Watercooled Laptop eGPU Aorus Gaming Box Review

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the first water-cooled graphics enclosure I've seen so let's test it out and see if it makes any difference to performance compared to a standard air-cooled egb you briefly for those that don't know an external graphics enclosure like this connects to your laptop with Thunderbolt 3 allowing you to use the power of desktop graphics cards in your thin and light laptop which may not even have discrete graphics there are various overheads associated but essentially this does allow you to get some nice GPU power on a machine that doesn't otherwise have any the Auris RT X xx atti gaming box comes ready to go out of the box so the xx atti graphics is included and inside it's even got a carrying case if you want to take it somewhere like a LAN party with your laptop it comes with a 50 centimeter Thunderbolt cable and power cable set up is extremely simple just connect the gaming box to your laptop with the included type C Thunderbolt cable and connect the box to power at this point you might need to run Windows Update if you don't have the necessary Thunderbolt drivers installed then simply open up the thunderbolt control center and approve the device from here windows might start automatically grubbing an outdated Nvidia graphics drive off so get the latest from Nvidia and install that from here you should be good to go I'm testing with the electronics Max 17 gaming laptop and we can see the 20 atti showing up in task manager now we could play games with the laptop screen however this will result in worse performance as there's more overhead involved as the laptop needs to send data to the GPU over thunderbolt then the GPU needs to send the displace signal back over thunderbolt to the laptop for this reason I'll be testing with an external monitor connected to the gaming box as this will offer a performance improvement and honestly better experience the idea of an external graphics enclosure is that it sits at home on your desk you can travel with a thinner and lighter laptop come home and hook it up with one cable for this reason in a docking scenario I think it's completely practical to also have a larger monitor on your desk connected to the gaming box if not just expect some performance loss using the laptop screen this sort of setup also works well because of the rest of the I are available on the gaming box it's got Ethernet and you SB support - so you can connect external storage devices like mice and keyboard and even gigabit network all of which will become available just by connecting that single Thunderbolt cable to your laptop the 28 ET i also has three DisplayPort outputs and HDMI if your laptop supports charging over type-c the gaming box will also charge the laptop with up to 100 watts of power delivery so it can really be a nice single cable docking solution let's take a closer look at the gaming box itself before diving into some benchmarks it's all matte black metal and the size is on the smaller side compared to other a GPU enclosures I've used owing to the fact that it's been designed around their water force twenty atti so it doesn't have to be larger to cater to other options the downsides of this that I don't think you'll be able to upgrade the GPU down the line as the back panel has predefined cutouts for the GPU IR but maybe you could still do it with the back panel off it just wouldn't be ideal the left and right sides have holes and act as air intakes and both sides have dust filters on the right we can see there's a fan to aid air flow the 450 watt power supply is down the bottom which offers to eight pin power cables for the GPU and we can just see the block and tubes on the GPU the top is their exhaust and again just a bunch of holes underneath here we can see the 240 radiator used as part of they are cooling solution there are 220 millimeter fans underneath it which exhaust air up and out on the bottom there are some rubber feet to reduce movement and vibration as well as some vents the front has the Auris logo in the middle and a third USB type a port towards the bottom so easy access if you need to connect something there's also RGB lighting down the bottom of the front which should help boost FPS and it can be controlled through the software that came on the CD or downloading it through the Auris product page is easier if you're like me and haven't had a disc drive for a decade the software lets you monitor the card and tweak it you can manually adjust things like fan speed GPU and memory clock speed however voltage appears locked rather than manually tweaking I've just used the scan button which took about 40 minutes to complete basically it runs a bunch of tests and creates an overclock curve specific to your graphics card which should be stable here's a quick look at the stock performance head to the overclock settings so a little boost is possible with this given this is a water-cooled card where after optimal performance so the rest of the game testing will be done like this that's enough info let's see what sort of performance we're actually looking at I've tested with the electronics max 17 laptop as this has Thunderbolt 3 support and it has an Intel i7 97 58 CPU and 16 gig of memory and dual channel I've tested the water-cooled or ass gaming box and also my mantas venous enclosure with my air called 2080 TI which happens to also be a norris card and to keep things fair I've also used the automated skin overclocked setting for best results here - first let's start out with the temperature differences as this should be one of the major advantages of the water-cooled Gaming box at idle the air-cooled card was 12 degrees warmer when gaming with the fans on the default automatic speed it was 17 degrees warmer and then with the fans at maximum speed there's a much greater improvement to the water-cooled card which was now 26 degrees cooler quite a difference and this is with a game running at 4k Ultra settings as expected the water-cooled card was also hitting slightly higher clock speeds which makes sense as better cooling allows GPU boost to do its thing granted the difference wasn't all that big now let's take a listen to the fair noise differences from both options the water-cooled gaming box was later' at idle you can hear some of the pump noise along with the fans when actually gaming with the fans of the default auto speeds the water-cooled gaming box was quieter then with the fan set to maximum it was a little loud off but realistically I doubt many people are going to be running either solution at maximum fan speed as it's quite loud so under normal scenarios the gaming box was quieter than the air-cooled card now let's take a look at the actual differences in gaming performance call of duty modern