(Future) Clevos with Razer Core (eGPU)?

I just heard from CES 2016 that Razer has released their latest ultrabook, the Razer Blade Stealth, and with it, their eGPU solution the Razer Core. It is said to work with any laptop as long it has a TB3 port, a 40Gbps cable and apparently some BIOS update to allow that to work with the laptop. This means a small possibility that (future) Clevos that have the TB3 port can use the Core too with the correct BIOS update.

So, just wondering, anyone interested in this development for Clevo laptops too?

 

I'd rather the GPU inside the laptop rather than having to lug around a huge, heavy desktop card. Beats the purpose of having a (thin and light) laptop in the first place when you have to bring several things all over the place. External GPUs while a good idea in theory, are terribly impractical. I honestly don't understand how anyone can buy Razer's marketing.

The Razer Blade Stealth is simply a Razer ultrabook, which means it's going to be (much) more expensive and as pointless as other ultrabooks from Apple, Acer, HP, Dell, Asus, etc. Just the brand slapped onto ultrabook specs.

Razer Blades are the MacBooks of Windows notebooks. Expensive, run hot and don't really do much properly. Now, an honest-to-God Clevo wouldn't bother with any of that thin-and-light nonsense.

 

I am really interested in eGPU the future is wireless thunderbolt 3.0.

The potential of eGPU is endless!! It can turn intel NUC, HTPC, and tablets into 4k gaming beast with gtx 1080 ti .
Most importantly the OPTION of eGPU future-proof gaming laptops without having to buy a new gaming laptop or pay extortionate prices for MXM GPU which might not even be compatible with Nvidia Pascal.

The statement that Razer blade stealth is going to run hot a little pessimistic as it doesn't have dedicated GPU so all Razer needs to worry about is the thermal from the CPU which is a dual core i5 6500u (Disappointing imo).

I hope Clevo/Sager decides to go for route similar to MSI GS40 phantom (2016 edition) where the laptop has dedicated graphics gtx 960m/1060m so you can play on the go and a dock similar to razer core but without the PSU allowing us the consumer to decide which PSU we want.

There is also the ROG XG station 2 dock developed by Asus and Silverstone which got a lot less press coverage.

 

To be honest the pricing isn't really that bad. All metal body, 1440p screen, i7 dual core, 8 gigs of ram, and 128gb ssd for $1000 isn't too bad in an ultrabook form factor.

 

first problem: weak psu inside the egpu dock, it only supports up to desktop 980

second problem: super weak friggin dual core cpu inside the machine, i wanna see just HOW MUCH this thing is gonna throttle the desktop gpu *lol*

third problem: its a razer

generally speaking though, having the extra OPTION of an egpu is nice, but the necessity out of which this development was born is not so nice, namely the whole industry going bga turdbook style...

 

This is the biggest problem.

 

FYI the Razer core is just a generic eGPU enclosure. They're just one of the first to get info out to everyone about it. They're just marketing it with the Ultrabook at the same time.

Others will come along.

EDIT: hoping a generic one comes along and I can attach my 980Ti to my P750DM-G and replace my desktop.

 

Usually the CPU is less important, however with that low power dual core you will struggle with beefier cards.

 

Hmm. I was hoping to get a decent Clevo and then hook up the Core if need be, but some of the statements here changed my mind a little...

 

With the Razer and the Asus XG Station 2, I'm finally glad to see some eGPUs coming to market. Hoping the Asus isn't proprietary to only their laptops.

 

I am hoping for Clevo's answer...

inbe4 someone says that Clevo has already answered via good GPUs in the first place

 

I'm all for EGPU as long as it doesn't hinder mobile gpu development.The main advantage is future proofing and cost,may cost less to have 980+enclosure for less a mxm 980 mobile (it would mean less if it is compatible to a 980m).Though scarificing portability is not a bright trade off.

I also see mxm going into smaller egpu for more ultrabook portability.

Seeing the msi vortex use mxm 980 sli also seems like a ray of sunshine for mxm

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic...vortex-badass-gaming-pc-in-a-cylindrical-box/

 

The original batch a few years ago did tend to use mxm-a cards

 

I don't care about this razer but the usb 3.1 type C thunderbolt sure looks promisiing.

I will patiently wait for Nvidia Pascal and Amd Finfet GPUs....i have a skylake ultrabook and i can tell you that the intel U CPUs won't be able to cope with the GPU demands...

an ultrabook runs hot, and throttling should be the second nickname for an "ultrabook" laptop.

