there and I have some additional information for you to read again folks this is the aido node and it does make a significant difference the question is is it worth your time and your money only you're going to be able to answer that right now but what I can say is that the future looks fairly promising for Thunderbolt 3 in external graphics and closures as long as apple is willing to support it uh that is the big question will Apple make it more difficult or will they make it easy will they see the potential here have they already seen the potential for that matter and will they make it easy well we'll see in the future but right now let me know what you guys think Down Below in the comments section this is Jeff with the 9 to-5 Maccan an external Graphics box like the aidio node provide a Major Performance boost to the 2016 MacBook Pro over thunderbow 3 in this video we'll show you the answer so the aido node is a thunderbolt 3 e Graphics box so basically an external Graphics box or external GPU or egpu uh that connects via Thunderbolt 3 to your MacBook Pro so this means that you can put a full-size Gra graphics card inside of the aido node and tap into the power of that graphics card right from Mac OS now for this particular test I'm using the AMD Radeon rx480 this one's from Sapphire uh thanks to the folks over at Sapphire for providing this for us uh to test this egpu setup out so the AMD Polaris line of cards is actually supported somewhat in Mac OS Sierra so that is why I chose this in particular on the other hand the Pascal cards from Nvidia like the GT TX 1080 and the 1070 are not supported in Mac OS so that is one thing that you want to keep in mind if you're trying to use an egpu setup you're going to be able to use the Pascale cards in Windows if you use a boot camp installation but you're not going to be able to use them in Mac OS so keep that in mind okay so let's go ahead and unbox the node right now so just going to take this off okay so here is the front panel of the aido node of course you have the aido logo right smack in the middle you have the Thunderbolt 3 text right here at the bottom and then you have this perforated design here that allows airflow to get get through the aidio node uh so the front is fairly simple now let's turn it around to the side here so on the left side you have this little panel here which is going to allow air to get through the unit as well uh that's pretty much all that's on that side so let's flip it around again to this side and the only thing you'll see on this side here is the fan for the power supply unit which is built in to the aido node you have a 400 watt power supply unit sfx unit built right into the node so you don't have to worry about supplying power to this thing externally so finally on the rear of the node you have two little openings for your PCI either single width or double width card you have a thunderbolt 3 Port right here single Thunderbolt 3 Port you have of course your power connector and then you have your power switch and that's pretty much it outside of a handle for carrying this thing around you're probably not going to want to carry it around too much cuz it's fairly bulky and fairly large and then you have these two thumb screws here to take the cover off so they you're able to install the GPU okay so now we're going to undo these thumb screws here so that we can get to the inside of the unit there's one here and there's one on the other other side as well now removing the cover is a little strange you actually have to push in on this uh handle or on the back of the unit in order to push towards the front of the case so that you're able to remove the cover so basically like that all right so we're going to just continue to remove this now inside the case it's pretty straightforward and simple you have your pcie slot down here you have your main board you have your sfx power supply this is a 400 W power supply you have two 6 plus2 pcie Molex connectors to go directly to your graphics card if need be you have the fan in the front here uh which is going to help with airf flow and then of course you have room for a double width graphics card if necessary here in front so uh everything that you're going to need is is here to power a graphics card externally and this thing is big enough it's wide enough as you can see to fit a full-size graphics card I'm going to actually put that rx480 in here in just a second to show you guys okay so now what we need to do is just unscrew these two thumb screws and then we're prepared to insert the GPU just remove the little plate we're good to go and as I mentioned earlier the folks over at Sapphire provided us with the Radeon rx480 uh for this test so we appreciate that shout out to the folks over at Sapphire for helping us out so now let's go ahead and unbox the graphics card here so here it is sapphires rx480 um this is a fullsize graphics card it is dual width and it has two HDMI ports it has a DVI port and it also has two display port connections it also has LED lighting uh embedded behind the sapphire logo which is kind of cool so there's a little button here you press that and you can change the color of the logo and just another little side point this card does come with a back plate as well okay so let's go ahead and install the rx48 inside the aido node now so all you need to do is simply line up the graphics card pcie connector with the pcie slot right here um then of course you want the two openings right here on the back of the aido node to line up as well and then you'll screw them down with those thumb screws so let's go ahead and do it all right so now it's secure right in there just like that so now we'll just tighten the thumb screws down okay got it in there okay so the last part of the installation involves simply plugging in the power connector uh you have the 6 plus 2 setup here you want to plug in the smaller one first on the outside like this and then that allows you to plug in the six pin adapter like this all right so now we're ready to go so we can put the case back on all right okay so now we'll just screw in the two screws here all right we are good to go can you can find the power cable and Thunderbolt 3 cable inside the box that comes with the node so here's your power cable no power brick because the PSU is inside the node itself which is nice and then you have a thunderbolt 3 cable as well along with documentation stickers and some cable ties in the future you're probably going to want to get a longer Thunderbolt 3 cable because nine times out of 10 you're not going to want the node right next to your MacBook while you work so now that everything is hooked up correctly we just want to turn on the Node like this and now you simply plug in the Thunderbolt 3 cable like that now early versions of the IO note come with firmware that needs to be updated to the latest version and you can download this from mido's website we have a link in the post on 9 to5 Mac as well once you download that you're going to run the firmware update tool you'll see it right here aidio T3 node update tool so we just double click on that and select yes but you're going to run into this error if you don't have your Thunderbolt drivers updated on Windows it's going to say SDK service not found Thunderbolt service doesn't exist uh this was really perplexed me at first but uh eventually I was able to figure it out and get the right Thunderbolt 3 driver download uh to work so what we'll do I'll show you how to do that now and I've also included a link to the Thunderbolt driver in the posto 9 to5 Mac as well so we're just going to open up this Intel Thunderbolt driver here so what we want to do here is we want to double click where it says setup and we want to select run and accept and then install and then yes all right so it complet it successfully so you just click finish here and to verify we can go into device manager close this out we can go under system devices and it should say Thunderbolt controller 15 D2 so that's what it should say for that controller all right so now what we can do is we can run the firmware update tool again from aido and we should see something different this time around now there you go so you can see the tool is loaded it did recognize the aidio node and then you can just select it and then choose next and go through the update now I've already done this update so I don't need to do it now but just in case you do um this is the way you do it and you actually have to do this in order for your node to be recognized successfully so before you do anything else make sure that your firmware is up to date with the latest version so that's all you need Windows for in this particular exercise and you can use a boot camp installation to do all this then we want to shut down our MacBook complet completely and disconnect the aido nodes thunderbow 3 cable now we want to boot the MacBook into recovery mode to do that you want to hold the command key and the r key at the same time while powering on the MacBook once you're booted into recovery mode what you want to do is go to utilities and then go to terminal and once the terminal loads as you can see here you want to type in CSR Ule space disable semicolon reboot and then press return on your keyboard okay so now comes the fun part using the automate egpu script you can find the details on the post on 9 to5 Mac the first thing you want to do is to connect the aido note to your MacBook using the Thunderbolt 3 cable so just plug that in and then boot up your Macbook to Mac OS once you're up you're want to go to the Post on 95 Mac we're going to copy and paste all these commands into the terminal and it's very easy I have it right here for you so this script is basically adding the device ID for the GPU to the kernal extension file found in the system folder on Mac OS so the first terminal command downloads the the automate egpu script the second command gives it execute privileges the third command switches to your desktop folder and this fourth command will execute the script and once we do so it's going to ask for the password your administrator password put that in press return and then you will see something that looks like this so you can see that it detected the external GPU the radon rx480 it didn't download any Nvidia web drivers because I'm not using an Nvidia car and you can see where it added that device ID to system Library extensions and the ad AMD Radeon 4100c so now it's rebuilding the cache and now it's asking us to restart so thanks to go Q script it really is simple of course you could do this manually if you want it to um but this script makes it so easy and it works with a variety of cards including AMD and Nvidia cards so it really just takes a lot of the the leg work out of making this whole thing work so now we want to shut down our computer and we'll go to the next step so before proceeding I just wanted to remind you guys that if you like this video please leave me a thumbs up because it helps a lot and also subscribe for more videos If you like this type of thing let's get on with the tutorial shall we okay so I have this display port connector coming from my 32in 4k aocc monitor and I'm going to go directly into the rx480 right here on the aidio Node so let's do it all right so we're connecting Ed now here's something that's a little different you're going