Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box Turbocharges Laptops With A Fast GPU And 3000 AI TOPS

In 2025, there are a great many reasons you might want to consider an external GPU for your laptop or handheld gaming system. It's not just about gaming anymore. Of course, the GeForce RTX 5090 is the fastest graphics card in the world, and connecting one to your PC will certainly allow it to chew through some graphics. Arguably, that would be a waste of the Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box's capabilites, though.

If you're familiar with the concept of an external GPU and you're aware of the GeForce RTX 5090's capabilities, you might be thinking "yeah, alright, it's an external 5090, I get it." It's more than that, though. The Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box definitely does include a desktop GeForce RTX 5090 that you power externally and connect to your PC via Thunderbolt 5. Naturally, it offers Thunderbolt 5 pass-through, too.


However, it also can serve as a general docking station. It includes a trio of USB ports: one 10 Gbps Type-C port on the front, and two 10-Gbps Type-A ports on the back, allowing you to connect extra peripherals at high speed. Furthermore, it includes an Ethernet jack—although Gigabyte mysteriously doesn't explain what speeds it supports.

Of course, there are also four display connections: three DisplayPort 2.1 jacks and an HDMI 2.1 port. Those connect directly to the GeForce RTX 5090 card, which is liquid cooled to ensure stable performance. Gigabyte says that it uses a solid copper base plate along with a 240-mm radiator to wick away heat from the 575W GPU. The air filters on both sides are removable, too, which makes for easy cleaning.


Connecting the card over Thunderbolt 5 imposes a latency penalty that will necessarily hurt gaming performance compared to a standard desktop. However, that won't matter for GPU-based compute, like AI processing. As long as your dataset (i.e. your generative model) fits into the 32GB of local memory on the card, processing should be just as fast as any desktop system, allowing you to crank out AI-generated text, images, or videos about as fast as possible without connecting to a full-on server.

Given that, the RTX 5090 Box could be one of the easiest ways for AI enthusiasts to upgrade to some serious tensor-thrashing horsepower. It won't come cheap, though. Gigabyte hasn't given pricing for the Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box and we weren't able to find it at retail, but given that the stand-alone version of this card—the RTX 5090 Waterforce—goes for over $3,000, we'd expect this box to start north of $4K.