I though external GPUs were a thing of the past. Why would you spend a ton of money on one of the best graphics cards, only to slap it inside an enclosure that could cut your performance by half, or even more? There’s been some hope that external GPUs would make a resurgence with the release of Thunderbolt 5, but we haven’t seen that materialize yet. A few years ago, you could find a dozen enclosures for sale. Today, you’re left with no-name products packing pitiful reviews.
But then the Minisforum DEG1 came along.
It’s a $99 external GPU enclosure that’s shockingly simple in its construction — and due to that fact, shockingly cheaper than the enclosures of years past. You have to supply your own graphics card, of course, but otherwise the DEG1 is fairly simple. The big difference between it and previously attempts, however, is an emerging connection standard called Oculink that makes all the difference when it comes to performance.
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There’s nothing quite like the DEG1
It’s easy to underestimate the DEG1, but it has a lot going on. That’s impressive given how the simple the device is in its execution. It comes with a single PCIe x16 slot and mounting points for a power supply (both ATX and SFX power supplies are supported). A bracket comes off the power supply to hold the GPU in place, and you need to connect two points of power — a 24-pin connection to the DEG1 and whatever power your graphics card needs. You also get the Oculink connection and a power button, but that’s it.
Simple, but there aren’t any other solutions like this that I’m aware of. You can pick up a daughterboard on Amazon for around $25 and try to build your own Oculink enclosure, but the simplicity and ease of using the DEG1 is definitely worth the $99 Minisforum is asking.
The Oculink connection is what really makes the difference for the DEG1, though. As I’ll get into in my benchmarks below, there isn’t a huge performance loss in most games. More important for the DEG1, however, is that Oculink is open-source. It’s a standard designed by PCI-SIG, which is the same group that defines PCIe standards. There isn’t a licensing fee to use Oculink, unlike Thunderbolt, which requires a license fee to Intel.
It’s hard to say with certainty how much that influenced the cost of the DEG1, but considering how simple the device is in its construction, I’d reckon the influence is quite large. Faster speeds and a lower price? There’s not much more you could ask for out of any tech product, and that all comes down to Oculink on the DEG1.
It just works
I’d heard some warnings online about Oculink. Thunderbolt devices might be more expensive, but they at least support Plug and Play on Windows — you shouldn’t need to worry about configuring anything yourself. Oculink doesn’t, but the DEG1 just worked when I tested it.
I used the Tecno Megamini G1 to test the enclosure, which is the only PC with an Oculink connection that I had on hand. After hooking everything up, I powered on the PC expecting at least an hour of troubleshooting to get the external GPU working properly. That wasn’t the case. The RTX 4080 Super I installed on the DEG1 spun up immediately, and I was on the Windows desktop in a matter of seconds.
Granted, the Megamini G1 uses an Nvidia graphics card, so I didn’t have any driver conflicts to worry about. Still, the fact that the PC picked up the external GPU without any intervention from me — and even managed to power the GPU on its own — is astounding. Oculink may not have Plug and Play support, but this is about the closest I’ve gotten to a plug and play experience when tinkering with hardware in the last several years.
Getting to the numbers
There’s always going to be some performance loss with an external GPU. Not only is the connection physically farther when data has to travel over a cable but there’s also the limited bandwidth available to modern connection interfaces. The DEG1 holds up shockingly well, however, even when testing a high-end GPU like the RTX 4080 Super that can process loads of data at once.
You can see my results above. In Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal, the performance is so close that I would call it identical — no one is splitting hairs between four frames. Red Dead Redemption 2 and Forza Horizon 5 are a more accurate representation of what you should expect to see, though. There’s a 12% drop in Forza Horizon 5, but that’s not too bad, especially considering a 15% performance drop was the minimum for many Thunderbolt enclosures a few years ago.
The clear outlier here is Horizon Zero Dawn where I saw a 35% drop in performance. That’s not as bad as a 50% drop like you can see on Thunderbolt 3 devices, but it’s still a big loss. These situations should be few and far between, but Horizon Zero Dawn is proof that, no matter how fast the connection, there’s still a loss when using an external GPU.
Still, I couldn’t be happier with the performance here. I’m comparing the DEG1 and Megamini G1 to a full desktop packing an RTX 4080 Super and a Ryzen 9 7950X. The DEG1 configuration is not only at a disadvantage from the external GPU — it’s also using a much weaker CPU in a much smaller chassis. The fact that the DEG1 was able to keep up when so much was working against it is remarkable.
The problem
The DEG1 is great, and that’s on the back of Oculink. But there’s a problem, not so much with the device itself but with the adoption of Oculink more broadly. There’s only one mainstream laptop I’m aware of that even has an Oculink connection — the Lenovo ThinkBook 15 Gen 4 — and although you can find the connection of products from Minisforum and brands like OneXPlayer, the standard hasn’t been picked up widely. Even the Asus ROG Ally X, which would be the perfect application for a device like the DEG1, doesn’t support Oculink.
So, even if you want to use the DEG1, you might not be able to. You’re restricted to a very small set of relatively new devices, which flies in the face of why you’d want to use an external GPU in the first place — that is, to add more power to something that no longer delivers the performance you need.
The other problem is Thunderbolt 5. Yes, it will be more expensive, but Thunderbolt 5 promises even higher bandwidth than Oculink and it has much broader adoption. We may not see a ton — or even any — Thunderbolt 5 external enclosures, but they’ll be a much easier sell than the DEG1 regardless of the price.
Still, there’s some mesmerizing about the DEG1 and what Minisforum has managed to do with it. It’s a simple product that executes its function flawlessly, and although it has niche applications, I’m happy the DEG1 exists for those applications.