Now please let's see Aorus, Asus, Clevo, MSI release the next generation of REAL laptops

 

Ultrabooks should just be called throttlebooks.

As for eGPU, I can see the benefits for sure but if they become too popular, kiss the high performance mobile GPU goodbye. We have already lost sockets so it's not really all that far-fetched.

 

The way the mobile graphics card has caught up to desktop graphics cards over previous generations, to where we are with the 980 now in laptops, maybe sometime down the road the mobile "M" versions might not be needed but just versions of the desktop cards in laptops? Hopeful thinking maybe.

I think with the increase in gaming/performance laptop popularity, I doubt that the manufacturer's would just give up on their main product lines for eGPUs, but would offer them as complimentary items. Not everyone one wants to be tied to a desk, so I think the demand for high end internal graphics will still be around.

I would find it hard to believe that Nvidia would invest in to getting the 980 in a laptop if they thought eGPU was just going to kill that market completely.

 

The problem is that everyone wants thin and light. They want to have full-fledged desktop performance in a tablet size, physics be damned.

 

Its possible, just thermodynamics be damned.
Apparently the aorus haswell thin 970m sli laptop runs at 50db!

 

Wait till you see the DT with 980 desktop

 

To be honest, I am mentally entertaining the idea of trading my P870DM-G for an Aorus skylake x7 with the 970M SLI and 6820hk but I doubt people are interested and I doubt I will actually be willing to downgrade that much just for 4 lbs less.. I have my way of cooling those throttle happy laptops down(excessive cold ambient via opening of windows) but still....I doubt I can get that BGA garbage over 4.0ghz and I just dont like BGA stuff in general.

The whole idea of Aorus thin/light gaming laptop feels like a compromise. It is mobile enough that you can move it all day and dont feel tired but it have massive thermal issues that you cant run it at a decent performance level without throttling. Also there is the issue with upgrades. The fact we have eGPU on thunderbolt 3.0 it is starting to make it interesting to me. Still, if you live in florida or something, probably a bad idea.

The 980 will be way worse due to the higher TDP requirement and heat density. The reason aorus are getting away with their ultra thin designs is due to using SLI to mitigate the heat issues. And even that is more or less a semi working solution. I wonder what is aorus doing to make the laptop working. Excessive underclocking and severely undervolted chips is possible.

 

I haven't seen numbers or anything for the aorus 980 ,thus my pre-judgment may be uncalled for,however having a 980 thin and light severely castrated to not be like a mobile oven and run like a 970m,They might as well stick to mobile M chips,But yr egpu is a prayer away for the hopeless,once they don't hinder progress its all good.

A 4lbs un compromised powerhouse sure does sound nice.

 

I personally think the dt will be pointless and if you want thin/light gaming laptop, the only reasonable option is the 970m SLI 17inch with the 6820hk. I dont like the MSI laptop thin design gaming laptop since the lack of an unlocked multiplier CPU and I personally will not settle with a single 970m. The clevo thin design gaming laptop lacks a TB3.0 port for egpu, which is the only way to future proof a thin laptop graphical wise. Gigabyte did manage to squeeze a 980m in one of their thin design machines but lack of a 6820hk does it make less attractive when compared with the aorus x7.

Though the price vs performance and overall performance of a thin design laptop is far lower then something like a Pxx0DM.

 

It would be interesting to have a special dock oriented desktop CPU/6820hk with beefy cooling laptop using the space for internal heatsinks and then have a dock connector for the GPU at home.

 

eGPU hopefully can become popular.

I definitely can see why razor is pairing it up with an ultrabook.
It's exactly what i have want, without the weak cpu.

The ultrabook format can handle all the non heavy gaming related task pretty well.
I saw there is even a way to make 4k video editting possible on ultrabook.

What I want however is one ultrabook that has a good cpu, so that I can actually have a solid desktop level performance back at home. I can plug the ultrabook on a cooling pad anyway when I need the heavy duty task which normally is back at home

Taking the ultrabook for photography or business and then heavy duty at home? That's pretty Damn sweet

 

Lol, the first line is indeed signature-worthy, haha!

But the second line is the worrying part; seems to me that the eGPU technology will give manufacturers a good excuse to not use MXM anymore...

Yeah, if any, this is the main gripe I have with Clevos right now; every other laptop you see have such technology but the Clevos are not having it yet. Of course, I understand that in return the Clevos cost less, but still...

