I Got Rid of the eGPU Enclosure I Recommended Seven Years Ago — So Which One Would I Buy Now?

2026年8月15日

Back in 2019 I wrote a post on this blog called “Three eGPU enclosures worth buying." An eGPU enclosure is the box you use to hang an external graphics card off a laptop. At the time, almost all of them connected over Thunderbolt 3.

After that I measured a lot of laptops with one, wrote it all up, stopped using it, and got rid of it. And then in 2026 I bought an eGPU enclosure again. Two of them, in fact.

Seven years on, both the prices and the way you connect them have changed places. If you were choosing an enclosure today, what should you be looking at? (Researched in August 2026. Prices are Japanese retail prices; ¥1,000 is roughly $6.70.)

What did an eGPU enclosure cost in 2019?

Here is the price table I put in that old post, left exactly as it was.

So the going rate was ¥40,000 to ¥55,000, call it $270 to $370. I bought the AKiTiO Node and put a GeForce RTX 2070 in it. At the end of that post, I had written this.

The complaints behind that were about a laptop with a single Thunderbolt 3 port, and an enclosure that takes the port for itself. Plug in a VR headset as well and the cabling turns into a mess. I was already unsure how to choose seven years ago.

What went wrong with the AKiTiO Node

The AKiTiO Node was the first Thunderbolt enclosure I bought. As the table shows, the built-in power supply was 400W.

That 400W ran out later. When I tried to put a higher-end graphics card in, the power supply could not feed it. I ended up replacing the whole enclosure, and what I bought next was the Razer Core X (650W).

Looking back, the answer was sitting in the same AKiTiO line all along. The Node came out in successively beefier versions: a 500W model, and the 650W Titan. Presumably other people had got stuck in exactly the same place I did.

The Core X I replaced it with was ¥39,359. Cheaper than the original Node (¥44,000), with 250W more power.

That same Core X now shows up used at ¥83,559 (Rakuten, checked 6 August 2026). More than double what I paid for it new. It is a strange thing to say when I am the one who got rid of mine, but I may have picked the wrong moment to let it go.

Why did I get rid of the Razer Core X?

With that Core X I kept writing: five laptops, an RTX 3090 or an RTX 3060 Ti hanging off them, measured against five different VR headsets. There are 28 posts from November 2020 to February 2021.

And then I stopped using it. The reason is not complicated.

Is Thunderbolt also not enough for local AI?

In 2026 I started using an external GPU again. What changed was what I use it for.

When you run AI on your own machine, a graphics card connected externally works fine. I measured the same card in the same enclosure and swapped only the connection, OCuLink against Thunderbolt: text generation speed barely moves (under 1% on the faster card). Here is the post where I compared them.

Not enough for rendering, enough for AI. The difference appears to be how much data has to travel down the cable.

Something I had written off seven years ago turned out to be usable once the job changed. That is why I bought an enclosure again.

Can you add a graphics card to a mini PC?

What set this off was a mini PC, the GMKtec EVO-X2 (from here on, EVO-X2). It carries 128GB of unified memory, so large models fit. What it does not have is a slot for a graphics card. It is a mini PC, so that is only to be expected.

Then I learned that you can pull an OCuLink port out of the M.2 slot inside the case, the slot that is meant for an SSD. Connect an enclosure there and the mini PC has a graphics card after all.

That would widen what the EVO-X2 can do. That was the original motivation. The M.2 side of it is covered in a separate post.

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Which enclosures are actually selling now?

I checked on Amazon on 6 August 2026. Prices, star ratings and review counts are all from that day, on the Japanese store. There seem to be two separate streams right now.

The Thunderbolt stream: AKiTiO Node Titan, Sonnet, Razer Core X

The most reviewed one, the AKiTiO Node Titan, is the beefed-up version of the Node I originally bought. The line I abandoned because it ran out of power is apparently still selling.

The price is worth a look too. In my table from seven years ago it was ¥48,600 (checked June 2020). Today it is ¥52,200 on Rakuten (checked 6 August 2026), and some shops are asking ¥60,000-plus. Seven years, and it has not come down.

The OCuLink stream: AOOSTAR EG01, AG01, AG02, AG03

The EG01 has such a wide price range because the same model number is split across five separate listings, from ¥16,900 up to ¥23,900, with different star ratings on each.

The AG01, AG02 and AG03 all carried a “50+ bought in the past month" badge. That seems to be where the volume is.

In my case the machine on the other end was a mini PC with no Thunderbolt port, and the plan was to pull OCuLink out of the M.2 slot. The choice made itself.

What should you check before buying one?

Is the power supply built in, and is it big enough?

This was the biggest difference of all. Plenty of OCuLink products in the same price band sell the power supply separately. It looks cheap, but once you have bought an ATX supply as well you are back at the same total. That is more hardware to find space for, and more cabling.

As for capacity, I got this wrong once already, seven years ago. I bought a 400W enclosure, later tried to fit a bigger card, came up short, and replaced the entire enclosure.

That history is presumably why today’s enclosures carry 800W. Judge it not by the card you own, but by the card you will want next, and you avoid the replacement I ended up making.

