Its about time.

[dling]

Ive been thinking that this should have happened years ago. An external box that would allow us to remove the cards from the case

along with all their heat. It should have it's own psu the can be upgraded in power.

 

 

http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/technologies-gaming/xconnect

 

 

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Edited August 4, 2017 by dling

[cchalogamer]

It's been doable for a few years now and officially supported with several laptops and enclosures for over a year.  The biggest problem is with a card like a GTX 1080 it's roughly a 25% performance hit due to the limitations of the Thunderbolt connection.  There's a chance AMD worked some magic and can make it all work better in Thunderbolt 3's roughly PCIe 3.0

[ccokeman]

Just putting this here

 

 

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/powercolor_devil_box/

 

 

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/powercolor_devil_box_redux/

[dling]

I would think something like this would be good for the desktop pc also. I agree that there would need the direct connect with the pcie slots for max performance . A vga card house with its own cooling and psu would make the inside of my case a lot cooler and less cluttered.

[Waco]

I'm still surprised that external PCIe never caught on.  It's not hard to channel 16 lanes over a decent cable, it's not like it has to be super long.

[cchalogamer]

I'm still surprised that external PCIe never caught on.  It's not hard to channel 16 lanes over a decent cable, it's not like it has to be super long.

I think the biggest reason based on the laptop use case is the lack of hot plug support, similar to how people chose USB 2.0 external HDDs over eSATA for the most part because it was so easy and common on systems.  

 

Thunderbolt takes care of hot plug and ease of use, just not having direct access to the PCIe lanes hurts it for things like graphics cards.  Still that could all change down the road. 

 

Even now doing external PCIe is a thing using devices like the ones here but they make the thunderbolt solutions look simple (and they are) and cheap