PowerColor Adds Devil Box To Emerging External Graphics Enclosure Race

News
By Kevin Carbotte
published

External graphics card enclosures designed to add gaming performance to otherwise pedestrian laptops seem to be popular in 2016. Earlier this year at CES we saw an enclosure from Razer that connects to its Razer Blade Stealth ultrabook, and Asus unveiled the ROG XG2 graphics dock, which uses PCIe over USB Type-C. MSI later introduced an AIO PC with an external enclosure hanging off its back.

AMD also jumped into the fray by creating AMD XConnect, a technology (part of Radeon software) that allows AMD graphics cards to function over Thunderbolt 3.

PowerColor is the latest company to join the club with its PowerColor Devil Box, which leverages AMD’s XConnect technology. The Devil Box is a 15.75 x 6.75 x 9.5-inch enclosure that sits next to your mobile or compact desktop PC. The Devil Box features a 500w internal power supply, with 375w dedicated to the GPU. The additional wattage powers the enclosure itself, which also features a number of I/O ports. PowerColor included four USB 3.0 ports, one USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C port, a gigabit Ethernet jack and a SATA III port to support an additional hard drive, and all of this is handled by a single Thunderbolt 3 40Gbps cable.

The Devil Box is large enough to handle graphics cards as long as 12.2-inches and as tall as 5.5-inches. The box is also only capable of enclosing graphics cards that are 1.96-inches wide (or less), which will make it difficult to fit many of the custom R9 390X cards since they are typically wider than the Devil Box’s limitations.

PowerColor said the Devil Box will support most of AMD's current GPU lineup, with the exception of the Fury X (no water cooling support), as well as the R9 285, R9 290 and R9 290X. Nvidia's entire Maxwell lineup, from GTX 750 through Titan X, is also supported. There was no mention of the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, but we can’t imagine why they wouldn’t work also.

PowerColor did not say when the Devil Box would be available, and we don’t know the price yet.

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Kevin Carbotte

 Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years. 

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Au_equus
    if the gtx 1080M benches (http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-1080-m-pascal-mobility-flagship-inbound/) hold true, the need for these bulky accessories will disappear fairly quickly.
    Reply
  • thor220
    if the gtx 1080M benches (http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-1080-m-pascal-mobility-flagship-inbound/) hold true, the need for these bulky accessories will disappear fairly quickly.

    Not really. Why haul an overpriced and heavy gaming laptop with no battery life around when you can buy a thin one with a good processor and battery life that can still game like crazy with this extra?
    Reply
  • whiteodian
    Kinda fugly, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? Let's hope they set a standard by not gouging people for it like some of the competitors. The price on these things should be about $200 and no more. It's basically an enclosure and PSU so I think $200 or less sounds about right.
    Reply
  • robodan918
    I blame razr - because of them this will be priced higher than it needs to be at first (i.e. the margins will be good). Expect them to drop over the next 2 years before stabilising to something more akin to a NAS enclosure. Under $200 seems like the sweet spot. Imagine not needing a gaming PC anymore - just buying a good (even thin, portable & stylish) laptop with a few USB3.1c/Thunderbolt 3 ports (1 for power, 1 or more for external graphics etc) and one of these eGPUs. The average PC gamer also has a laptop. Even if you wanted something more stationary, you can fit a mini-ITX build into something much smaller than an old phone book with a pico PSU ~150W to use with one of these eGPUs. The future is great, and hopefully this is the thing that will kill locked in consoles for good.
    Reply
  • hatib
    which is the best laptop with i7 6700hq no dedicated gpu and thunderbolt 3
    Reply
  • robodan918
    I don't know about 6700HQ but the Razer Blade with i7-6500u (integrated grpahics) and thunderbolt 3 for use with the razer core eGPU case is probably the best one right now. Good prices for the blade, but the core eGPU case costs an extortionate $500 without the card!
    Reply
  • robodan918
    18046193 said:
    which is the best laptop with i7 6700hq no dedicated gpu and thunderbolt 3

    I don't know about 6700HQ but the Razer Blade with i7-6500u (integrated grpahics) and thunderbolt 3 for use with the razer core eGPU case is probably the best one right now. Good prices for the blade, but the core eGPU case costs an extortionate $500 without the card!
    Reply
  • whiteodian
    Let's hope it's not overpriced and comes in closer to $200.
    Reply
  • steve4king
    Seems like there could be a demand for a semi-AIO monitor. Skip the CPU, Mobo, Memory and Storage and just slap a large video card and connectivity back there.
    Reply