Gigabyte's Aorus Thunderbolt 5 External GPU Box With RTX 5090 Is Now Available

Today, Gigabyte introduced its Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box, a Thunderbolt 5-powered eGPU solution for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 outfitted with 32GB of GDDR6X VRAM. As the name implies, it's being marketed as a practical accelerator for AI workloads to help power laptops or PCs that need extra GPU horsepower, though of course an RTX 5090 is also quite the beefy gaming and rendering GPU. While there are compromises to Thunderbolt 5 eGPUs versus a direct PCIe connection, the onboard graphics in this box should still offer class-leading graphics performance well above what's possible in a laptop version of the RTX 5090, which would be throttled by power and thermal limitations. The Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box is retailing for $2999 USD, which is surprisingly reasonable considering how many GeForce RTX 5090 cards are selling for well above their $1999 MSRP.

But even if RTX 5090s actually sold at MSRP or this eGPU solution were only a couple hundred bucks on top of MSRP, its still a high ticket graphics and AI accelerator. So, just how much better is it than the laptop RTX 5090 GPU? How does it compare to a full-fat RTX 5090 desktop GPU not throttled by Thunderbolt 5? Fortunately, we don't have to ask these questions, because simultaneously with the eGPU's release, the German branch of Notebookcheck.net released a review with benchmarks. In gaming performance, this little box sees an average 40% performance increase over the laptop version in 4K gaming, before DLSS or Multi-Frame Generation are enabled. However, its performance compared to a desktop GPU is more like a last-gen desktop RTX 4090 and well below a full fat desktop RTX 5090.


So, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, but it's still better than any mobile GPU solution you'll be seeing anytime soon. Hopefully, more of these high-end eGPU products will start opting for direct PCIe, the faster-than-Thunderbolt OCuLink standard, or maybe even the next-gen CopprLink standard. Sadly, Thunderbolt and USB are far more ubiquitous for these products than those standards are, and that does result in some performance trade-offs in high-end eGPUs.

Gigabyte Aorus Thunderbolt 5 eGPU Retail Listings

• Newegg
• Amazon (Inflated price via Amazon marketplace seller at time of publication, which should improve once available directly from Gigabyte)