Aorus rtx 2070 gaming box review in Spanish (full analysis)

Today we have something very special for everyone, it is the AORUS RTX 2070 Gaming Box, an external eGPU or GPU that is used to connect it to our laptop with Thunderbolt 3 to create a maximum of games at the level of desktop PCs. Best of all, this little ITX box contains an entire custom Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 inside. The Thunderbolt connection also supplies us with 100 W of charge for our laptop.

We really want to see what results and performance this little wonder can offer us on our laptop, so stay with us for all the details.

As always, we must thank AORUS for the transfer of this impressive product and their trust in us to get this review.

AORUS RTX 2070 Gaming Box technical characteristics

Unboxing and presentation

A few years ago, having an external graphics card was a dream, and now renowned manufacturers such as Gigabyte in its AORUS gaming division and others, give us the possibility of giving that extra power of graphic processing to our laptop. The eGPUs are gaining more followers in the gaming equipment market, the reason? Well, we don't need a 2, 000 euro laptop to play. We have enough with a Thunderbolt 3 connector and this gaming box with an entire RTX 2070 to turn our ultra-thin laptop into a gaming station.

After this introduction to open your mouth, this AORUS RTX 2070 Gaming Box is presented to us in a large hard cardboard box which is provided on the outside with another thin cardboard packaging that shows us all the information about what we have in our hands. On the main face is a large photo of the eGPU with the lighting turned on and featuring the RTX emblem.

In the back we have an area full of images and a description of what we are going to find inside and the possibilities that we will have with its different data ports. Take it easy, we'll see all this later. Now what we are going to do is remove the wrapper and open the main box, which is completely black.

And this is what we find, a backpack / suitcase / bag, a handle to hang it on and the connection cables that will of course be the 50 cm long Thunderbolt 3 and the 230 V power cable for the power supply. Where is the eGPU then? Well man, AORUS has taken advantage of the extra protection of the backpack to store it inside. By the way, we also have the product installation guide and a CD-ROM for the installation of the drivers, although it will be better to get them updated directly from the Nvidia page.

The suitcase is undoubtedly a marvel, built in textile and synthetic elements that perfectly fit the dimensions of the product and has great padding throughout. We also have multiple pockets to store cables and a portable type handle to hang it on our shoulders. Great work and finishes, our congratulations to AORUS.

AORUS RTX 2070 Gaming Box exterior design

We already enter the matter that interests us most, which is to talk about the main product, this small, but bulky eGPU AORUS RTX 2070 Gaming Box.

The external appearance shows that it is a product of small dimensions, no bigger than an ITX box and that is greatly appreciated from the point of view of portability. It is true that we will not have compatibility to introduce "normal" graphics cards, but this design is exactly what a laptop user needs.

The measurements we have are 212 mm long, 162 mm high and only 96 mm wide. Any custom RTX 2070 takes up more space than this. The construction of the box is completely made of high-quality steel, which makes the complete set weigh 2.3 Kg, which is no small feat.

The front area is completely smooth and flat with an AORUS logo on the top with chrome finishes, which means we have no lighting on it. We think that in this area the USB connectors at the back would have been very useful for better accessibility, or at least one of them.

In the left side area is the entire ventilation and air access area for the graphics card heatsink, with that huge 130mm fan that directly lowers the custom GPU heatsink. The grille that separates the elements from the exterior is made of steel and coarse grain, which will not be a great insulation against dust, although it will obviously allow us to see the interior and the RGB Fusion lighting that is in this part.

In the right side area we also have the same ventilation grid configuration, for this area we will give fresh air to the power supply thanks to two small fans located in the front area, both to put air inwards.

The rear area is surely the one with the most crumb if we talk about connectivity. In it you will find everything you need to give power and functionality to our AORUS RTX 2070 Gaming Box. In this way we have the following connections:

• 3 DisplayPort 1.4a that supports 8K resolutions at 60 Hz 1 HDMI 2.0b that supports 4K resolutions at 60 Hz USB Type-C VirtualLink that also acts as normal and ordinary USB and with DisplayPort 1 USB 3.1 Gen1 support with fast charge mode (red) 1 normal USB 3.1 Gen1 (blue) Three-pin 230V power connector AND the USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port with Thunderbolt 3 at 40 Gb / s as the data link for our laptop.

This Thunderbolt 3 port also gives us the charging capacity for the laptop with 100 W of power, something highly demanded in this type of product. We would have liked to have a second Thunderbolt with another 100W, but it was not possible.

Nor do we leave behind one more fan that is responsible for putting air into the PSU.

We finish with the bottom area of ​​the box. In it we only have four small rubber feet as support and two rails that facilitate the installation and removal of the outer plate and the entire PCB and graphics card area.

Connection to laptop

The installation of this eGPU in our laptop has no major complications. Of course we will have to have installed and updated the Intel driver for Thunderbolt 3. Do not worry if you see that it says Thunderbolt 1, if we know that the laptop supports version 3 we will have the bandwidth of 40 Gb / s available and the charging mode of 100 W.

Well, we will need to connect the power cable to the PSU, but the lighting will not work until we have Thunderbolt connector to the equipment. The controller will install the necessary drivers and it does not have many more secrets, as the manufacturer indicates that it is a Plug and Play system.

Of course we recommend installing the Nvidia RTX drivers directly from the website, which will be completely updated to the latest version.

