Most laptops cannot afford to upgrade their GPUs, and an ultrabook with integrated graphics will further limit gaming capabilities. This is where external graphics boxes come in. To that end, Gigabyte has added a liquid-cooled GeForce RTX 3080 Ti option to its Aorus gaming box lineup.

Gigabyte was the first company to utilize Nvidia's Ampere GPU stack in an external graphics enclosure and, to my knowledge, the only company to incorporate liquid cooling into the mix. This is accomplished with an all-in-one liquid cooling solution consisting of a 240mm aluminum radiator and 120mm fan, large copper plates, composite heat pipes, and heavy-duty FEP tubing

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The AIO liquid cooler inside the Aorus RTX 3080 Ti Gaming Box (via HotHardware) not only dissipates heat from the GPU, but also cools the graphics card's memory chips and MOSFETs (aka VRM).

An 80 Plus Gold certified 500W power supply is also included. The card draws power from two 8-pin PCIe connectors, but no actual setup is required. [The card adheres to Nvidia's reference blueprints, with a base clock of 1,365 MHz, a boost clock of 1,665 MHz, and 12 GB of GDDR6X memory (19 Gbps) connected to a 384-bit bus with a memory bandwidth of 912.4 GB/s.

In our tests, the 3080 Ti performed nearly as well as the GeForce RTX 3090 in games, usually with only a few frames per second difference between the two. However, this is when connected directly to a PC.

Gigabyte's external graphics enclosure must be connected to a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) port, so you will need one on your laptop or desktop. Therefore, a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) port is required on the laptop or desktop computer. Also, performance will be reduced due to lower bandwidth compared to installing a graphics card directly into the PC.

Nevertheless, an external graphics box is an effective way to upgrade your system's GPU capabilities. These include an Ethernet port, three USB 3.0 ports (Type-A), two HDMI outputs, and three DisplayPort outputs.

Gigabyte has not revealed a release date or price for the Aorus RTX 3080 Ti Gaming Box; GPUs fly off the shelves as soon as retailers have them in stock, so this is likely to be another GPU that is near impossible to find.