Does the cable come in the box?

Reviews of the AG03 mention that no OCuLink cable is included, and that the supplied USB cable is short. An enclosure on its own does not connect to anything. It is worth checking what is actually in the box before ordering.

Can you boot with it left plugged in?

One AG03 review reported this: on the previous model (AG02) you could boot with the cable connected, but on the AG03 you have to unplug and reconnect after Windows has started, otherwise the machine will not restart and you end up at the BitLocker screen (2 stars, ROG Ally X with an RX 9070).

OCuLink was designed on the assumption that you power down before connecting. Thunderbolt is supposed to be plug-and-go, but depending on the combination it does not always cooperate.

What does the switch actually do?

An AG01 review says “the power button is a lie, it does nothing, if you want it off you pull the whole thing out" (3 stars). An AG03 review, on the other hand, says the on/off switch works properly, unlike the earlier version.

Checking on my own units, here is what it really is.

If you pull the power cable, is it off?

This is in neither the product description nor the reviews. I noticed it while using them.

Unplugged from the wall does not automatically mean safe to touch.

Why I picked the AOOSTAR AG01

This was the first one I bought. Three things decided it.

• It has a power supply built in at this price. In a band where most of them sell the supply separately, that mattered
• It is a good deal cheaper than the Razer Core X (¥39,359) I used seven years ago
• There is no case, and I decided I could print one myself

The third reason will not apply to everyone. If the outside is bare and that is why it is cheap, it suits people who are happy to add the outside themselves.

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What bothered me about the AG01 was the size

Why I added the AOOSTAR AG03

The second purchase followed from the first.

First, the AG01 worked over OCuLink. Once I knew it worked, I wanted another one.

On top of that, the AG03 has two Thunderbolt 5 ports. I picked it guessing that would open up more uses. What I was after was the Mac. If it worked with a MacBook, it would be an eGPU enclosure and a USB dock at the same time. One box doing both is not a bad deal, was the thinking.

So far, though, that has not worked out.

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Can a MacBook use an external GPU?

Looking into it, this was not something I had misconfigured.

• Apple does not support external GPUs on M1 and later Macs. The explanation given is that the feature is simply not in macOS
• Thunderbolt 5 does not change that. Even with a TB5 enclosure, it is reported not to work on Apple Silicon
• Support stopped with the Intel-based Macs
• The one exception is an experimental project called TinyGPU, which only works through a specific framework

If you choose an enclosure on the assumption of using an external GPU with a MacBook, you will miss. I did. The dock functions (power delivery, USB) still work, but the graphics card inside the enclosure will not.

The person who wrote “I should have gone with that one" seven years ago has missed again seven years later. Looking it up beforehand would have told me.

In summary: choosing an eGPU enclosure today

• The answer changes with what you want it for. For rendering (games, VR), Thunderbolt will not let the card show its full strength. For generating text with local AI, Thunderbolt is enough
• That said, loading a model takes 1.5–1.7x as long, and on Linux the card is sometimes not detected over Thunderbolt at all. If you swap things around a lot, OCuLink is the one
• Thunderbolt boxes run ¥60,000–88,000 and OCuLink boxes start in the ¥20,000s, close to a 3x gap. Thunderbolt models have 100-plus reviews; OCuLink models are still in the tens
• The AKiTiO Node Titan in my old table was ¥48,600. Today it is ¥52,200 on Rakuten and ¥64,090 on Amazon. Seven years and no drop. Meanwhile OCuLink has reached 800W at ¥24,273
• Size the power supply for the card you will want next. I bought 400W, came up short, and replaced the whole enclosure
• Whether the cable is included, and whether you can boot with it left connected, are both worth checking first
• The switch is on/off only. There is no long press
• After unplugging, wait for the LED to go out. There is charge left in there
• Decide where it will sit first. With a graphics card and a power supply inside, it ends up bigger than the mini PC
• External GPUs do not work on MacBooks (M1 and later)
• At the cheap end, the machine-translated names with zero reviews are best avoided

Seven years ago I bought an enclosure because I wanted heavy rendering out of a laptop. Now I buy one because I want to run AI on a mini PC. Same product, opposite reason.

Hardware mentioned in this article

The two I use.

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The model that sits between them. If you need both OCuLink and USB4, this is the one.

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An open frame with no power supply in it. You bring your own ATX or SFX supply and connect it (the manufacturer’s product page lists ATX/SFX support and graphics cards up to 350W). If you have a spare supply lying around, this is the cheapest way in.

The staples of the Thunderbolt side. The one I used was the Core X.

The adapter that pulls OCuLink out of a mini PC’s M.2 slot, and the cable to connect it.

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The mini PC this whole thing started from.

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Sources

Prices, ratings and reviews were checked on Amazon.co.jp on 6 August 2026, so they are Japanese retail figures; the dollar amounts are converted at roughly ¥1,000 = $6.70 and are there for scale only. Mac support follows Apple’s own documentation and several technical outlets. The older prices are the ones I recorded on this blog on 4 September 2019 and 26 June 2020. Anything described as confirmed on the hardware was checked on the AG01 and AG03 I own.