Benchmarks: AKiTiO Node Thunderbolt 3 eGPU for Apple’s new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

“AKiTiO has given us an early ‘test drive’ of their Thunderbolt 3 eGPU called the ‘Node eGFX Box,'” rob-ART morgan reports for Bare Feats. “We benchmarked it with five different CUDA capable NVIDIA GPUs to see what it could bring to the party.”

“Test Mule: ‘late 2016’ Retina MacBook Pro 15-inch, 2.9GHz Core i7-6920HQ, 16G of 2133MHz LPDDR3 memory, AMD Radeon Pro 460 (4G) GPU, 1TB flash storage,” morgan reports. “The AKiTiO Node eGFX Box’s Thunderbolt 3 port was connected to the Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port of the MacBook Pro. The DisplayPort of each NVIDIA GPU was connected to the Dell 5K 27″ display’s DisplayPort. When testing the Pro 460 GPU, the MacBook Pro was connected to the LG UltraFine 5K display using a Thunderbolt 3/USB-C cable.”

“The AKiTiO Node eGFX Box is the first Thunderbolt 3 GPU expander we have tested that is macOS friendly, runs at full Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth, has a built-in power supply, and ships with a 2 meter Thunderbolt 3/USB-C cable. And with the array of compatible NVIDIA GPUs to choose from, you can be confident that it will not only support your CUDA capable apps, but will accelerate OpenGL and OpenCL capable apps beyond what the MacBook Pro’s discrete AMD GPU is able to do,” morgan reports. “Note that the TITAN GPU with its 12G of VRAM did best in the DaVinci Resolve test while the GTX 780 shined in the Tomb Raider test. In all other tests, the GTX 980 Ti excelled making it the best overall choice for your eGPU.”

Read more and see the benchmark results in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, for pros who need it, high performance for the MacBook Pro is available, thanks to the MacBook Pro’s Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports.