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The best external graphics card enclosure
By Andrew Cunningham This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commission. Read the full guide to external graphics card enclosures. For laptops or mini PCs with Thunderbolt 3 ports, adding an external graphics card (or eGPU) can be a good way to play high-end games, run professional 3D apps, and connect as many as half a dozen monitors. After researching nearly 30 Thunderbolt 3 eGPU enclosures and testing six, we think Akitio's Node Pro is the best box you can buy to put your graphics card in. The Akitio Node Pro is a bit slimmer than other eGPU enclosures and has an understated, all-metal design that looks better than most of the plain black boxes in this category (it looks especially at home next to Macs). You can open it and install or swap out graphics cards without any tools at all—on most enclosures you need at least a screwdriver to access the interior—its fan is relatively quiet, and it has a second Thunderbolt 3 port that you can use to connect other accessories. It can provide up to 60 W of power to a connected laptop, more than enough to keep most 13-inch notebooks charged while you use them. And it has a neat retractable handle you can use to carry it from place to place. The Razer Core X Chroma is bigger, boxier, and more expensive than the Node Pro, but it also includes a Gigabit Ethernet port, four USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports for connecting accessories, and customizable RGB lights that can add a flashy, colorful touch to your gaming setup. It can also provide up to 100 W of power to a connected laptop, enough for some 15-inch laptops like Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pro (though others exceed USB-C's 100 W charging limit). If you're looking for a Thunderbolt 3 graphics card enclosure that can double as a laptop dock, this is the one to get. The 550 W version of Sonnet's eGFX Breakaway Box (which also comes in a 650 W version) typically costs between $100 and $150 less than our other picks, money that you could put toward a more powerful graphics card. But its design is more utilitarian than that of our other picks, it's not as easy to open, and its fan is a bit noisier. These shortcomings are forgivable for the price, but most people will be better served by the Akitio Node Pro.
Researchers teach a computer to compose sonnets like Shakespeare
In addition to penning 37 plays, William Shakespeare was a prolific composer of sonnets -- crafting 154 of them during his life. Now, more than 400 years after his death, the Bard's words are influencing a new generation of poets. It's just that these writers do so with silicon imaginations and digital quills.
macOS finally supports VR
Until now the only way to run a high-end VR system on a Mac was by booting into Windows, but that didn't solve the fact that Apple had yet to offer a GPU option that was actually good enough for VR. The next best thing was to plug in your desired NVIDIA card via an external enclosure like the Razer Core, but you'd still be stuck with Windows. Thankfully, Apple has finally decided to take matters into its own hands by adding VR graphics support to the upcoming macOS High Sierra due this fall, and it's also offering a Thunderbolt 3 external GPU dev kit as of today at WWDC.
Create your own 'Star Wars' crawls, sonnets and Yoda speeches
Don't relish the thought of buying a $150 robotic BB-8 toy just to have some Star Wars-related fun? Don't worry, you won't have to spend a cent. A handful of websites have posted free tools that let you have fun with the sci-fi series' iconic language. The official Crawl Creator is arguably the highlight -- its simple editor turns your writing into the famous scrolling text you've seen in front of every Star Wars flick. There's also a Sonnet Generator that crafts Shakespearean Star Wars poetry from just a few questions. And yes, everyone's favorite centuries-old Jedi gets his due: plug text into the Yoda-Speak Generator and you'll get whatever you wrote in Yoda's distinct verb-follows-subject phrasing. These will only do so much to tide you over until The Force Awakens hits theaters, but they're definitely gentler on your bank account than the endless waves of merchandise hitting stores.
