Aorus Squeezes RTX 2080 Ti, Liquid Cooling Into Latest eGPU Dock
The upcoming Aorus Gaming Box comes with an RTX 2080 Ti that's liquid cooled, but not overclocked.
Gigabyte is reportedly launching a new variant of its Aorus Gaming Box: one that carries Nvidia’s crème de le crème GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, as per VideoCardz today.
The Aorus Gaming Box is essentially an external GPU housing, which users can connect to their laptops through a USB-C port that carries the Thunderbolt protocol. Aorus' currently offers an RTX 2070 Gaming Box, GTX 1080 Gaming Box and GTX 1070 Gaming Box.
Aorus' upcoming Gaming Box box also reportedly has its own Ethernet port, as well as a built-in USB hub. For display connectivity it sticks to Nvidia’s favorite connectors as found on their reference cards: three DisplayPort connectors, HDMI and one USB-Type C port.
Don’t mix the two up though. The Type-C port next to the display connectors is part of the graphics card; whereas, the Type-C shaped port between the Type-A ports and the Ethernet port is what's used to connect the unit to your laptop. Yes, USB Type-C is confusing (you can check out our USB-C explainer for clarity).
Despite the graphics card itself doing perfectly well on air-cooling, Aorus equipped the RTX 2080 Ti in this unit with a “WaterForce” liquid cooler but hasn’t overclocked the card even a bit, so it will run at the standard 1,545 MHz boost clock. The GPU also carries 11GB of GDDR6 memory and comes with 68T RTX-OPS.
Gigabyte has not revealed pricing information, though if previous Gaming Boxes are anything to go by, the unit certainly won’t be cheap (the Aorus RTX 2080 Gaming Box is currently selling for about $680) -- especially considering the GPU it packs.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.