 

The higher end desktop CPU machines do have thunderbolt however.

 

I dont know if the desktop cpu machines need egpu. I want a 13inch clevo with a 6700k that is designed for egpu docks. No need for a mxm GPU taking up chassis real estate.

 

The 14 inch with 960M and the CPU sharing the GPU portion of the heatsink with a 6820hk could be interesting and not require a total re-design.

 

They are heavy and costly though

 

yesss thats what ive been asking for the whole time! desktop gpu, get rid of 2.5" storage, all m.2, use available space for super beefy heatsinks, include a crappy igpu for on the move and go all out balls to the wall egpu baby

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Eh, high-capacity M.2 SSD storage is expensive... Still can't get 2 TB for $200, while you can with a 2.5" HDD.

 

I just want a good 4k screen to watch porn on.

 

lol, good one yotano

@SRSR333 sata m.2 drives are totally affordable besides, who needs terabytes upon terabytes of storage while on the move? u wont have that anyways with small form factor machines. two m.2 slots are more than enough, especially with the imminent release of 1tb m.2 drives also, users who fork over that kinda money on such highend machines + egpu enclosures would also go for m.2 goodness anyways

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

@jaybee83, see, that's the failure of small form-factor notebooks. Just like the MacBook with only one USB C port, everything is relegated outside of the notebook. GPU, storage, display, keyboard, everything. Then whoever buys the Razer Stealth has a mess of wires all over his desk to support his tiny underpowered and under-specced laptop (can't eliminate wires, can we? Have we achieved stable PCIe 3.0 x16 speeds over wireless standards yet?). Might as well buy a desktop which would be cheaper.

Even if you want to move around rarely, moving itself would be a pain in the rear end. You need to pack all the abovementioned clutter on your desk into a suitcase of its own. In fact it is easier to just get an mITX desktop if one wants to 'move around' with high-end power.
On the other hand, with a high-end laptop that has its own GPU, just take the laptop, toss it into a backpack, wrap up power cable, mouse and headphones (if necessary), toss into a side compartment and you're done.

Honestly, in my humble opinion, M.2 seems inferior to mSATA. Longer, bigger chips that (apparently) get really warm as well - not a very good deal. I have seen M.2 SSDs and they are huge compared to mSATA. The standard was developed for the sake of development, I feel... Which is not good.

 

People that use these as an argument.." why would you want more wires on your desk" and " who'd want to lug around a box along with the laptop" are missing the entire point of eGPU's . The idea of them is for home DOCKING. Brands are recognising that people use their laptops for school/college/uni/ work and when they are back at their condo they game... So instead of having a laptop for school and a desktop for home, you can have both in one device . I went laptop because of these reasons; the only thing i did was buy a laptop with a beefy internal GPU in for when i want to go to friends houses for LANS. Thus, if i can boost my home experience using a eGPU dock through Thunderbolt 3, i'm 100% in. I'm no expert on how it's going to work, but if i can buy a next gen card and slap it in an eGPU dock...i could be gaming in higher res sooner than i thought.

I bought a p751DM-G recently, i bought it in preparation for using devices through the Thunderbolt 3 port.

 

For me, eGPUs are more for future-proofing (however improbable that seems to be in today's tech...). Your internal GPU cannot play certain games anymore? No prob, just use an eGPU to tide over until you can save up for a new laptop (or even PC)

 

I see it as future proof as well.

The trouble with having laptop and desktop is that each has different configuration because they are separate machines.
It isn't so simple if you want to transfer the files.

And cpu isn't as demanding for gaming as gpu, so long I have a reasonable solid cpu, I can expect a pretty good performance across the board with egpu options

 

At the risk of shooting myself on the foot, I must say that with the right configuration (of at least the desktop), it is possible to transfer the files to/from the desktop to the laptop.

I can attest to it somewhat since I am now playing around with an old computer and ESXi

 

Try importing 100gb raw photography files from camera to laptop, do some editing and then transfering to desktop to do more editing.
It becomes a complete mess to manage

 

That is exactly what I am looking for. I like just using just one computer, for work and the occasional gaming right now. But if I could just dock it at home and get some more firepower, and not have to build a whole new desktop and transfer things back and forth, that would be ideal for me. I'll be keeping my eye out for a 17 inch model with a decent internal GPU and an eGPU option, for my next personal purchase. I don't think I would want to go with one of the smaller 14 inch models for something like that. But it might be another year or so, so hopefully there might be some growth in the market by then.

