[recuter]

I was hoping for an external GPU enclosure, like a storage bay, that lets me plug in my own card ever since Thunderbolt was announced.

This is a hack that goes: Thunderbolt -> ExpressCard -> PCI-Express. Two adapters is not quite so elegant, but whatever, this seems to work and I love it.

A 13" Air has 12 hours of battery life and weighs nothing and now you can dock it at home to game. Perfect.

[FooBarWidget]

Me too. It's sad to read that Intel is blocking the release of such a product. I don't want a separate gaming system, I want an addon for my mac.

[atourgates]

Apart from cost - what's preventing this from working with something like the Echo-Express pro? http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpresschassis.html - are there software limitations that will prevent a graphics-card from working in that chassis?

[potatolicious]

Bandwidth. We can (and already have) gotten video cards working across external links, but they are severely bandwidth constrained.

Thunderbolt is constrained to 10Gbit (20Gbit in some contrived used cases if your'e using Thunderbolt2). A 16-lane PCI-e gaming video card consumes anywhere between 32Gbit and 126Gbit (with modern cards coming in on the high end of that).

So you can get it working, but it'd be mostly pointless. The main impetus for an external video card is to get desktop-like video performance for demanding applications like gaming, but you are heavily bus-bottlenecked which reduces the video performance to a small fraction of its potential.

[dnissley]

I think you're looking at power problems. That page says that it has a 100W or 150W power supply. High end cards often top out above 200W[1].

[1] - http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/279391-28-power-requiremen...