A rack mount for the Mac Pro and other news for March 27, 2014
It's been a rather quiet morning, but here are three stories we found for you. Sonnet Tech has announced a 4U rack mount for Apple's cylindrical Mac Pro. The so-called xMac Pro Thunderbolt 2 PCIe Enclosure rolls off the tongue and includes three PCIe single-width expansion slots; Thunderbolt 2 compatibility, as the name indicates; and hardware for mounting additional storage. The whole thing comes with a 300W power supply and a 75W PCIe power connector. BusyMac Software has announced new software BusyContacts. They call it a "complete replacement" for Apple's built-in Contacts app and its design resembles that of iTunes. BusyContacts offers sync support for iCloud, Google Contacts, Exchange, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. A public beta is now open. Mavericks adoption is chugging along at a nice pace. The folks at Chitika note that Mavericks now generates nearly 40% of all North American OS X-based web traffic. They also note that Mountain Lion was at 26.8% after seven months. It's important to note here that Mavericks is free, of course.
Mobile World Congress in 14 lines
In Barcelona we all tried to thrive And strove to not imbibe too many beers When Samsung trotted out the GS5 Then shortly after highlighted new Gears. Mozilla's and Ubuntu's phones seemed cheap, Along with some of Waterloo's new wares, But Sony's flagship stuff's atop the heap And Blackphone puts an end to snooping scares. Though what of HTC and LG, too? Those also-rans with rivals large and strong? They talked of their Desires and G Pro 2 While we were wond'ring if Nokia's wrong. It wasn't long before the show had ended And we'll be back next year, our livers mended. (image credit: Getty Images)
Sonnet announces powerful Echo 15 Thunderbolt Dock
Slowly, but surely, Thunderbolt docks are starting to appear from peripheral manufacturers. The Matrox DS1 has shipped to much acclaim, although Belkin's promised Thunderbolt Express Dock has slipped past the promised Q1 ship date. Now Sonnet has announced that the Echo 15 Thunderbolt Dock (starting at US$399.95) is available for pre-order. The Echo 15 is good-sized, and for a very good reason: it's full of ports, adds a DVD or Blu-ray drive, supports an internal HD or SSD, and uses Mini DisplayPort to connect to a number of display interfaces. Sonnet is starting with four configurations: Dock with DVD drive -- $399.95 Dock with Blu-ray drive -- $449.95 Dock with DVD drive and 2 TB HDD -- $499.95 Dock with Blu-ray drive and 2 TB HDD -- $549.95 All of the configurations show a Summer 2013 ship date. The configurations with a built-in Blu-ray drive also include Mac Blu-ray player software.
Sonnet Echo 15 Thunderbolt dock piles on 15 ports, optical drive, disk bay for $400
There are Thunderbolt docks, real and ethereal, and then there's this beast from Sonnet: the Echo 15. As implied by the name, it's lavished with 15 ports front and back, including four USB 3.0, two eSATA, two audio in and out, an extra Thunderbolt, GigE and FireWire800 ports. If you're thinking that'll finally let you hook up a Blu-ray or hard disk to your laptop, back up a second -- Sonnet's dock has those items built in as well, giving you SATA III-level disk throughput and freeing up your ports for more interesting peripherals. You'll be able to grab one this summer with a built-in DVD for $399, or configure it to the max with a Blu-ray drive and 2TB HDD for $549 -- assuming it avoids any untoward delays.
Origin Stories: Sonnet Technologies
Sonnet Technologies has been around for 26 years, and was founded by a former Apple engineer. I've long been a fan of their products, first with a PPC daughtercard upgrade for my 8500 years ago. In this Origin Stories I talk to Greg LaPorte about the history of Sonnet. As a bonus, check out the additional videos around some great Sonnet products. Here's a video of some of Sonnet's advanced Thunderbolt products: And here's a video of some more great stuff, including a USB 3.0 media reader and a Tempo SSD card for performance junkies:
Sonnet shipping xMac mini server, Echo Express PCIe adapters to follow suit shortly (update)
Sonnet's no stranger to the Thunderbolt peripheral game and it now has three new Thor-approved expansions to ship. The Echo Express adapter packs one X4 mode PCIe 2.0 slot of the x16 flavor, an extra opening for a connector plate or a double-width card and clocks in at a sizeable $599. At a heftier $899 $799, the Pro model sports two of the same slots and support configurations with larger cards. The AC-powered aluminum housings each feature an extra Thunderbolt port to continue the daisy chain and ship out for duty on June 8th. Bent on turning your Mac mini into a server and have $1,295 squirreled away behind a rack? The xMac mini server 1U rackmount enclosure is replacing its older sibling and adds more PCIe 2.0 slot connectivity. Hit the source links for full tech specs on all three. Update: The Echo Express Pro rings up at $799 instead of $899. Sonnet Tech let us know that the RackMac mini Xserver never shipped, but is being revamped as the xMac mini.
