After my quite disappointing attempt of using the Breakaway Puck I went down DIY road with the Razer Core X and an Powercolor XT5500. It was quite a bumpy ride because the Core’s internal PSU is just bad. That’s really disappointing as it’s not exactly a cheap unit. The problem is that the fans are not temperature regulated and so even if your MacBook isn’t running the fans still speed up as long as it’s connected to the Razer Core X – same as the extra fan on the side. I hate noise coming from my tech stuff so this was a no go.
As it was working pretty well apart from the noise I decided to go further into DIY land and ordered a Corsair SF600 PSU that fits the Core X perfectly as a drop in replacement. You just have to fix it with some double sided tape and you are good to go.
I disconnected the fan on the side because the XT5500 doesn’t need it and the Corsair PSU fans don’t run until you fire up a benchmark or a game which is pretty nice. Speaking of which, here are some Benchmarks:
OpenCL score of XT5500 in Razer Core X:
35045 points
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/1038061
Metal score of XT5500 in Razer Core X:
34121 points
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/1038090
The scores are as good as is to be expected for a XT5500 and more than 3x higher than the RX560.
All is finally good?
Well unfortunately I realised pretty soon that the setup that came so close to being good with the new PSU still sucks…
Apart from having to pay 120€ extra for a decent PSU the Razer Core X only works fine as long as you don’t use any USB accessories like mice or keyboard or connect an ethernet cable. As soon as you use the USB hub you get random ping spikes or disconnects, your mouse starts getting super laggy and some keyboard inputs get lost along the way as well. In short it’s unusable.
The only solution is to use an extra hub for your accessories which is exactly the thing I didn’t want to do as I had the dream of plugging in one USB-C cable and everything works. I don’t get how Razer can even sell the Core X like this as there are a lot of complaints in the egpu.io forum and on reddit about this. In the end you are better of getting the non-X version without the USB hub / ethernet because you can’t use it anyway… The PSU (Corsair SF600) fits perfectly there as well (I tried because in the meantime I also ordered a non-X) so I guess the Razer Core (non X) is a pretty good case with that modification.
Verdict
In the end I bought a cheaper eGPU case because non of the more premium ones seem to work with the internal hub without occasional problems. As I need an extra hub for USB / ethernet / power anyway one might as well just get a smaller one like the ZOTAC AMP BOX MINI which I finally did and it works really well.
That is until I bought a new MacBook Air a couple of weeks ago with the M1 chip which doesn’t support eGPUs anymore but has more GPU power on its own… but maybe somebody can avoid my journey with bad eGPU cases, unnecessary modding, etc.