to need a USBC device plugged into the adjacent USBC Port um right next to the Thunderbolt 3 cable going to the aido node for Hardware acceleration to work if you try to boot up like this you're going to get a display on your monitor on your external monitor but it's going to be without Hardware acceleration it's going to be real just real jerky real slow to load and it's definitely not the experience you so make sure you have a USB C device like this aie SD card USBC reader or Apple's own USBC to USB adapter you can use either of those you just plug it right into the adjacent port and then you're good to go so now when you boot up you should get an external display with Hardware acceleration so now that we have everything connected and plugged in it's time to power up the aidio node so let's do it okay so we're going to boot up for the first time here we're going to see what happens now as Mac OS is booting you're going to hear a little whoosh sound from the graphics card indicating that things are working properly you can see the light come on for the external display and there we go folks look at that beautiful I don't know if you can see this but right now I'm running at about 78 frames per second 68 80 89 frames per second and you can run High settings at 60 frames per second um or at least close to that generally in some of the benchmarks like heaven and with um Valley as well so it really is no surprise that the egpu is perfect for gamers because you're going to get much better performance in games when using this external GP U you can see there around 78 73 frames per second you're usually maxing around 30 frames per second using the integrated Graphics at Mac settings now here's the heaven Benchmark and you can really see the difference that an egpu can make with gaming performance notice the 1080 Ultra no anti-aliasing you're getting over 40 frames per second whereas with the integrated Graphics you're getting well less of 20 frames per second so you're going from non-playable to playable basically when using the external GPU and the same picture is painted with the valley Benchmark notice the 4K low no anti-alias scene Benchmark you're getting over 30 frames per second which is comparable to 1080 low no anti- alosine with integrated Graphics so you can really see the difference that an external GPU makes now unfortunately the latest version of Final Cut Pro 10 doesn't work with my egpu setup but I downgraded to 10.2.2 and you can really tell the difference here man it's a huge difference in export time when you're using effects and then you have the geek bench 4 opencl Benchmark you can see the major difference between the rx480 and the Intel Iris 550 more than double the overall score of the integrated and finally the C open Benchmark you can see the difference there paint it very clear as well you're going to get much better frame rate when you're using an external GPU when compared to the integrated graphics on the 13-in MacBook Pro that Intel Iris 550 so the big question is is an egpu worth it is it worth your money is it worth your time investment and the answer to that question is mixed if you're a gamer then you will be able to see tangible differences for instance here is rocket League running on my 2016 MacBook Pro with that Iris 550 integrated GPU and the frame rate is hovering around 30 frames per second sometimes it dips a little lower uh depending on what's going on on screen as you can see right here so that is playable but it's not really the best experience and if you have any more demanding games you're going to find uh even worse results at times so you do see those noticeable benefits when doing things like gaming and even with Final Cut Pro 10 granted the newest version doesn't quite work yet with this egpu setup so you will have to downgrade to 10.2.2 but the differences are there now the question is is it worth the price uh because it is an investment you're going to pay around 250 for the node you're going to pay somewhere around 250 for a graphics card like the rx480 um but you do see those benefits there look at the frames per second with rocket League using the egpu but that is not the only thing you need to consider you need to consider the time investment that it takes to set this whole thing up and you need to consider other factors such as the fact that the egpu can't drive the MacBook Pros in internal display so you need an external display and there are other factors such as the unit size it's a big box and it's going to take up a lot of space on your desk and aido doesn't provide you with a long enough Thunderbolt 3 cable to relocate the node to the floor so until you get a longer Thunderbolt 3 cable it'll be next to your MacBook Pro which is not a good thing because the fans can get a little loud with the unit itself and graphics cards so a lot of things to consider here make sure you read the full post over at 9 to5 Mac because I Tred to break it all down there and I have some additional information for you to read again folks this is the aido node and it does make a significant difference the question is is it worth your time and your money only you're going to be able to answer that right now but what I can say is that the future looks fairly promising for Thunderbolt 3 in external graphics and closures as long as apple is willing to support it uh that is the big question will Apple make it more difficult or will they make it easy will they see the potential here have they already seen the potential for that matter and will they make it easy well we'll see in the future but right now let me know what you guys think Down Below in the comments section this is Jeff with the 9 to-5 Mac\n"