2012 14" Lenovo Thinkpad T430s + Silverstone Sugo SG13WB + RX480 [email protected] (Mantiz Venus PCB via TB3 to TB adapter) + Win10 Pro x64 (1809) [Yukikaze] // Benchmarks + Custom Enclosure  

Background
I have a Mantiz Venus. Well, I have a PCB from one. Mantiz sent me a PCB as part of the initial production runs for evaluation, and I've been using it in various capacities since. My latest use for it, since I sold both of my AKiTiO Thunder2 units, was as the eGPU adapter for my T430s. Lacking the actual enclosure, I had to improvise a stand for it. It wasn't pretty, and consisted from an empty box of thermal shrink tubing as a base and some screws and mounting bits from an old PE4C v2.1, but it worked. The main problem was that it was a dust magnet. I powered the setup with a Corsair RM550x modular power supply (which a normal-sized ATX unit), which posed a challenge in finding a case that would be small enough to look like an eGPU enclosure, while still accepting a regular ATX power supply.

Over Thanksgiving weekend I stumbled upon the Silverstone Sugo SG13 on sale at Amazon: A tiny mITX case that can accept a regular ATX PSU and any "standard" sized video card (that is, a card up to 10.5 inches [266mm] in length, and two slots in width). It is designed to be used for a system which cools the CPU with an AIO 120mm (or 140mm, but with limitations) closed-loop watercooling setup, so it has very little CPU cooling space.

How tiny is the SG13? Well, it has a volume of 11.5 liters, which makes it smaller than the Razer Core X, Sonnet Breakaway, Omen Accelerator, AKiTiO Node and Node Pro, Powercolor Devil Box, and the Asus ROG XG Station 2. It is only ~10% larger than the Blackmagic eGPU unit, and is essentially the same volume as the Mantiz Venus casing (which is 11.56 liters, but arranged slightly differently).

Anyway, the SG13WB (white with black mesh) version was 47$, so I did some reading on the max video card size, power supply length and clearance, and pulled the trigger on the Amazon order.

To give myself a little more graphical power than the GTX750Ti this setup was equipped with, and to get myself and HDMI2.0 output which the first gen Maxwell card lacks, I also picked up a Sapphire RX480 4GB Nitro OC off ebay for 93$. There are quite a few ex-mining cards on the market right now, and the 4GB Nitros provide you with a lot of bang for the buck, while their build quality means that they likely survived mining workloads unscathed.

All this stuff arrived and was lying around waiting for me to get some free time to put it all together, which finally happened today after work.

System Specs
Chassis: Lenovo T430s (2355HKU)
BIOS Version: G7ETB2WW (2.72)
CPU: Core i7-3520M (dual-core, 2.9ghz)
Memory: 8GB (2x4GB) Hyundai DDR3 1600Mhz
Storage: myDigitalSSD BP4e 120gb mSATA SSD + Intel X-25M 160GB SATA SSD
Monitor: Sony XBR43X800D TV
 
eGPU Hardware
GPU: Sapphire RX480 Nitro 4GB
eGPU Enclosure: Mantiz Venus PCB  + Silverstone Sugo SG13WB mITX Case
Power Supply: Corsair RM550x (Fully Modular)
TB1-to-TB3 Adapter: Apple (MMEL2AM/A)
TB Cable: Apple 0.5m, White (MD862LL/A)
 
Hardware Pictures
The original, and not very elegant, setup looked like this (you can probably see why I wanted a case for it):

Time to start tearing things apart:

Open sesame:

Since the Mantiz Venus PCB doesn't match the mounting standoffs for the motherboard, I had to make sure I won't short something out by covering them with electric tape. This also provides cushioning for the PCB to sit on:

Removing the SDD/HDD caddy, I installed the RX480 and the RM550x. The Mantix Venus PCB is latched onto the PCIe fingers of the RX480 and supported from below by the wrapped motherboard standoffs. It all fits nicely:

You can see how tight this case is. Building an entire system in this space would be quite a challenge. For an eGPU, in theory, something like the R9 Fury X, or other watercooled cards should fit here, with the 120mm radiator mounted on the front of the SG13, where the CPU's radiator is supposed to sit in a full system build. In that case, however, you will probably need very short or very flexible PSU cables, as there is little room to deal with the more rigid or very long varieties. As you can imagine, a modular power supply is pretty much a must:

Installing the SSD/HDD caddy back is a very, very tight fit for the Corsair RM550x. Depending on the layout of the modular connectors on other PSUs, they might not fit at all. Simply removing the caddy is an option, but it also serves as a secondary structural element, and without it the case is a bit more flimsy. It is not the end of the world, but I am happy I managed to squeeze it in:

Ready for testing:

And everything powers up just fine. Neither the PSU fan or the two RX480 fans move an inch when idling at the desktop:

Unigine Valley sends the RX480 fans spinning, but the PSU doesn't bother with its own fan. The power consumption of the RX480 is something the RM550x can easily deal with on passive cooling:

And here it is closed up and ready to go:

 
Installation Steps
Plug and Play: DDU old drivers, reboot, install the latest AMD drivers and you're done.
 
Benchmarks
For some reason AIDA64 keeps crashing when I try to run the GPGPU benchmark, and CUDA-Z does not work on AMD cards, so I have no bandwidth measurements. Seeing, however, as this is a TB1 to TB3 setup using a Mantiz Venus base, these measurements are of little added value anyway.

Here is a direct comparison between the GTX1050Ti and the RX480 in multiple benchmarks, normalized to the GTX1050Ti result. For reference, on the desktop, the RX480 is about 50-60% more powerful than the GTX1050Ti.

 

Here are the raw numerical results for both GPUs:

 
Summary