This is the RTX 2080 Ti liquid cooled Thunderbolt gaming box.

Now, I have three questions.

First of all, what exactly is the point

of pairing the most powerful

consumer graphics card available

in a Thunderbolt enclosure?

My second question is, does it make any sense whatsoever?

I mean you have the bottleneck of Thunderbolt,

you have the bottleneck of whatever thin and light

laptop you connect it to,

and finally, and probably most importantly of all,

is this worth the massive $1500 price tag?

Let's find out, shall we?

So up front, we have a USB 3.0 port,

and if we flip around to the back,

we actually have a pretty decent selection of ports.

Including all the graphics outputs.

We have Type C, Thunderbolt USB as well as ethernet.

This is a very weird concept,

because on one hand you have an RTX 2080 Ti.

You have the ridiculous overkill capabilities

of what you're going to get out of water cooling.

So, realistically you should be overclocking it.

On the other hand, you have limitations of Thunderbolt.

Now, they do have what seems to be a pretty decent

liquid cooling set up here.

So we have a 240 mil radiator on the top,

and a waterblock over the GPU itself,

as well as the VRM.

I mean you've got the dual 120 mil fans,

which are exhausting straight out the top.

It has a dedicated 450 watt power supply right down here.

I mean, this looks like a pretty solid gaming setup.

I guess there's only one way to find out.

So for testing we'll be taking advantage of my daily driver,

a 2019 Dell XPS 13 2-in-1,

with 10th gen Core i7,

as well as importantly Thunderbolt.

As when you're using one of these GPUs,

you need Thunderbolt 3 built into your laptop

or desktop or whatever.

Now another reason why I'm using the XPS 13,

is I think this is sorta the sweet spot.

So obviously there are much beefier,

much more powerful gaming laptops

that do take advantage of Thunderbolt.

However, if you've got something that thick and that bulky,

you probably already have a decent GPU anyway.

Whereas this, while the integrated graphics are fine,

they're certainly not up to hardcore gaming.

Which is where this supposedly will come in huge handy.

(music stops) Huge handy?

- Wow. - Mm.

- Mm. - Mm.

- Huge-handy, I don't like that one.

(laughing)

That's something you have to pay for, I'm sorry.

- Hey, when you pay $1500 for a GPU,

you get a huge handy.

(guitar music)

I feel not particularly happy with this monitor right now.

It is freaking really hard on this display.

Argh, damn it, nothing works.

Uh, so one slight issue that we've had

is that it does not like running on the internal display.

So I just disable the internal display,

but Battlefield doesn't understand

that I have two screens connected

because generally speaking with Thunderbolt

you don't want to run with the internal display on

because it's soaking up your bandwidth.

Can I please kick it over?

Oh, look at that!

Okay, this is not respecting me at all right now.

(banging on desk rhythmically)

(clicking keyboard)

(banging on desk)

- How's tech support in the forest?

(laughing)

- I don't think this is necessarily the game box's fault.

This is just a matter of Thunderbolt and this XPS

are really not agreeing.

It just doesn't understand how to deal with this monitor.

- Do you think another Thunderbolt laptop would work?

- Maybe.

- So it's another day and surprise, surprise,

switching to the Razer Blade,

a laptop which is actually designed

to work with an external GPU, is working flawlessly.

So the setup is exactly the same as it was yesterday.

So we have the Blade.

The screen is turned off to get the maximum performance.

Now let's see if this actually works.

Wouldn't that be lovely?

Okay, we are up and running with a very cinematic 23 FPS.

(laughing)

So I am not particularly surprised

considering that we are running it

literally with everything completely maxed out.

Let me bring a couple settings down

to something reasonable and see what we get.

Oh, look at that!

Literally just by turning my ray tracing from ultra to medium

we went from 20 to 40 FPS.

I mean you can see it looks incredible.

This is definitely a scenario in which

we are getting some real performance out of the 2080 Ti.

So next up we have GTA 5.

Now this might not seem like a really obvious choice.

However it's actually still a pretty good game to test.

Specifically DirectX 11 and, very specifically, CPU usage.

So this is a game, which, once you crank it up

can still actually be fairly demanding.

So this is mostly maxed settings at 4k.

So we're in like the mid-30s right now

and we can certainly turn the settings down

but I actually think this is where

we're starting to run into some bottlenecking.

So even though the Razer Blade

is still a fairly powerful laptop,

it's still using a mobile chip.

