Gigabyte’s liquid-cooled external GPU powers up your laptop with an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti

Gigabyte Aorus RTX 3080 Ti Gaming Box External GPU Connected To A Laptop
(Image credit: Gigabyte)

Gigabyte’s Aorus RTX 3080 Ti Gaming Box is a new external GPU from the hardware maker which provides this freshly-launched Nvidia graphics card in a liquid-cooled form that can be hooked up with your gaming laptop.

The Aorus external GPU enclosure is nothing new, but the availability of a version with the RTX 3080 Ti (product name GV-N308TIXEB-12GD) rounds out the range, providing a middle-ground between the existing RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 versions of Gigabyte’s box of tricks.

Obviously enough, this will give you more pep than the base RTX 3080 spin, but with less of a wallet-crushing price tag than the top-end RTX 3090 box. 

That said, as you might imagine, the Aorus RTX 3080 Ti Gaming Box won’t be cheap, but a price has yet to be confirmed. To give you some idea of the ballpark, the base Aorus RTX 3080 model costs $1,400 (or £1,400).

Team Liquid

You’re getting not just the GPU in an enclosure, but a full liquid cooling system with a 240mm radiator, plus a pair of (quiet) 120mm fans. Gigabyte makes the point that it cools not just the GPU, but also the video RAM and other important components to ensure stable running when an overclock is applied. (The GPU comes at stock clocks by default, mind you; namely 1365MHz with boost to 1665MHz).

The external GPU is connected to the laptop via a Thunderbolt 3 port, and this box is also capable of charging the notebook (with 100W of power delivered). As well as Thunderbolt, there’s an Ethernet port and a pair of USB 3.0 Type-A connectors, with video outputs consisting of a trio of DisplayPort 1.4, plus a pair of HDMI 2.1 ports. Inside the box, a 550W power supply nestles alongside the graphics card.

As mentioned, we don’t yet have pricing, or for that matter any release date, but given that Gigabyte has now announced the Aorus RTX 3080 Ti Gaming Box, presumably it’ll be on shelves soon enough.

Via Tom’s Hardware

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).