 

I am sure if one or the other laptop/desktop disks died, or the folder tree were corrupted / lost, you would be happy to have the files in 2 places

That's why I want TB3 speed link between the laptop / desktop - so you can sync up working directories at high speed. It's a little less annoying at 1GB/sec transfer than 35MB/sec

 

I have all files back up saved on my external HDD so it's ok.

The ideal flow is basically:
1. Finish Photo shooting
2. Export to laptop and keep back up of ALL raw files on external HDD.
3. Review on external monitor and pick out usable shots
4. Finish editing
5. Export as jpeg to share
6. Keep the RAW and JPEG for those I have editted on my laptop and remove the rest

What I normally end up doing is having:
2.5. light edit on laptop and share as jpeg directly to friends and family
3.5. duplicate the editing on laptop and review on external monitor

Adding a desktop workflow just become unnecessarily complicated.

Honestly having one system to handle everything is always going to be more handy imo

 

Everyone works differently. It's impossible to carry all your files with you, there just isn't enough room for all the disk space you can use in the teenie laptops.

So you are going to move files, whether to a desktop computer / share managing all your storage, an external drive you leave at your desk, or a company NAS, it's going to move again after dropping the files onto your laptop.

You are already optimizing by doing the initial filtering of what is a keeper on your laptop, reducing the amount of files to transfer when you get back to your desk.

 

Like I said, I only need to keep the raw initially from camera to laptop for screening.
Then I only need to keep the raw and JPEG that were used for finalised images.

The initial screening does not come from my laptop because my laptop monitor isn't as colour accurate as my external monitor.
So my initial screening is more or less for cleaning up dust and light editing but not as a finalised editing. (meaning I don't remove photos at that stage)

It doesn't take up massive space (around 60gb max for initial import and around 10gb max for filtering) and laptop especially mine which can hold two hdd bay is way more than enough.

There is also more annoyance dealing with Lightroom because of catalogs which I find extemely bothersome to do when switching between laptop and desktop.

Its way easier with just laptop and external HDD, compare to laptop to HDD to desktop

 

@pat@XOTICPC I think Xotic creating their own egpu dock would be a really good thing for everyone, and that would be totally awesome! I think you guys could do it better than anything else I have seen yet, but only if you guys have the know how and the resources to do it!

 

And, that's the part I was looking for. If the disk bay(s) were part of the dock, PCIE x4 SSD's connected via high speed TB3 speeds instead of slow USB speeds, that would be a great benefit - high speed transfer of your laptop files to the external drive.

So if that drive where housed in the desktop PC/eGPU, you could share them between the laptop and the desktop PC/eGPU much faster and easier.

If that Dock were in fact a full PC capable, then the disks, GPU(s), and external displays could be used independently of the laptop, while it was connected or away.

The desktop PC/eGPU could be much more powerful, faster, at processing your images than the laptop. Besides the external monitors being color accurate, a 4/8/12 Core CPU in the desktop PC/eGPU would be much more suited than the much slower 2 Core CPU in the Stealth toward processing images.

 

Ah yes, similar position here, which is why I prefer one good machine too instead of two...

My point still stands though if using the desktop as a NAS (or just using a NAS for the matter)

 

Yes, it does, but my point is to extend it 1 more step to include a CPU with the GPU / Fast Storage / Large Monitors so you can actually use both systems without needing the other plugged in.

That way the mass of the best most expensive stuff isn't sitting on the desk idle / useless until you plug in the laptop.

That would also let you have a laptop with a more power efficient 2 Core CPU, longer battery life. And, in the eDock a powerful 4-12 Core CPU that can zip through image processing.

The storage would be shared, and useful for both the laptop / eDock computers. So you wouldn't need to manage 2 sets of data.

You could opt to use the storage on the laptop when plugged in to the eDock, from the eDock computer, instead of copying the data across to the eDock disks.

And, you could read images from the laptop, process them on the powerful CPU in the eDock computer, and then save them to long term storage on the eDock disks.

 

I would love to see the Razer Core or any eGPU be compatible with CLEVO laptops but the only ones so far that have TB are the huge desktop replacement models with already high end GPU's and desktop CPU's ( I could be wrong but that's what I know)
The 640ER would have been great fit f it had a TB port.

 

Hmm... Not sure what you exactly mean, but this sounds like using the laptop as a thin client when you get back home and when outside you use the laptop as a laptop?