Which mean that while it will boost up

to a fairly high clock speed,

over time as you're hitting it with

a pretty sustained load,

that clock speed will start to drop

which will start to hurt our performance.

This is fine and we can very easily

turn the settings down just a little bit

and probably be well above 60 FPS.

But I do think this is probably the first real example

of a game which is starting to run, not necessarily badly,

but this is nowhere near what I would expect

a 2080 Ti to do if it had a better CPU

and wasn't being bottlenecked by Thunderbolt.

So for reference, I have this same graphics card

paired with a Core i7-9700k

getting 12,750 points in the Time Spy test.

Now, we're not going to hit that.

But I'm curious to see exactly how close we are

obviously with whatever bottlenecks that exist.

CPU I'd think is definitely going to be one of them.

Okay, and our score is, ooh, 9600.

Okay, so that's not terrible

but we are certainly losing performance,

not only on the CPU score, but specifically,

even the graphics score is a little bit down

than compared to what I would expect.

For reference, though, that is still over three times

more powerful than the GTX 1650 which is inside this laptop.

So there's no doubt that we're getting

a huge performance gain.

It's just that a water-cooled 2080 Ti

is obviously going to be bottlenecked

running over Thunderbolt.

Now what I'm curious about is if we

actually start overclocking it

can we get that much higher, or are we just

fundamentally limited by this setup that we have here?

Let's, uh, let's see.

So Gigabyte does offer some software

that will supposedly autoscan for GPU boost.

I don't know exactly how good this is going to be.

I assume not great,

but let's see what we can actually get.

- You see what I would do is get it to

whatever the slider lets you go to and work it down.

- Is that the School of Ken Overclocking?

Crank it up to 11 and figure it out later?

- Yeah.

- Or you could go maximum at all times.

So it, wait, no, that's dumb

because if I had it set to this

it only goes to a higher clock speed

when it gets hotter! (laughing)

Fan speed is fine.

GPU voltage will not let me unlock,

oh I can unlock, okay, cool, yeah.

Give me a hundred more.

I'll leave memory alone and I'll do manual GPU boost of--

- All the way!

No, I'm not gonna...

It's not gonna work if I do it all the way.

- Why not?

- Why not?

It's just not gonna work.

- We'll never find out.

We'll never know if you don't do it.

(laughing)

- Why do I let you talk me into these dumb things?

All right.

(laughing)

Wow, Ken, I can't believe that didn't work!

No way!

(laughing)

- As Wayne Gretzky said,

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

- How is that a shot?

You crank something up to a million

and it doesn't work, the end.

Like, that's not--

- We also have the most powerful laptop

on the face of the planet. (laughing)

I'm just gonna restart the whole system now.

God damn it.

Okay, so we have now done the auto overclocking tool

with the 2080 Ti.

I did manually bump up, not only the power limit,

but also the GPU temperature. And let's see what we've got.

So again, for reference, before we overclocked

we had a score of 9,628.

Let's see if this actually made a difference

or whether our watercooling is not useful.

The suspense is real. Ooh!

That's very slightly better. So 10,072.

Look, if I'm gonna be real for a second

this actually is pretty impressive.

So we're getting most of the performance

out of our 2080 Ti using Thunderbolt.

And you have to consider that there are

two major bottlenecks.

So first of all is the Thunderbolt 3 port.

Now while, yes, it's quite fast,

you still are only getting about

a quarter of the bandwidth than

using a PCI slot on a desktop motherboard.

It's not the end of the world

but it does hurt performance.

But probably our biggest bottleneck here

is the mobile Core i7 inside this laptop.

Now, don't get me wrong.

The Blade Stealth is a very nice laptop

and you do get a lot of power for a 13 inch laptop,

but at the end of the day you have

severe thermal limitations and power restraints

compared to a full desktop.

So if I was using a Core i7 on a desktop

I could easily tune it to go well over

100 watts of power, lots of cores, lots of clock speed.

But on a laptop, you're really limited.

I mean, we're realistically using, like what,

a fifth that power budget,

and it can't boost anywhere near as high.

And when you combine those two

it totally makes sense that we're losing some performance.

But 20% based on all that is actually not too far to drop.

However, I have one more thing I want to try.

So this is the AORUS 2070 gaming box.

So they actually make a couple of these.

So this is the one that I think

is probably the best bet for most people,

or at least that was my assumption

before starting this video,

as essentially what you get here

is still a very high-end graphics card

but it is significantly cheaper.