This new external GPU features GeForce RTX 5060 with Thunderbolt 5 and OCulink connectivity

A new prototype external GPU solution has been tested by ETA Prime, featuring NVIDIA's new mid-range GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card with Thunderbolt 5 and OCulink connectivity. Check it out:

The new external RTX 5060 graphics solution uses the desktop RTX 5060 and not the mobile variant, with 3840 CUDA cores (versus the 3328 CUDA cores in the RTX 5060 Laptop GPU) with a higher 150W TDP (compared to the mobile version with 115W through Dynamic Boost), joined by 8GB of GDDR7 memory.

This isn't the final version of the external RTX 5060 graphics solution, but we should expect Thunderbolt 5 connectivity in the final version compared to Thunderbolt 4 in the prototype that ETA Prime tested, which has Thunderbolt 4 (USB4) and OCulink connectivity.

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The prototype eGPU featured an external PSU which isn't the best solution, as the external PSU is almost as big as the external GPU solution itself. ASUS has its new ROG RTX 5090 Mobile on the market now, which does it way better with an integrated PSU. There's no talk of USB Type-C Power Delivery (PD) support, so there isn't a single cable that can serve both power and data needs (but again, this is a prototype, the final version could change things up).

The limitations of Thunderbolt 4 and USB4 mean that we don't have the best results, with ETA Prime testing the prototype eGPU solution on the ASUS ROG Ally X gaming handheld (which uses USB4), hitting 3157 points in 3DMark Steel Nomad, and between 13,358 and 13,629 points on 3DMark Time Spy (tested on the ASUS ROG Ally X and desktop gaming PC powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X processor).

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ETA Prime notes that the synthetic benchmarks always look better than real-world gaming results, where actual gaming results will differ from game to game, and whether the games support NVIDIA DLSS 4 upscaling support. Gamers report issues on eGPUs with problems like freezing and stuttering, so here's hoping the jump to Thunderbolt 5 helps there.

The RTX 5060 graphics card uses a PCIe 5.0 x8 interface that features 31.5GB/s of usable bandwidth, while Thunderbolt 5 supports PCIe tunneling at 64Gbps (8GB/sec) which is the same as OCulink-2 (PCIe 4.0 x4). This falls short of fully saturating the GPU interface, while Thunderbolt 5 supports DisplayPort 2.1 connectivity, and Power Delivery of up to 240W.

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As for the aesthetics, the prototype external RTX 5060 graphics solution that ETA Prime tested looks like Radeon RX 7600M XT-based external GPU solutions, so we're probably looking at an OEM model that third-party companies like AYANEO or other companies could use.