US$349 Mantiz Venus TB3 enclosure/dock  

Posted by: goalque

Posted by: FricoRico

Is anyone using this enclosure with Thunderbolt 2 equipped Macbooks? I wonder if anyone else is having any black startup screen issues?

For me the Macbook firmware is locking the startup when this enclosure is attached. Can't seem to get past that and it would be great to be able to reboot with the eGPU still attached.

Yep, I had similar issue with the Devilbox & Mid 2015 15" (M370X). The culprit was either complexity of multiple ports that the firmware couldn't initialize in EFI or the dGPU. I don't remember exactly.

This indeed seemed the case. eGPU can now be attached while rebooting after using the daemon to reset the NVRAM boot option, also got my hands on a Thunderbolt 3 Macbook Pro 15", it behaved normally without the daemon running.

Also concluded that the harddrive does not work under Windows on Thunderbolt 2 systems because of the complexity of multiple ports. Because that also works in Windows on the Thunderbolt 3 Macbook Pro.

New Venus Italian video review

I have had the Venus since the first group buy and it has worked fine up until around august last year where it started to randomly disconnect the gpu and hard drive I had in there. I have since tried swapping the graphics card with another one and also buying a new cable for it but nothing seems to work. It does it more often when I am gaming but also does it when I am doing nothing.

This is  what I have:
R9 280x and R9 380
Razer Blade Stealth late 2016 7500u

We pubblished Italian full review of Venus. You can check benchmarks no need to know Italian
https://www.egpu.it/recensione-mantiz-venus-thunderbolt-egpu-box/

Does anyone experience that there might be a problem with the power supply or the TB connector? my VENUS has an issue where when moved around it completely crashes (power off -on) don't know if its the issue with the PSU or the TB connector. 

right know my setup is unusable since with the egpu my Mac just instantly freezes. 

PLUS: moving the power cable makes some electric noises inside my box, like a surging sound - faulty capacitor?

Is there any data on the impact of running a SSD inside the Venus? I have a Vega 56 set up with High Sierra now and I'm considering adding a SSD for game storage. Will it cause a drop in FPS?

Italian guide to upgrade Venus PSU:

For those of you that are now starting to have connections...

Check your TB3 cable.

I have had two of the included cheapo .5m cables go bad now. (Razer and Mantiz)

Replaced with an Apple .8m TB3 cable and fixed the issue both times.

Just wanted to say thanks to the great support at Mantiz in terms of shipment and dealing with customs, I got mine today. Because I was following this (and other) threads, I was quite surprised about the Venus now featuring a larger fan (not the 80mm fan I was reading here a lot about).
So here is a picture of the larger fan.

Received mine today as well and noticed the different fan (was going to swap the 80mm for something else). It's almost identical to the ID Cooling 120mm 15mm thick fans I have.