Razer Core Thunderbolt 3 eGFX Chassis: $499/$399, AMD & NVIDIA, Shipping In April

Back at CES 2016, Razer announced their Core Thunderbolt 3 external graphics (eGFX) chassis. Built around the new Thunderbolt 3 standard and its long-awaited official support for external video cards, the Razer Core is the first eGFX chassis to hit the market. We got a bit more information about it with last week’s AMD XConnect announcement, and now today at GDC Razer is releasing the full details on functionality, compatibility, and availability.

Jumping right into things, the Razer Core is what can be considered a full size eGFX chassis. The unit is large enough to accommodate a double-wide video card up to 12.2 inches long, which covers almost every video card on the market. The only notable exceptions here are cards that use external radiators (e.g. Radeon R9 Fury X) and the small number of ultra-high-end triple-wide card designs such as some of MSI’s Lightning cards. The toolless design is able to handle both open air and blower type video card coolers, however given its smaller size relative to a full PC case, I think it’s going to be worth looking into just how well open air cards do.

The chassis itself measures 4.13” x 13.9” x 8.66” and contains an internal 500W PSU, with Razer rating it to drive up to a 375W video card. At 10.89lbs it is technically portable, though clearly not ideal for the task given its handle-less design. Rather Razer intends this to be a fixed docking station for laptop users, as demonstrated both by the additional ports made available on the Core – 4x USB 3.0 Type-A and a gigabit Ethernet port – and by the fact that it’s capable of charging laptops over its Thunderbolt 3 connection.

The Core is the first of what we expect will be several TB3 eGFX chassis. As we briefly mentioned in our AMD XConnect overview, the Core is essentially the pathfinder product for the TB3 eGFX standard, with Intel, AMD, and Razer working together to put together the first devices and validate them. Consequently the Core is so far only validated to work with two laptops – Razer’s Blade Stealth and new 2016 Blade – however it should work with any future laptops that are also eGFX certified.

As for video card compatibility, while the Core was initially developed with Intel and AMD, Razer has confirmed that the chassis does support both AMD and NVIDIA video cards. The full compatibility list is posted below, but for AMD cards it’s essentially all of their latest generation (290 series and newer) video cards. Meanwhile on the NVIDIA side all of the company’s Maxwell 1 and Maxwell 2 cards are supported, starting with the GTX 750 Ti. Though given the price of the Core, it goes without saying that the expectation is that it will be paired up with high-end video cards as opposed to lower-end models.

While the Core supports both AMD and NVIDIA cards, how well each brand is supported is looking a bit hazy. As part of the eGFX development cycle, AMD’s drivers are fully capable of and validated for eGFX plug ‘n play operation, allowing Windows to gracefully handle losing the external GPU with both planned and accidental disconnects. In the case of an accidental disconnect, Windows will stay up, while applications using the GPU may crash. However NVIDIA’s drivers have not yet been validated for plug ‘n play operation, and it sounds like at this moment NVIDIA is still hammering out the final bugs. That said, NVIDIA has committed to having drivers ready by the time the Core ships in April, so we’ll have to see where things stand next month.

Finally, let’s talk about availability and pricing. Razer will begin taking pre-orders for the Core tonight through their website, with the chassis set to ship in April. As for pricing, the first eGFX chassis on the market will not come cheap: Razer is setting the base price on the chassis at $499, and after the cost of a high-end video card to put in the Core, we’re looking at a total price tag of $1000 or more. However Razer is offering a $100 discount on the Core if it’s purchased alongside a Razer Blade or Blade Stealth laptop – bearing in mind that these are the only two laptops eGFX certified at this time in the first place – which brings the effective cost down to $399. Razer also notes that this offer is also retroactive for customers whom already purchased a Blade Stealth earlier this year, as the ultrabook and the Core were announced together at CES and the company doesn’t want to penalize early buyers who were intending to grab the Core anyhow.

Gallery: Razer Core

GDC 2016: Imagination Demonstrates PowerVR Vulkan SDK & PowerVR Ray Tracing

Among the many companies showing off their latest development wares at GDC this week is Imagination. As opposed to their new GPU IP launches over the past couple of months – PowerVR Series7XT Plus and Series8XE – the focus for GDC is showing developers what they can do with their shipping hardware, and what new tools are ready for developers to use for the task.

First off, following the recent release of the low-level Vulkan API 1.0 specification, Imagination has integrated support for the API into version 4.1 of their PowerVR Graphics SDK. As is the case with PC vendors, for mobile vendors Vulkan is a chance to shift towards a less CPU demanding and multi-threading friendly model for draw call submission, which is all the more important given the high prevalence of 4+ core CPUs on Android devices. To that end the company is also showing off its newest Vulkan tech demo, Sunset Vista, which uses Vulkan for both graphics and compute purposes, combining various graphical effects with a compute shader-driven foliage simulation.

