If you want a high-performance gaming rig, but also need the portability offered by a laptop, then an external graphics card is tempting. Now you can buy one that's water-cooled.
Cooling Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti graphics card usually requires at least two and probably three fans spinning, but the noise generated is usually muffled inside a desktop case. For external graphics cards the box is right there next to your laptop on the desk, which is why a much quieter water cooling solution is desirable. Gigabyte is offering us just that with its new Aorus RTX 2080 Ti Gaming Box, which it claims is a world first.
Inside the Gaming Box you'll find a Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti graphics card cooled using Gigabyte's Aorus Waterforce cooling system. Cooling is provided by way of a water block and pump, large copper plate, 240mm aluminum radiator, and two 120mm fans. The card has 4,352 CUDA cores, is clocked at 1,545MHz, and complimented by 11GB of GDDR6 running at 14,000MHz using a memory bandwidth of 616GB/s. The box supports a max resolution of 7,680-by-4,320 and can handle up to four displays. Powering the card and cooling required a 450W power supply and the box weighs just over 3.7KG.
Connecting the Gaming Box to your laptop is done via a Thunderbolt 3 cable, which is included, but there's also three USB 3.0 ports, three DisplayPorts, one HDMI, a USB-C port, and an Ethernet port.
There's no details on pricing yet, but don't expect it to be cheap. The RTX 2070 Gaming Box Gigabyte launched earlier this year costs $695, so this 2080 water-cooled version is surely going to cost significantly more.