Gadgetory

welcome to an unboxing and first look that is more exciting due to what it represents in the future than it is necessarily for its practicality today for gamers this is the magma express box 3 t-this is quite simply a thunderbolt external enclosure that has two PCIe 8 X and one PCIe 4x slots inside of it it has a 250 watt power supply and it is capable of installing pretty much anything that you would normally install in a PCI Express slot inside your computer so right now driver support is a bit of a challenge it comes with a carrying case so you can take it around with you on the road think of this guy's laptops that you can install up to three full size PCI Express expansion cards in essentially ok just mind-blown right ok so comes with a blower that you can install if you have something like a Quadro graphics card that you want to use to accelerate cuda applications although right now you can't use it as a display output yet and that's mostly supported on on Apple at the time or at this time here so it's a quick start guide I've actually already opened this and I've already tinkered with it a fair bit so that's why there's like PCI slot covers in here because I've already installed cards in it but right so what makes it more useful in the future than it is today because for general consumers you're going to find that hardware compatibility is a bit of a challenge with not just this one but with all of the Thunderbolt PCI Express expansion expansion bays that you can obtain so here it is it's crafted out it's very beautiful I mean it's very Apple esque the way that it's constructed it's got a nice matte aluminum finish over the whole thing with a simple magma logo on both sides it's got a perforated front to the enclosure that has a power indicator it's a button but generally speaking you won't even use it because it's automatically activated as soon as a fun durable connection is detected and the computer is booted up so you can just leave it plugged in and leave it on all the time and it'll automatically turn itself on and off with your computer should you desire that there's also a cooling fan behind here it's an 80 mil cooling fan so you can install power-hungry things like graphics cards to go along with that 250 watt power supply the bottom again is quite simple you've just got four rubber feet so that it doesn't go anywhere and once you load this thing up with expensive hardware you're going to want it to not really go anywhere so I've got three cards in here right now one of them is an Asus zonar dense it's a Zen sound card so this is for the split out for more analogue connectors I've also got a black magic capture card that's an HDMI capture card as an intensity Pro and last but not least I have some random LSI raid card that I decided to throw in here and see what happened I tried a number of graphics cards it looks like the challenge right now is that the graphics card manufacturers need to release drivers that will support running over thunderbolt so that thunderbolt connection is 10 gigabit per second and you can daisy-chain this device for multiple express boxes or storage devices or whatever else remember thunderbolt daisy chains up to six times and that gives you enough bandwidth these are all pcie 2.0 ports so it has there you go to a tech slots and a 4x slot with one of those ATX slots having an open back so you can install a 16 X card so I tried a bunch of different graphics cards geforce cards Radeon cards I even had a Quadro 6000 that I put in but unfortunately on the Windows platform I wasn't able to leverage that but out of the cards that are in here the Blackmagic intensity Pro worked flawlessly so if you wanted to say for example have a portable capture station so you had like a nice powerful Ivy Bridge laptop with a Thunderbolt port and you wanted to carry one of these guys around with you with it I mean it wouldn't consume much power in that configuration so you have a small UPS or something battery backup that you run it off of you could actually do multiple camera captures all at the same time do live to tape recording on set somewhere so that's fascinating you could install three of those cards capture up to three sources at the same time very cool stuff power is provided by two molex connectors so you can adapt those to PCI Express if you were running a Mac which apparently runs completely driverless you just throw the Quadro 6000 in there you plug in the power so use a PCIe adapter and you install it right there so you get two of those and a 250 watt power supply as I mentioned before the raid card didn't really get detected and the Zoners ence works it works but the asus control panel wouldn't install so what i've encountered is everything from stuff that doesn't get detected at all to stuff that detects and works perfectly like the Blackmagic I even captured video to stuff that works but doesn't quite work so we're almost there this is extremely exciting technology because what I am waiting for because I like notebooks I like portability but I hate how gutless notebook graphics are and how horrible generally speaking notebook on board sound is how limited the expansion options are now all of a sudden through the magic of Thunderbolt you could just sit down at your desk at home plug in your notebook one cable hot pluggable have a graphics card a beast sound card and like an awesome external rate like raid card that runs off to like some storage array or something like that and the whole thing could run off your notebook you disconnect it you go on the road and you're ready to go so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the magma express box 3 T I am so excited for the future of devices like this right now they're also quite expensive don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos