The chip still supports the full bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3. The JHL6540 chip is a bit old with Intel now on the 8000 series controllers that support PCIe Gen 4.Īlthough the brains of the Core X are about 5 years old, that's not necessarily a bad thing. That chip supports up to 4 lanes of PCIe Gen 3 traffic, a DisplayPort interface, and an additional port that can carry USB 3.1 Gen 2 or DisplayPort. The Razer Core X specifically uses a JHL6540 Thunderbolt 3 controller.
Just two active components and a power supply. There's also a USB-C controller thrown in the mix to manage the connection. They all use an Intel Thunderbolt controller which takes in PCIe signals on one end and spits out Thunderbolt on the other end. The way these devices work is quite simple. Making sense of the Thunderbolt connection There's no vendor lock between Razer laptops and Razer eGPUs, we just happen to be using parts from the same brand to test with today. Keep in mind that since Thunderbolt and PCIe are both industry standards, you can use any eGPU with any supporting laptop. Of course, you need a compatible laptop to make use of the enclosure, so we'll be using the Razer Book 13 that we recently reviewed.
Putting this design into practice, today we'll be taking a look at Razer's Core X external GPU enclosure. This allows for a connection between PCIe devices and Thunderbolt-enabled laptops with a single controller chip. Intel and Apple designed Thunderbolt as just a fancy wrapping of the PCIe and DisplayPort interfaces in an external cable. The laptop then sends programs that need strong graphics power to run on that box.Īll eGPUs on the market currently use the Thunderbolt interface. Basically you put a desktop GPU in a special box and then plug that box into your laptop. These products, known as eGPUs, are an easy way to bring enhanced graphics performance to laptops without discrete graphics. However, the advent of modern high-speed external interfaces such as Thunderbolt has allowed for the integration of desktop-class graphics cards with laptops.
If you require strong PC gaming performance, traditionally that meant a desktop was your only option.