Gigabyte Says Aorus RTX 5060 Ti AI Box eGPU With Thunderbolt 5 Nearly Matches Desktop GPU

by Aaron Leong — Friday, September 12, 2025, 01:42 PM EDT

GIGABYTE has unveiled the AORUS RTX 5060 Ti AI Box that, promises to bridge the performance gap between eGPUs and full desktop PCs with discrete graphics cards. As the name suggests, this box is powered by an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB of VRAM, connected via Thunderbolt 5, and most crucially, is claimed to be only 5% slower than an RTX 5060 Ti-equipped desktop PC.

A big portion of the AI Box’s performance parity has to do with the Thunderbolt 5 interface. Where current OCuLink and Thunderbolt 4 interfaces have more limited bandwidth, Thunderbolt 5's potential for up to 120 Gbps effectively eliminates this bottleneck. In the AI Box, the RTX 5060 Ti is capable of performing at near-desktop-level speeds, with Gigabyte reporting just a 5% performance deficit compared to a full-sized desktop counterpart.

Moreover, GIGABYTE has packed quite a bit of niceties into the compact (243 × 117 × 48 mm) chassis of the AI BOX. Of course, we have the aforementioned Blackwell GPU complete with 16GB of GDDR7 memory. Keeping the GPU humming along at peak performance, the AI Box employs GIGABYTE's proprietary Windforce cooling system. On other products, Windforce has been featured with a unique Hawk inspired fan blade design modeled around bird wings, which supposedly maximizes airflow and reduces noise. It's probably safe to assume that the same type of fans are used in the AI Box.

Whereas many eGPU boxes/docks are pretty stingy when it comes to connectivity, the AI Box serves up a decent number of ports, including three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports for connecting peripherals like an external drive or printer (or just for charging with PD 3.0 Quick Charge support), an Ethernet port, and a Thunderbolt 5 port with daisy chain support. The product listing also mentioned RGB lighting capability, although it doesn't specify how the lighting is implemented.

The AORUS RTX 5060 Ti AI Box follows in the footsteps of the flagship RTX 5090 AI Box announced at Computex 2025. GIGABYTE hasn't released information on availability and pricing yet, but it's reported that this latest AI box could be close to the $1000 mark.