Meanwhile the company’s ray tracing team is continuing to show off the potential of their PowerVR Wizard technology now that the company has a working in-silicon implementation of the GR6500 ray tracing hardware. Imagination’s latest ray tracing tech demo in turn demonstrates ray tracing implemented over OpenGL ES using Imagination’s proprietary extensions. As with past demos the company is keen to show off hybrid rendering with classes of effects that are difficult or inefficient to implement via rasterization (i.e. regular GPUs) including specular reflections and efficient percentage closer soft shadows.

Finally, along these lines, the company is also announcing a new collaboration with engine developer Unity this week. In 2014 the two announced that they were working together to implement real-time lightmap previews into the Unity editor. Now in 2016 that collaboration is taking a step forward; Unity and Imagination will be building a full-fledged software ray traced lightmap editor, with the goal of further improving the speed and quality at which lightmaps can be developed in real time. As this is a software implementation it isn’t something Wizard GPUs can accelerate at this time, but it’s easy to see how if everything were to go well for Wizard, Imagination and Unity could try to make that jump.

MSI Introduces two new GTX 950 2GB GPUs with 75W TDP: the OCV2 and OCV3

A standard GTX 950 reference design comes in at a 90W TDP, which means it requires a 6-pin PCIe power connector as the standard PCIe slot is typically rated to only provide 75W. However, we have seen a couple of AIB partners introducing new 75W versions of the GTX 950 to come in under the limit, and as a result remove the 6-pin PCIe connector needed. One of those is MSI, who has introduced two new video cards that can be powered solely by the PCI Express connection. The low-power GeForce GTX 950 graphics boards from MSI follow similar graphics adapters from ASUS and indicate that there are NVIDIA’s GM206-251 GPUs. At this point we might conclude that the ‘251’ nomenclature refers to the specific silicon design which might afford lower power operation.

The two new cards from MSI are the GeForce GTX 950 2GD5T OCV3 and the MSI GeForce GTX 950 2GD5T OCV2 and are based on the GeForce GTX 950 (GM206) in its default configuration: 768 stream processors, 48 texture units, 32 ROPs as well as a 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface. The GPUs of both cards are clocked at 1076 MHz, but can increase their frequencies to 1253 MHz in boost mode. Both graphics adapters are equipped with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6.6 Gbps, a dual-slot cooling system with an aluminum heatsink, one DVI connector, one HDMI 2.0 port and one DisplayPort output. As mentioned above, neither of the boards require additional PCIe power connectors and their TDP does not exceed 75 W.

The two cards differ in their cooling and length. The first one is the GTX 950 2GD5T OCV3 uses a dual fan design and features a longer PCB which is designed to focus on a typical desktop PC. The shorter GTX 950 2GD5T OCV2 uses a single fan and seems to be designed for mini-ITX systems. Thanks to the fact that the GM206 GPU features hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding of H.265 (HEVC) video and fully supports HDCP 2.2 content protection over HDMI 2.0, the OCV2 card could be a fine choice for small form-factor home-theater PCs. 

That being said we have noticed that on the stock photographs that the smaller model eliminates some of the PCI Express pins for an unknown reason, so the exact feature-set is to be confirmed. We have put questions to MSI on this and will update when we have a response. 

Graphics cards based on the GeForce GTX 950 GPUs with lowered power consumption can be used not only to build SFF HTPCs, but also to upgrade cheap desktop systems, which sometimes do not have a spare PCIe power connector inside. Previously NVIDIA’s partners only offered GeForce GTX 750 Ti without auxiliary power connectors, but this adapter is already two years old, and its performance may not enough for modern titles.

Now there are (at least) two graphics cards suppliers who offer GeForce GTX 950 adapters with lowered power consumption, it is likely that other companies will follow them as well. It is unclear whether NVIDIA officially sells GM206 GPUs with low TDP to address the market of entry-level desktops, or companies like ASUS or MSI simply hand-pick GPUs that do not need more than 75 W of power to function properly. In any case, it is evident that such GPUs exist and are in demand enough that the AIB partners want to produce them.

Exact prices and release dates of MSI’s GeForce GTX 950 2GD5T OCV3 and GeForce GTX 950 2GD5T OCV2 graphics cards are unknown. Keeping in mind that the boards are not exclusive products available only from MSI, their prices will hardly be very high and will be near the GTX 950’s MSRP of $159.

Gallery: MSI Introduces GeForce GTX 950 Graphics Cards with 75W Power Consumption