As announced shortly before this year's CES, AVerMedia today announced the Live Gamer Bolt capture card. This is essentially an external version of the built-in Live Gamer 4K capture card, with the same features in a portable form factor.

This sounds tempting, until you scroll through the specs and see that it requires a Thunderbolt 3 port. Not all modern PCs have them; you can buy a Thunderbolt 3 add-in card, but the built-in Live Gamer 4K is cheaper if you want to occupy a PCIe slot. [The Live Gamer Bolt costs $449.99, plus the cost of a Thunderbolt 3 card if you need one. In contrast, the built-in Live Gamer 4K costs $229.99 at Best Buy, while Elgato's 4K60 Pro (one of the best capture cards for PC gaming) costs $329 at Amazon.

Cost and compatibility aside, Bolt is an interesting product: it is the only external capture card capable of recording 4K HDR at 60 fps and 1080p at 240 fps. It can also capture 1440p games at 144fps.

AVerMedia also claims ultra-low latency pass-through with this external capture card.

"Bolt adheres to AVerMedia's globally acclaimed ultra-low latency, with preview latency of less than 50 ms. Intel's powerful and robust Thunderbolt 3 connection allows Bolt to deliver uncompressed video capture without compromise. uncompromised uncompressed video capture," said AVerMedia. [For laptops, a Core i7 7700HQ or higher processor, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU, and 8GB of RAM are required. For desktops, at least a Core i5 6000 series CPU, GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card, and 8GB of RAM; Windows 10 is also required.

We have not tested Bolt ourselves, but it is available now if you need 4K capture in a more portable format than PCIe cards.