external thunderbolt video card enclosure - coming in 2012

[wormbog]

Story at ExtremeTech here:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/92160-external-thunderbolt-graphics-card-for-macs-will-not-blow-you-away

It's meant for Macs, but something like this would be PERFECT for easily chaining 6 cards to a cheap PC. But we'll have to wait for the product to hit the shelves, and for Thunderbolt to arrive for the PC architecture.

[strictlyfocused]

Ill start carrying GPU's into work for free electricity assuming bitcoin is still alive when these are out and PC compatible 

[haploid23]

interesting concept. it would increase mobility, but still will require all necessary cables and it might limit the cooling, especially for non-reference designs that exhaust heat in all directions. this type of casing will trap a lot of that heat in

[Dargo]

I'm not feeling the excitement here. Besides the difficulties already noted: 1) how are you going to chain 6 of these to a cheap PC when it requires a special "Thunderbolt" port? 2) How would the result end up being a cost effective mining rig when you have to buy 6 of these enclosures @ $300 each? I guess the mobility would be cool if you could get it to work, but again since it requires a special port, how mobile will it really be? It's no good that you can cart it around if you don't have anything to plug it into. It would be nice to be able to cart it to work, but even with free electric, it would take a long time to pay off that $300. Unless I'm missing something, this seems like an obvious no-go for mining.

[m0w3r]

Hmm...Only one double height card per enclosure...call them up and ask for much more external power and space for, I dunno, 5 double height cards.  They could charge a lot$ for that I'd suspect.

[bmgjet]

Dont see it being any use to mining unless some one can build a mini linux dongle that plugs into it to drive the cards.
Other wise the only real use of it is leaving it at home plugged into the screen when you take your laptop out. Then when you want to play games come home and plug it back in.

[haploid23]

i guess i missed the price at first. at $300 a pop, that's not practical for mining at all

[stellan0r]

You could hook it up to your 2012 MacBook Air, sounds pretty mobile to me