It’s a PCIe-certified box with a DisplayPort port and an extra Thunderbolt 3 port for peripherals, but you’ll need to bring your own power supply as well. The Node Lite is currently priced around $224 on Amazon.
It doesn’t offer any extra ports for connecting peripherals, but the enclosure’s lower-priced sibling does. The original Node packs a 400W power supply and costs $230 on Amazon. We won’t get into the distinction here, but you can read about it on Intel’s Thunderbolt blog. Instead, they’re general purpose PCIe boxes. A key difference between most of Akitio’s products and the other graphics card enclosures we’ve seen is that, with the exception of the original Node, Akitio’s are not certified by Intel as external graphics (eGFX) peripherals. Be sure to check it out before you buy!Īkitio has gone all-in on external graphics card docks by offering not one but three models: the Node, Node Lite, and Node Pro. PowerColor maintains a list of supported graphics cards and host systems in the specifications section of its Gaming Station webpage. The newer box is rocking a 550 watt power supply, ethernet, and five USB 3.0 ports. PowerColor’s preferred enclosure is the simply named Gaming Station ( $300 on Newegg Remove non-product link). It’s still listed on PowerColor’s site, but it isn’t easy to find. PowerColor’s Thunderbolt 3-based Devil Box was a similarly fancy box that sold for $450 in the early days of external graphics docks.