Thunderbolt devices are still irritatingly thin on the ground
Apple's announcement of Thunderbolt on Feb 24th was greeted by excitement, as Mac users became aware of the tantalising possibilities of this new high-speed port. There's lots of things Thunderbolt can do that were simply not possible before -- driving multiple external displays from a single port, "docking" a laptop to a selection of external ports via a single cable, expanding a laptop with high-performance desktop graphics cards. Then there are applications that older standards like Firewire and USB simply aren't fast enough to cope with, such as capturing uncompressed 1080p video or very fast external drives like RAID arrays or sold state drives. Our own Chris Ward went so far as to ask if Thunderbolt could foretell the end of the line for the Mac Pro as we know it, by allowing a Mac mini sized chassis to be endlessly exapanded via external Thunderbolt-connected peripherals. And yet... ten months later, if you go to Apple's store and search for 'Thunderbolt', you'll see just 11 products, three of which are Apple's own ultra-expensive Thunderbolt Display (plus its VESA mount) and the official Thunderbolt cable. There's three LaCie BigDisks, at $500 for 1 TB and $600 for 2 TB, or $900 for an ultra-fast SSD unit. There's four types of Promise Drobo-like RAID boxes, starting from $1150. Finally, there's a Promise Thunderbolt-to-Fibre-Channel adaptor, for $800 (Fibre Channel is an multi-gigabit enterprise-grade communication protocol used to connect with storage-area networks like Apple's Xsan, among other applications), allowing Thunderbolt-equipped machines to participate in distributed video workflows. None of these are remotely mainstream devices. The 2 TB LaCie disk is almost twice the price of an equivalent eSATA/Firewire model, at $329, which will be just as fast using eSATA as it is Thunderbolt. So where are all the devices that normal humans might want to buy? Has Thunderbolt arrived as more of a damp fart? My research for this post started when I was considering an iMac purchase. I'm not keen on Apple's official SSD pricing, because a top-of-the-line aftermarket model (twice as fast) is available for about $150 less. If possible, though, I'd also like to avoid the work of swapping my own drive in -- I'm sure I'll spend half my life trying to remove dust from the inside of the screen afterwards. Logically, I thought to myself, I should be able to buy some sort of reasonably priced Thunderbolt-connected drive bay that would be just as fast as an internal drive, right? Wrong. Such a thing doesn't exist. The only thing close is the $900 LaCie model I mentioned above, and it's a whopping $500 more expensive than the OCZ drive I am considering. No-one is offering a cradle you can put your own drive into. Nor can you buy... well, most of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph, actually. There's been plenty of promises from third parties, to be sure. Sonnet, in particular, has announced a broad range of exciting products, such as an Expresscard/34 adaptor (pre-order now, ships by December 14th). With that card cage, lots of expansion options open up (like eSATA ports). However, Sonnet's PCIe Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis, which will connect any normal PCIe x16 card -- like a high-performance graphics card -- and the RackMac mini Xserver -- which will convert a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac mini into a 1U server -- won't be available until "early January." Another raft of devices were announced at the Intel Developer Forum in September of this year, but manufacturers were long on promises and short on firm prices or ship dates. Blackmagic's HDMI capture device is available now, but that's a rather specialist piece of kit with a hefty $300 price tag. Belkin's Thunderbolt Express Dock (a dongle with Thunderbolt on one end and USB/ethernet/etc. on the other) won't be out until "spring 2012" and