ALERT: half H2D performance issue on TI83 TB3 enclosures (Node, Venus, Devil Box, XG Station 2)  

10-Nov-2017: Powercolor Devil Box has a H2D firmware fix available here.

25-Aug-2017: The Aorus Gaming Box has a H2D firmware fix available here.

24-April-2017: Asus ROG XG Station 2 has a H2D firmware fix available here.

19-April-2017: Mantiz Venus will be shipped with H2D fixed firmware fix here, updated here.

6-April-2017: AKiTiO Node has released a firmware fix for this issue available here.

As of 30-March-2017, all the TI83-based TB3 enclosures in the buyer's guide, listed below, have been tested and found to be delivering half the critical host-to-device (H2D) bandwidth of their 22Gbps Intel's TB3 specification , 1100MiB/s or 9.22Gbps.

• AKiTiO Node
• Mantiz Venus
• Power Color Devil Box (new releases are TI83, older ones are TI82)
• Asus ROG XG Station 2

 This brings their real-world performance down to less than TB2 levels (1100MiB/s here for TB3 vs 1300MiB/s for TB2). It has a direct impact on bandwidth-dependent gaming FPS when using an external LCD attached to your eGPU.  Performance analysis is in the appendix.

What sort of gaming FPS improvement could be had if this was half-H2D bandwidth issue was fixed?

Consider a H2D of 1100MiB/s is 9.22GBps, which is close to x4 1.1 8Gbps.  Below is a summary of the games seeing significant FPS increase with a x4 1.1 -> x8 1.1 bandwidth increase (approx. equivalent to the H2D issue being fixed). As found at techpowerup's GTX1080 PCIe Scaling test @ FHD:

* Hitman: +46% (63.7->93.1)  here

* Far Cry Primal: 43% (51.4->73.9) here

* Just Cause 3: +42% (73.7->104.7)  here

* Total War Warhammer : +39% (43.2->58.6)  here

* Assassin's Creed Syndicate: +29%  (55.1->70.9) here

* BF1: +26% (97.8->123.4) here

How to solve this half-H2D bandwidth performance problem?

1. Purchase a TI82-based enclosure

 Do note that while the TI82-based AKITiO Thunder3 gets a better H2D of 1700MiB/s here and even 2200MiB/s here it's still less than the TI82-based Razer Core that so far hasn't given us a H2D benchmark less than 2200MiB/s.

2. Wait for the enclosure vendors to fix the problem with new firmware

 The affected TI83-based TB enclosures have a better feature set than the TI82-based enclosures so may be worth the wait to get this performance issue fixed. At eGPU.io we've notified the following eGPU.io reps of this problem:

• AKiTiO eGPU.io rep @DanKnight
• Mantiz eGPU.io rep @Mymantiz_John

As Intel FW is likely the culprit, the vendors should aim for at least for 22Gbps H2D performance specced by Intel for TB3.

FYI: Intel have FW throttled TB3 down to 22Gbps. It is 32Gbps capable.

While at it, I've asked the vendor reps to ask Intel to unleash TB3 from 22Gbps to it's full  32Gbps PCIe traffic capacity. The underlying Intel system architecture can support it as discussed here. It would then help counter the large outting of TB3 eGPU underperformance based on, quite likely, this half-H2D performance issue tainting the results in the following  video:

 Appendix: benchmark results identifying the problem

The tested comparison systems and enclosures being:

1. A Dell Precision M7510 - TI82 Razer Core vs TI83 AKiTiO Node - H2D of 2124MiB/s versus 1126MiB/s

2. ASUS UX501VW, TI82 AKITiO Thunder3 vs TI83 AKiTiO Node: H2D 2081MiB/s vs 1144 MiB/s

3. 2016 13" Macbook from @Goalque email - TI82 Devil Box vs TI83 AKiTiO Node - H2D 1625MiB/s vs 1108MiB/s

@Goalque verifying these results using Matlab which confirms CUDA-Z is working properly:

The 2016 13" MBP +  Powercolor Devil Box enclosure gets H2D 1625MiB/s, compared to the Node's 1108MiB/s. Not quite the top end 2200MiB/s H2D we've seen which suggests Apple may have throttled the TB3 notebook firmware OR the Devil Box is also not delivering max performance. To confirm the latter would require PCIe TB3 SSD comparative benchmarking to see if it can hit 2200MiB/s.

 4. MSI GS63VR. Another TI83-based AKiTiO Node half-H2D result here.

5. TI83-based  Mantiz Venus is half-H2D affected here .

6. TI83-based  Asus ROG XG Station 2 is half-H2D affected here.

7. TI83-based AKiTiO Node is half-H2D affected with an AMD RX470 here as tested with OpenCL benchmarking.