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Magma ExpressBox 3T gives you 3 external PCIe slots over Thunderbolt
Laptops aren't exactly renowned for their expandability, especially those beautiful slivers of aluminum from Apple. (Simply upgrading the RAM on your Air requires you break out the soldering iron.) Magma has a solution, the ExpressBox 3T. This silver case houses its own 220w power supply and a trio of PCIe 2.0 slots. Two of those slots are of the x8 variety (though one can hold an x16 card) while the third is scaled back to x4. And they all talk to your notebook via that wonderful little port known as Thunderbolt. It even comes with a carrying case which, we suppose, makes this hunk of metal "portable," but we certainly wouldn't want to lug it around very often. Sadly there's no info just yet about price or release date, but we do have a gallery of images below and the complete PR after the break. %Gallery-132908%
ExpressBox: use external PCIe cards with your MacBook Pro
The ExpressBox1 from Magma is a cool accessory for MacBook Pro owners that allows you to add a standard desktop PCIe card to your notebook via the ExpressCard/34 slot. It consists of a powered external enclosure for a PCIe card (either half or full length) together with a cable to an ExpressCard module that fits into the MacBook Pro. The "no latency" bandwidth is 2000Mpbs allowing you to run variety of external cards, even PCIe graphics cards (provided the drivers are available).All this coolness comes at a price, however; the ExpressBox1 is $729 for the half-length and $749 for the full-length enclosure.[via Macworld]
Magma ExpressBox mates PCI Express with ExpressCard
Desktop users longing to take advantage of ExpressCards on their machines have long since been quieted, but for laptopers looking to somehow stuff a PCI Express card into that diminutive slot, your prayer has been answered. Magma's ExpressBox / Express Box Pro allows users to operate a PCIe card up to 6.604- / 12.283-inches in length by handling up to 250MB/sec, providing dedicated power and cooling solutions, and playing nice with Windows XP, Vista, and OS X. The breakout box sports a fliptop lid for quickly changing out PCIe cards, and after installing the appropriate drivers, users will have full functionality of a PCI Express card right on their portable machine. Notably, these iterations only support cards that require 55-watts of power or less, and the company notes that gamers wishing to cram power-sucking GPUs into these boxes need to wait for the next revision before giving it a whirl. Even still, you better need the PCIe portability mighty bad to rely on one of these, as the ExpressBox and ExpressBox Pro will run you a stiff $729 or $749, respectively.[Via Macworld]