warfare was tested in campaign mode the results were interesting and not what I expected I've got the water-cooled gaming box shown by the purple bars and my air cooled card in the red bars and the water cooled option was slightly behind granted the gap closed in at higher resolutions shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested using the game's built-in benchmark once more my air cooled card was outperforming the water-cooled gaming box why I'm not exactly sure as we saw earlier the water-cooled option was much cooler and able to reach higher clock speeds control was tested running through the same part of the game in both configurations yet again the air-cooled option was coming out ahead though the difference was basically nothing practical once we get all the way up to a 4k resolution honestly the performance was a little disappointing going in I assumed it would be a little ahead but that wasn't the case in the games tested that said the water-cooled gaming box was clearly running with much lower temperatures and it was also quieter in these tasks the air-cooled card seems to draw more power from the wall and the GPU power reported by hardware info was also higher there - this may explain the higher performance it's worth noting that for some reason increasing the voltage of the water-cooled unit was locked in software and while this could be done on my air-cooled card I didn't do it here but that could possibly widen the performance gap further with some manual overclocking finally let's look at pricing you can find up-to-date prices linked in the description if we look at the price differences the Auris r-tx 2080 ti gaming box goes for around fifteen hundred and sixty US dollars on Amazon or two thousand four hundred and seventy Australian dollars here in Australia which is actually a bit cheaper off to converting currency the mint is Venus a GPU enclosure I've tested is three hundred you while the Auris 2080 TI is $1300 but it actually ends up being slightly more expensive again something I didn't expect I just figured the water-cooled option would come at a premium but apparently it's less money than the alternative setup I've gotten compared to I think this water-cooled II GPU has its place but I feel it's targeting and niche within a niche external graphics enclosures are already failing niche for most people you'll still get pretty good performance just using a gaming laptop with discreet graphics and these can still be quite portable if you want to play higher resolutions then the power of the a GPU could be worth it but you're probably going to spend the amount of money on that setup you could get a sweet gaming laptop for anyway they do have their place it's just a niche for people who really want one machine with Xtreme laptop portability when they travel and the option of more power at home and a water-cooled variant of that would be for a certain subset within that niche the gaming box is a cool idea pun intended but the possible lack of upgrade ability compared to a traditional enclosure which outperforms it may be hard to justify the place where the gaming box is undeniably a head is in the thermals so I think it comes down to just how badly you want cooler temperatures let me know what you thought of the Auris gaming box down in the comments isn't a GPU something you'd consider and if you're new to the channel make sure you get subscribed for future tech videos like this onethis is the first water-cooled graphics enclosure I've seen so let's test it out and see if it makes any difference to performance compared to a standard air-cooled egb you briefly for those that don't know an external graphics enclosure like this connects to your laptop with Thunderbolt 3 allowing you to use the power of desktop graphics cards in your thin and light laptop which may not even have discrete graphics there are various overheads associated but essentially this does allow you to get some nice GPU power on a machine that doesn't otherwise have any the Auris RT X xx atti gaming box comes ready to go out of the box so the xx atti graphics is included and inside it's even got a carrying case if you want to take it somewhere like a LAN party with your laptop it comes with a 50 centimeter Thunderbolt cable and power cable set up is extremely simple just connect the gaming box to your laptop with the included type C Thunderbolt cable and connect the box to power at this point you might need to run Windows Update if you don't have the necessary Thunderbolt drivers installed then simply open up the thunderbolt control center and approve the device from here windows might start automatically grubbing an outdated Nvidia graphics drive off so get the latest from Nvidia and install that from here you should be good to go I'm testing with the electronics Max 17 gaming laptop and we can see the 20 atti showing up in task manager now we could play games with the laptop screen however this will result in worse performance as there's more overhead involved as the laptop needs to send data to the GPU over thunderbolt then the GPU needs to send the displace signal back over thunderbolt to the laptop for this reason I'll be testing with an external monitor connected to the gaming box as this will offer a performance improvement and honestly better experience the idea of an external graphics enclosure is that it sits at home on your desk you can travel with a thinner and lighter laptop come home and hook it up with one cable for this reason in a docking scenario I think it's completely practical to also have a larger monitor on your desk connected to the gaming box if not just expect some performance loss using the laptop screen this sort of setup also works well because of the rest of the I are available on the gaming box it's got Ethernet and you SB support - so you can connect external storage devices like mice and keyboard and even gigabit network all of which will become available just by connecting that single Thunderbolt cable to your laptop the 28 ET i also has three DisplayPort outputs and HDMI if your laptop supports charging over type-c the gaming box will also charge the laptop with up to 100 watts of power delivery so it can really be a nice single cable docking solution let's take a closer look at the gaming box itself before diving into some benchmarks it's all matte black metal and the size is on the smaller side compared to other a GPU enclosures I've used owing to the fact that it's been designed around their water force twenty atti so it doesn't have to be larger to cater to other options the downsides of this that I don't think you'll be able to upgrade the GPU down the line as the back panel has predefined cutouts for the GPU IR but maybe you could still do it with the back panel off it just wouldn't be ideal the left and right sides have holes and act as air intakes and both sides have dust filters on the right we can see there's a fan to aid air flow the 450 watt power supply is down the bottom which offers to eight pin power cables for the GPU and we can just see the block and tubes on the GPU the top is their exhaust and again just a bunch of holes underneath here we can see the 240 radiator used as part of they are cooling solution there are 220 millimeter fans underneath it which exhaust air up and out on the bottom there are some rubber feet to reduce movement and vibration as well as some vents the front has the Auris logo in the middle and a third USB type a port towards the bottom so easy access if you need to connect something there's also RGB lighting down the bottom of the front which should help boost FPS and it can be controlled through the software that came on the CD or downloading it through the Auris product page is easier if you're like me and haven't had a disc drive for a decade the software lets you monitor the card and tweak it you can manually adjust things like fan speed GPU and memory clock speed however voltage appears locked rather than manually tweaking I've just used the scan button which took about 40 minutes to complete basically it runs a bunch of tests and creates an overclock curve specific to your graphics card which should be stable here's a quick look at the stock performance head to the overclock settings so a little boost is possible with this given this is a water-cooled card where after optimal performance so the rest of the game testing will be done like this that's enough info let's see what sort of performance we're actually looking at I've tested with the electronics max 17 laptop as this has Thunderbolt 3 support and it has an Intel i7 97 58 CPU and 16 gig of memory and dual channel I've tested the water-cooled or ass gaming box and also my mantas venous enclosure with my air called 2080 TI which happens to also be a norris card and to keep things fair I've also used the automated skin overclocked setting for best results here - first let's start out with the temperature differences as this should be one of the major advantages of the water-cooled Gaming box at idle the air-cooled card was 12 degrees warmer when gaming with the fans on the default automatic speed it was 17 degrees warmer and then with the fans at maximum speed there's a much greater improvement to the water-cooled card which was now 26 degrees cooler quite a difference and this is with a game running at 4k Ultra settings as expected the water-cooled card was also hitting slightly higher clock speeds which makes sense as better cooling allows GPU boost to do its thing granted the difference wasn't all that big now let's take a listen to the fair noise differences from both options the water-cooled gaming box was later' at idle you can hear some of the pump noise along with the fans when actually gaming with the fans of the default auto speeds the water-cooled gaming box was quieter then with the fan set to maximum it was a little loud off but realistically I doubt many people are going to be running either solution at maximum fan speed as it's quite loud so under normal scenarios the gaming box was quieter than the air-cooled card now let's take a look at the actual differences in gaming performance call of duty modern warfare was tested in campaign mode the results were interesting and not what I expected I've got the water-cooled gaming box shown by the purple bars and my air cooled card in the red bars and the water cooled option was slightly behind granted the gap closed in at higher resolutions shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested using the game's built-in benchmark once more my air cooled card was outperforming the water-cooled gaming box why I'm not exactly sure as we saw earlier the water-cooled option was much cooler and able to reach higher clock speeds control was tested running through the same part of the game in both configurations yet again the air-cooled option was coming out ahead though the difference was basically nothing practical once we get all the way up to a 4k resolution honestly the performance was a little disappointing going in I assumed it would be a little ahead but that wasn't the case in the games tested that said the water-cooled gaming box was clearly running with much lower temperatures and it was also quieter in these tasks the air-cooled card seems to draw more power from the wall and the GPU power reported by hardware info was also higher there - this may explain the higher performance it's worth noting that for some reason increasing the voltage of the water-cooled unit was locked in software and while this could be done on my air-cooled card I didn't do it here but that could possibly widen the performance gap further with some manual overclocking finally let's look at pricing you can find up-to-date prices linked in the description if we look at the price differences the Auris r-tx 2080 ti gaming box goes for around fifteen hundred and sixty US dollars on Amazon or two thousand four hundred and seventy Australian dollars here in Australia which is actually a bit cheaper off to converting currency the mint is Venus a GPU enclosure I've tested is three hundred you while the Auris 2080 TI is $1300 but it actually ends up being slightly more expensive again something I didn't expect I just figured the water-cooled option would come at a premium but apparently it's less money than the alternative setup I've gotten compared to I think this water-cooled II GPU has its place but I feel it's targeting and niche within a niche external graphics enclosures are already failing niche for most people you'll still get pretty good performance just using a gaming laptop with discreet graphics and these can still be quite portable if you want to play higher resolutions then the power of the a GPU could be worth it but you're probably going to spend the amount of money on that setup you could get a sweet gaming laptop for anyway they do have their place it's just a niche for people who really want one machine with Xtreme laptop portability when they travel and the option of more power at home and a water-cooled variant of that would be for a certain subset within that niche the gaming box is a cool idea pun intended but the possible lack of upgrade ability compared to a traditional enclosure which outperforms it may be hard to justify the place where the gaming box is undeniably a head is in the thermals so I think it comes down to just how badly you want cooler temperatures let me know what you thought of the Auris gaming box down in the comments isn't a GPU something you'd consider and if you're new to the channel make sure you get subscribed for future tech videos like this one\n"