The Minisforum DEG1 is an external GPU dock you might actually buy, coming in at only $100 while barely sacrificing any performance.
I though external GPUs were a thing of the past. Why would you spend a ton of money on one of the best graphics cards , only to slap it inside an enclosure that could cut your performance by half, or even more? There’s been some hope that external GPUs would make a resurgence with the release of Thunderbolt 5, but we haven’t seen that materialize yet. A few years ago, you could find a dozen enclosures for sale. Today, you’re left with no-name products packing pitiful reviews.
The Oculink connection is what really makes the difference for the DEG1, though. As I’ll get into in my benchmarks below, there isn’t a huge performance loss in most games. More important for the DEG1, however, is that Oculink is open-source. It’s a standard designed by PCI-SIG, which is the same group that defines PCIe standards. There isn’t a licensing fee to use Oculink, unlike Thunderbolt, which requires a license fee to Intel.
I used the Tecno Megamini G1 to test the enclosure, which is the only PC with an Oculink connection that I had on hand. After hooking everything up, I powered on the PC expecting at least an hour of troubleshooting to get the external GPU working properly. That wasn’t the case. The RTX 4080 Super I installed on the DEG1 spun up immediately, and I was on the Windows desktop in a matter of seconds.
You can see my results above. In Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal, the performance is so close that I would call it identical — no one is splitting hairs between four frames. Red Dead Redemption 2 and Forza Horizon 5 are a more accurate representation of what you should expect to see, though. There’s a 12% drop in Forza Horizon 5, but that’s not too bad, especially considering a 15% performance drop was the minimum for many Thunderbolt enclosures a few years ago.
The problem The DEG1 is great, and that’s on the back of Oculink. But there’s a problem, not so much with the device itself but with the adoption of Oculink more broadly. There’s only one mainstream laptop I’m aware of that even has an Oculink connection — the Lenovo ThinkBook 15 Gen 4 — and although you can find the connection of products from Minisforum and brands like OneXPlayer, the standard hasn’t been picked up widely.
External Gpu Graphics Cards Minisforum Nvidia PC Gaming
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