eGFX Breakaway Box - 550W by Sonnet

Upgrade without throwing outAs laptops and desktops become ever increasing in their upgrade cycles, sometimes a machine from a couple years ago is just fine on the CPU front and the bottleneck generates from the graphics card becoming out of date. The Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box is the perfect solution to upgrading a recent laptop like a Macbook Pro or one of our lower end 3XS system machines and even circumvent the cycle of buying everything new again.

Full Sized Graphics Card on the goThe eGFX Breakaway Box comes outfitted with a Thunderbolt 3 port, making it ideal for connecting to the latest laptops and interfaces. The PCI-e (PCI Express) port inside and the unit itself can fit a full length graphics card, like the best in the world at the moment, the NVIDIA GTX 1080ti and AMD Vega 64. For those more production inclined, the Breakaway Box also supports the Quadro line of cards.

Having the ability to circumvent the need to buy a whole new system gives life to machines that still have the speed and power elsewhere, but might not be able to hold their own in the graphics department. The Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box gives you options that weren’t previously available. Once you’re ready to fully upgrade to a new system entirely, you can bring the full card into your machine.

Thunderbolt 3The power of Thunderbolt 3 means that external graphics card expansions are now actually usable. In the past, with USB 2.0, 3.0 or Thunderbolt 2, the speed just wasn’t there, but the sheer power of this advancement means that the full blown power of the graphics card can be implemented.

Video EditingSo the eGFX Breakaway Box can turn your plain old laptop or older desktop into the powerhouse that you need, but what can you use it for? Well, with the additional graphical horsepower, your rendering times will be slashed, meaning your video or image projects will be completed quicker, allowing you to get back to what you do best: creating more things to be rendered, colour graded or applying special effects.

View and Edit 4KYou can now bring 4K to a machine that didn’t use to have the capabilities, allowing you to output to a monitor or screen, displaying your work in the best quality possible or even just watch a UHD movie.

GamingWith the power for multimedia editing in tow, it also means that you can game at high frame rates with increased graphical settings. MMOs (Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft), MOBAs (DOTA 2, League of Legends) and First Person Shooters (Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Overwatch) are all now playable at top settings. There’s no need to invest in a whole new machine, as current ultrabooks will do just fine with the additional power given by the eGFX Breakaway Box.

Graphics Cards? But Which One?Due to ever changing compatability and rotation of graphics cards, Scan Pro Video recommend that you head over to Sonnet's official list.