has no suggested price. mLogic's mDock looks interesting, but the company doesn't even have a full website up so we couldn't contact them for any updated information on when it might ship. Even Apple itself hasn't showed much follow through for Thunderbolt devices. We've got the Thunderbolt Display, with its extremely handy forest of ports which are ideal for laptop users working on a desk. The 27" 2560x1440 screen is certainly sumptuous, but at $999 it's a pretty specialised device -- and there's nothing else on offer. So, almost ten months after Thunderbolt was announced, its initial high promise is still mostly unfulfilled. TUAW reached out to several of the manufacturers mentioned above but frustratingly none of them would comment about why the peripherals have been exceedingly slow to ship. I have theories -- Thunderbolt remains highly expensive to implement and purchase, for example. Consider that a single Thunderbolt cable costs more than an entire eSATA-equipped drive dock. Also, despite Apple's high Mac sales of late, and all current Mac models (except the Mac Pro) coming suited and booted with at least one Thunderbolt port, there can still only be a few tens of millions of Macs out there with it. In the grand scheme of things that isn't a substantial install base for OEMs to target, compared to (say) the sheer volume of PCs with USB ports. Hopefully we will soon see Thunderbolt ports on PCs, which will help address both of these issues by giving OEMs a wider base to target and bringing some volume to manufacturing to bring prices down. For now, though, Thunderbolt's strong early promise remains mostly unfulfilled.
Need RAID? Fusion F2QR packs two 1TB drives into a portable shell
Do you demand portability from your Redundant Array of Independent Disks? Then you've probably already seen Sonnet's Fusion F2, with its two 1TB drives and eSATA connector. Today the company introduces the Fusion F2QR, which also features two 2.5-inch, 1TB hard drives -- but now comes with four interface options. You've got your eSATA, of course, but also Firewire 400, Firewire 800 and USB 2.0 connectors. There's a new built-in RAID controller that smooths configuration as well, and the aluminum case and fanless design keep noise to a minimum. All of that fits in a shell measuring 5.9- x 6.1- x 0.95-inches. This slender slab of storage is available now and will set you back $569.
Thunderbolt accessories at IDF 2011: Belkin's Express dock, Seagate drives and PCIe expansion cards (video)
Seeing as Wintel fans will soon join in on the Thunderbolt fun, how about a smorgasbord of devices toting the interconnect, conveniently laid out in a two pane vitrine here at IDF? Alongside the usual suspects -- such as LaCie's Little Big Disk, Promise's Pegasus and Sonnet's Echo -- are a few devices we've never seen before, namely Belkin's Express dock, some unnamed Seagate drives and two PCIe expansion chassis from Sonnet and Magma. We're particularly smitten with the latter two -- you know, dreams about extending our future Ultrabooks with some serious external graphics horsepower. Check out the entire spread in our gallery below and the video after the break. Myriam Joire contributed to this report. %Gallery-133792%
Sonnet announces RackMac mini Xserver, makes Apple desktop IT life seem more legit
We're sure a few of you have made that recently revamped Mac mini your office server, but now you can give it the look of a grown-up server room. Thanks to Sonnet, you'll soon be able to rack mount your Thunderbolt sportin' dainty PC within a 1U shell. The company has announced that, upon the system's expected arrival in November, it'll be decked out with a PCIe 2.0 X4 slot, a 75W power supply and a Thunderbolt daisy-chain port. This Apple speed-port adapter will enable use of that massive Thunderbolt display even in server or metadata controller mode. For more use scenarios, hit the full PR below or peruse the product page via the coverage link.