We take advantage of the images to inform that inside we have an RGB lighting strip with Gigabyte RGB Fusion technology, so we will have to install this program if we want to manage animations and color of this band. The design we see is practically identical to the eGPU that we analyzed in its day with the GTX 1070.

Hardware and technical characteristics

We take advantage of the section to open this AORUS RTX 2070 Gaming Box and take a closer look at its infernal zone and describe the characteristics of the installed hardware.

Well, inside this box we find an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 and all the features that this GPU is capable of providing us. It is one of the most powerful eGPUs that we find on the market, there is no doubt about this. It is already well known that the TU106 chip has 2304 CUDA Cores, along with 288 Tensor and 36 RT that will be dedicated to real-time DLSS rendering and ray tracing for next-generation games. In this case, the maximum frequency at which this GPU works is 1620 MHz, a little lower than the desktop versions, although it is also true that the cooling and the data bus is a little more limiting.

Likewise, we have a GDDR6 memory of 8 GB to 14 Gbps under a bus width of 256 bits and bandwidth of 448 GB / s. It will be interesting to see the benefits that FPS will offer us in games, since obviously we do not have the 16 LANES of a motherboard, it is something acceptable and that we must know.

Gigabyte has done a great job in the heatsink area of ​​this eGPU. We have a large 130mm fan that facilitates air flow to the heatsink area. This in turn is built in aluminum with a copper base formed by four heatpipes that distribute the heat equally throughout the area.

In addition, thermal pads have been installed in the areas of the VRM and the heatsink memory modules also the heat generated. And in turn these heatpipes have two layers of material and in between these, there is a network of micro liquid channels that facilitate the transport of heat.

In the back area we will have the power supply, which in this case is also placed inside the eGPU. Its power is 450 W, of which 100 W go directly to the Thunderbolt to provide charging to our laptop. According to AORUS the efficiency is 90%, so we are facing an equivalence to the 80 Plus Gold certification. From it comes an 8-pin PCIe connector to power the GPU.

We can also appreciate the PCI-Express slot that provides the connection to the card, and a small PCB that manages Thunderbolt connections and the available USBs. We do not have details of the chip it mounts for this purpose.

Test bench and tests

TESTING BENCH
Laptop:	Lenovo Yoga 730
External graphics card	Aorus RTX 2060 Gaming BOX

To check the stability of the graphics card we will use a Lenovo Yoga 730 laptop with a low-consumption processor: Intel i5-8250U at 3.4 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB SSD NVMe and a 13.3-inch screen. We already know that we will have a significant bottleneck, but we did not have a more powerful team in our test bench.

All the tests we have carried out with the Aorus RTX 2060 Gaming BOX in Full HD resolution: 1920 x 1080. Below we leave you the synthetic tests:

• 3DMARK Fire Strike3DMARK Fire Strike Ultra3DMark Time Spy

What are we looking for in the tests?

First, the best possible image quality. The most important value for us is the average FPS (Frames per second), the higher the number of FPS the more fluid the game will go. To differentiate the quality a bit, we leave you a table to assess the quality in FPS, but we will also have the minimum Fps in the tests that were thus possible:

FRAMES BY SECONDS
Frames for Seconds. (FPS)	Gameplay
Less than 30 FPS	Limited
30 ~ 40 FPS	Playable
40 ~ 60 FPS	Good
Greater than 60 FPS	Fairly Good or Excellent

Game Testing

We have used the same games as our regular desktop and laptop test bench. Hopefully it will help you to compare with other analyzes and draw your own conclusions.

Final words and conclusion about Aorus RTX 2070 GAMING BOX

Since the first external graphics cards compatible with Thunderbolt 3 technology were launched, we found them very interesting. We see it ideal for those users who want to use their laptop for trips, but want to enjoy sporadic games at home. Without having the need to buy a desktop computer.

In our case we have used our beloved Lenovo Yoga 730 that equips an 8th generation low-consumption Intel processor, 8 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD. The performance has been fantastic considering that we are not in front of a high-end processor and we are limited by the RAM of our laptop.

We recommend reading the best external graphics cards (EGPU)

In addition to the power, we really liked the temperatures obtained. At rest it never goes above 22 ºC and at maximum power with 21 ºC of room temperature we have an average of 59 ºC.

In short, the performance of the Aorus RTX 2070 Gaming BOX is one of the great options that we can acquire right now. It is a compact box, we can take advantage of its USB connections (HUB style) and get a lot of graphics power from our ultrabook or 2-in-1 laptop. Currently there is no availability in Spain, but we can find it on Amazon for 760 euros.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ COMPACT AND WITH VERY GOOD TEMPERATURES	- HIGH PRICE. ALTHOUGH IT IS IDEAL FOR PORTABLE EQUIPMENT.
+ RAY TRACING
+ GREAT PERFORMANCE
+ VERY GOOD TEMPERATURES

The professional review team awards you the gold medal and recommended product.

Gigabyte AORUS RTX 2070 Gaming Box

• Built-in Geforce RTX 2070 enables real-time ray tracing and AIT Thunderbolt 3 plug and play Custom 130mm large fan Easy to carry with portable size Supports fast charge (QC 3.0) and power delivery (PD 3.0)

Buy on Amazon

AORUS RTX 2070 Gaming Box

COMPONENT QUALITY - 95%

DISSIPATION - 95%

GAMING EXPERIENCE - 90%

SOUND - 80%

PRICE - 85%

89%