Echo Express Pro: Desktop Graphics In A Thunderbolt Chassis

Features
By Andrew Ku
published

Have the rigors of life on the road forced you to ditch your desktop in favor of a laptop? What if you could add discrete graphics to your Ultrabook? We test the gaming performance of Sonnet's Echo Express Thunderbolt expansion chassis for PCIe cards.

The Beauty Of Standards: Just Plug It In

Sonnet Technologies' Echo Express enclosure should be compatible with any PCIe-based device, so long as you have drivers for it. The only complication involves operating system support. A graphics card backed exclusively by drivers for the PC won't work in OS X. The same goes for a Mac-specific piece of hardware that lacks a Windows driver.

As we've already covered, the installation is pretty easy. Drop a card into the chassis, plug in the power connector, and connect the Thunderbolt cable.

When we drop a GeForce GTX 460 into the Echo Express Pro, this is what we see. After installing Nvidia's driver package, the card shows up as a secondary card. The hierarchy of bridges makes it clear that the GTX 460 is being controlled through a series of PCI Express switches. More than likely, this will further affect performance compared to a card sitting in a native slot.

Then again, that's simply not an option for someone using a notebook. As a measure of convenience, getting discrete graphics running on a notebook almost certainly trumps the non-native performance trade-off.

Andrew Ku
65 Comments Comment from the forums
  • amuffin
    Well, getting a laptop that supports thunderbolt is already pretty expensive. Then, you have to get one of these which ranges from $400-$800. THEN you have to buy a dedicated card....

    It's pretty expensive once you add it all up :/
    Reply
  • yobobjm
    I like it, but I see limited use for it, especially for those of us who already have large towers, and don't really want another small tower added on to that. That being said, this would make a pretty awesome home dock for a laptop, and good for those tiny desktops that intel, apple, asrock, zotac and many others make (once all of those get thunderbolt).
    Reply
  • acku
    Prices will go down. Remember that.

    Second, it's about the cost you'd have to pay anyways for a desktop (which you need if you want to game since you can't on a vanilla ultrabook), so its more like an alternative solution for those who want a single system setup.

    Cheers,
    Andrew Ku
    Tom's Hardware
    Reply
  • amuffin
    Prices will go down. Remember that.

    They don't go down enough...
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    any controller + the surrounding ecosystem that is this expensive cant survive much. Not being a hater, but being a realist.
    Reply
  • acku
    You don't know that :). USB 3.0 was expensive when it first came out. Look at things now. Wow things have changed. Prices are substantially lower now.
    Reply
  • Darkerson
    Pretty interesting, even with the currently high price tag.
    Reply
  • Vorador2
    Needs to be cheaper. That's my only serious gripe.

    And well, for this purpose Thunderbolt still needs to be faster to fully take advantage of the external GPU, best around 16 Gb/s since it's the speed of a 16x PCIE 3.0 slot.

    Although you could potentially sidestep this issue if you use two linked thunderbolt interfaces, but then there's the problem of synchronizing data transfers (and finding a laptop with two thunderbolt interfaces...if there's any)
    Reply
  • Menigmand
    If they can make this much cheaper, I would be very interested. I prefer to game on a laptop so I can easily stow it away when I have guests over and need the dining table. An extra box would be ok, as long as it doesn't need an external display.
    Reply
  • assasin32
    Well this makes things more interesting, when the price goes down and becomes resonable within probably the next few years it may give us the ability to buy laptops and attach some reasonble GPU's to them so we can play games on them a lot better.

    If this was around 8 years ago I would have been all over it and had it for my laptop since I used to use that for gaming.
    Reply