Sonnet's Echo brings ExpressCard to Thunderbolt machines
Looking for more stuff to plug into that Thunderbolt port? If you've got a smattering of ExpressCard/34 doodads laying around, Sonnet's upcoming Echo adapter might just fit the bill. Scheduled for an October release, the $149 gizmo can now be pre-ordered from the company's online store, but be forewarned that it'll ship sans cable. So if you haven't already picked up one of these guys, be prepared to part with a half Benjamin before you join in on all the fun. All in all, a pricey affair, but that's what you get for living on the bleeding edge, you futuristic maverick, you. [Thanks, Mmm]
Sonnet's Qio eSATA controller / all-in-one card reader
Sonnet's a fun little company -- when not hustling iPod chargers and transmitters, it's providing the world with more sober, serious hardware, such as its RAID storage solutions. Among the company's newest kit is Qio, a media card reader / writer that includes a E4P SATA host controller, four eSATA ports, and the usual array of P2, SxS and CompactFlash slots. If that weren't enough, this device also includes an adapter so that your SD and XF cards don't feel left out. Available for both desktop (PCIe) and laptop owners (ExpressCard), the HDD controller supports port multipliers allowing users to access up to 20 drives. Available sometime next month, pricing to be determined.
Sonnet FireWire dongle gives your MacBook Pro the gift of FW400
When Steve Jobs announced the new MacBook Pros, Apple received a lot of criticism for excluding a FireWire 400 port, despite the addition of FireWire 800. While most people were sitting around and griping, one company actually did something to reconcile the situation. Sonnet has created a dongle that allows you to use FireWire 400 devices in your MacBook Pro's FireWire 800 port. The Sonnet Simply Fast dongle works with standard 6-pin male FW400 cables. This dongle can be bought from the Sonnet online store, or from other retailers (i.e. Amazon) for around $14.24US. You can visit the Sonnet website for more information about the FireWire adapter. If you are looking for solutions to this FW 400/800 mystery then you might also want to check out FireWire 800 to 400 cables which are very plentiful, and might be slightly cheaper.
Sonnet's Fusion F2 portable RAID solution hits 1TB
For budding audio / video editors that can't stand to leave home without a RAID setup in tow, you should probably give Sonnet's incredibly mobile Fusion F2 a look. This portable SATA RAID solution now tops out at 1TB (a 640GB model is also available) and features an eSATA connector, fanless design and compatibility with Sonnet's Tempo SATA ExpressCard/34 card. Within the 1.22-pound, 5.9- x 6.2- x 0.72-inch enclosure, you'll find a pair of 2.5-inch 7,200RPM HDDs that are able to deliver 134MB/sec read and write rates. Word on the street places a $995 price tag on the 1TB edition, which is all set to ship "early this month."[Via Macworld]
Sonnet announces D400, D800 Fusion RAID storage systems
Sonnet's mainly popped up onto our radar for its various iPod accessories, but the company also has quite a few other products up its sleeve, to which it's now added a pair of new RAID storage systems. Boasting support for up to four and eight drives, respectively, the Sonnet Fusion D400 and D800 systems each come bundled with a PCI Express RAID host adapter, which will let you set 'em up in your choice of RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 10, 50, or JBOD configurations. Fully loaded, the D800 will give you a maximum 6TB of storage, although you can just buy one empty and pop in additional drives as needed (or pop out, as it's fully hot-swappable). Look for it to set you back just over $2,000, with the D400 a comparative bargain at around $660.
Hang Your Mac - Sonnet MacCuff Pro
It's common knowledge that Mac Pro is one of the most powerful pre-configured desktop computers out there, but who knew it was hung? With a little help from Sonnet Technologies, your Mac Pro or PowerMac G5 can hang elegantly from under your desk instead of taking up valuable floor real estate. The MacCuff Pro is made of solid steel and retails for a pricey $129. While the idea of hanging a tower is cute, I'd be cautious to try it on anything but the sturdiest desks, and definitely only those made of solid wood instead of particle board. [via CrunchGear]
