News ASUS Announces the ROG XG Station 2 External Graphics Enclosure

After its announcement at CES 2016, ASUS has finally released its own TB3 eGPU enclousre. Slated for release in Q1 2017.

A successor to the pioneering XG Station by the company, which launched way back in 2007, this box has the connectivity to drive high-end graphics cards, and expand connectivity of your machine. The enclosure features a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot, and two 6+2 pin PCIe power connectors, with which it can supply the card with up to 500W of power. Its power supply can further provide up to 100W of power to recharge your notebook. The internal power supply meets 80 Plus Gold efficiency rating.

I'm not a fan of the aesthetic. Way too XTREME G4M3R for my taste.

You can supplement the main Thunderbolt connection's bandwidth with an additional USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) connection to your host machine. This isn't necessary, but ASUS claims it will improve performance.

That's rather interesting. I'm curious if the extra connection will be used to offload the Ethernet and USB hub bandwidth, because no way can USB latency keep up with a GPU.

So, a non-standard PSU, hard to source and likely noisy 70 mm fans, and shouty LED strips. All in all, I'm a bigger fan (heh) of AKiTO's product.

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[Phuncz]

Some of us were already discussing its seemingly "main features" in another topic: https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/the-space-inefficiency-thread.471/page-8#post-23986
It doesn't look huge, but still over 10 liters. For the random gamer with a single GTX 970 in a NZXT S340, considering a laptop and this "mITX case", that's probably svelte.