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Thanks to Adobe’s work on adding eGPU support to its Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere products, you can get a lot of improvement in overall rendering and output in all those applications, particularly if you’re on a Mac that only has an integrated GPU. The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT is a beast, however, and delivers plenty of horsepower for improving activities like photo and video editing, as well as giving you additional display output options and just generally providing additional resources for the system to take advantage of.

Most of my testing focused on using the Razer Core X Chroma with a Mac, and for that use you’ll need to stick with AMD’s GPUs, since Apple doesn’t natively support Nvidia graphics cards in macOS. It’s quiet in operation, and only really makes any audible noise when the GPU held within is actually working for compatible software. It’s also relatively short and long, making it a great option to tuck away under a desk, or potentially even held in an under-desk mount (with enough clearance for the fan exhaust to work properly). This isn’t the smallest enclosure out there, but that’s in part because it supports three-slot cards, which is over and above a lot of the competition.

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Razer provided me with a Core X Chrome, an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for the purposes of testing across both Mac and PC systems. The Chroma version also comes with tunable LED lighting for additional user customization options. On the back of the eGPU you’ll find four extra high-speed USB ports, as well as a Gigabit Ethernet port for networking. The integrated power supply provides 700w of power, which enables 100w output for charging any connected laptop. The Razer Core X Chroma is Razer’s top of the line GPU enclosure, and it supports full-sized PCIe graphics cards up to three slots wide, up to a maximum of 500 watts.

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But the good news is that you can continually upgrade and replace these graphics cards to give your Mac even more of a boost as graphics tech improves. Keep in mind that for each of these, the pricing is for the enclosure alone - you’ll have to add your own eGPU to make it work. Here are a couple of Thunderbolt 3 eGPU enclosure options out there for those considering this upgrade path, and the relative merits of each.

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But for anybody looking to extend the life of their existing Mac for a few more years to wait and see how the Apple Silicon transition shakes out, updates from Apple and key software partners make an eGPU a great choice.

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But while Apple has directly sold a few eGPUs, and natively supports AMD graphics cards without any special driver gymnastics required, it’s still mostly a niche category.

These have very high throughput, making it possible for a GPU in an internal enclosure to offer almost as much graphics processing capability as one connected internally. Existing Macs with Intel chips will still be useful long after the transition is complete, however, and software porting means they might even support more of your existing favorite applications for the foreseeable future, which is why adding an external GPU (eGPU) likely makes more sense now than ever.Īpple added support for eGPUs a few years ago, made possible by the addition of Thunderbolt 3 ports on Macs. And while new Intel-powered Macs will be released and sold leading up to that time, it does mean that the writing is on the wall for Intel-based Apple hardware. That process is meant to begin with hardware to be announced later this year, and last two years according to Apple’s stated expectations. Apple recently announced they would be transitioning their Mac line from Intel processors to their own, ARM-based Apple Silicon.

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