It’s impossibly to offer the full performance of the latest GeForce RTX graphics cards inside a gaming laptop, but you can add a good chunk of it with the help of a Thunderbolt 3 cable and an external graphics box. Gigabyte is offering just that with a water-cooled GeForce RTX 3080 Ti in an Aorus Gaming Box.
The Aorus RTX 3080 Ti Gaming Box contains a Gigabyte Waterforce GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with a GPU clocked at 1,665MHz and 12GB of GDDR6X memory running at 19,000MHz and 912GB/s memory bandwidth. It supports up to four displays at a maximum resolution of 7,680-by-4,320, and should therefore cope with even the most extravagant of display setups and any game you care to throw at it.
As Hot Hardware reports, Gigabyte opted to use an all-in-one closed loop cooler consisting of a 240mm radiator and a pair of 120mm fans. This setup keeps noise to a minimum as the fans are adjusted based on temperature and hot air pumped out the top of the box. You can minimize noise yet further with clever positioning of the box, although the cable included is only 50cm long.
The main limiting factor for performance is the Thunderbolt 3 link, which only allows for a 4x PCIe 3.0 connection. Even so, it will beat any GPU your laptop contains, and works just as well with a desktop PC, but in both cases Windows 10 is required. As for pricing, it has yet to be revealed. Even without the pandemic causing serious shortage of graphics card, this box also contains the watercooling components so expect a healthy premium over what Gigabyte charges for its 3080 Ti cards. Based on the 3080 version, the price will likely be north of $2,000.
