Gigabyte have finally released its RTX 5090 external GPU—but it’s calling it an ‘AI box’
I enjoyed the highs and lows of the gaming laptop life for more than ten years—until the recovery partition said ‘NO MORE’ and fell over in a heap. I love the portable form factor of a gaming laptop…I just don’t love the drawbacks of putting the power necessary for PC gaming into that slim and trim silhouette. A lightly singed lap or desk? No thanks. Enter Gigabyte with what it’s pitching as a solution: an ‘AI box.’
As you can probably guess from the name, the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box is a chonky bit of gaming hardware powered by a Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU (I’ll come back to the ‘AI’ bit). The pitch is that you plug your lighter weight laptop into this beefy boy via a Thunderbolt 5 cable, and reap the benefits of not having “near-desktop-level graphics performance” directly perched upon your lap.
Though, speaking of lightly toasted laps, the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box uses a Waterforce liquid cooling system, which incorporates a “large copper base plate, a 240 mm aluminum radiator, two 12 cm fans, and optimized water flow pump.” All of that keeps things cool and quiet—whether you’re gaming or thrashing at the latest AI model.
Gigabyte has cast a wide net with this box, hoping to ensnare both gamers, creatives, and AI-heads with its 32 GB of VRAM and “over 3000 AI [Tera Operations per Second].” But how superfluous is the ‘AI Box’ branding really?
Well, given Gigabyte has been making similar plug-in powerhouses for years now without veiling it in AI branding, I’m already tempted to say ‘more than a little.’ Then there’s the fact that our Dave reviewed the small but mighty Framework Desktop PC recently. He found that its 128 GB LPDDR5x-8000 RAM made it a supremely powerful AI workstation, so it’s hard not to feel Gigabyte’s AI Box and its 32 GB of VRAM pales in comparison.
But it’s not all about power—price is important too. For instance, the aforementioned 128 GB RAM model of the Framework is going for $2,000, but its soldered-in RTX 4060-equivalent GPU isn’t really what I’d recommend if you’re looking for a mini gaming PC. Gigabyte hasn’t yet announced the MSRP for the Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box, but it will likely be looking at something similarly north of two grand judging by its most recent predecessor. However, with the current state of hardware pricing due to tariffs, here’s hoping that MSRP doesn’t just disappear over the horizon.
Pricing and AI power aside, I don’t think this is another heavy-hitting black box I’ll be inviting into my hardware collection. Like, it’s neat that the Thunderbolt 5 connection also supports power delivery so this external GPU box can also supply your laptop with 100 W of charging power, but even without worrying about a mess of cables, the whole setup feels impractical to me.
Okay, so, in theory you could pick up a decent enough budget laptop and then blow the rest of your funds on this eGPU—if it was me, I’m not sure I’d want to play something so powerful on a budget screen. I can see the argument that eGPUs offer flexibility, but in this potential price arena I can’t help but question ‘who for?’
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