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On 30/10/2016 at 6:36 AM, The Pfhor said:

Will  you guys be testing this on the new Macbook Pro? I am thinking it is a better option than the Razer Core not just because of price, but as I believe you will provide better support as the Core is obviously designed specifically for the Blades regardless of whether they say it is not system specific or not.

From the specifications listed here, it looks like Macs (or at least OSX) are not supported.

You might have luck with Windows in boot camp, although your Thunderbolt controller/firmware will still need to support external graphics cards. No idea if this is a thing on Mac hardware. Maybe @DanKnight can answer.

18 minutes ago, DanKnight said:

 

Heck yeah. Going to set-up a webcam to show off the Skull Canyon and Node working together.

 

 

Good question. Yeah, there's some overhead from Thunderbolt, so there will be a hit on performance. But a GPU working at 80-90% is still better than an integrated or embedded GPU.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, the IGPU on the Skull Canyon is actually not that bad all things considered, but even a slightly impaired discrete GPU will completely stomp it!

I think I'll take a TB3 connection with a minor performance hit over having a PCI-E ribbon adaptor sticking out of the case and hooked up to some sort of Frankenstein PSU setup.

12 hours ago, DanKnight said:

 

The Node will be available outside of the US, we just don't know when. We predict we will be in the same situation as Razer, but I will try my best to work with the team to get some out to EU. Again, not sure when. I'm hoping we can get them in EU by early 2017. I know we got a big EU community, so I won't forget you guys.

Good to hear!

Another question - most of the benchmarks that I've seen for the Core show that we can expect a slight performance hit from an EGPU versus a natively installed card. From what I've read it looks like we should expect cards to perform at around 80-85% of their true capacity. I'm assuming this is a limitation of the TB3 interface and thus the same will hold true for the Node?

(By no means a deal-breaker, just good to know.)

@DanKnight: Do we know at this stage if the Node will be available outside of the US?

Reportedly Razer haven't released the Core in Europe because they can't keep up with demand in the US. As such, the only options we have for EGPUs over here are either to import a Core from the States at considerable expense (also minus the official Razer warranty), or hack together our own solutions using products like your Thunder2/3 boxes.

I've been considering getting a Skull Canyon NUC as a replacement for my ageing system for a while now - the GPU is the only missing piece of the puzzle.