I have an egpu for my mini but I’ve signed up for this as it has more of a full dock built in. Will then sell my current one when it arrives.
Thought it may help someone else in here who likes to game / do demanding stuff!
Pretty cool. The M.2 SSD addition is also neat.
Doesn’t strike me as very trustworthy. Kickstarter is a great way to lose your money.
Actually this guy has the Norwegian government as a financial backer if that helps. He applied for small business funding for this, and got about 75.000 USD after they went over his business plan.
There’s no guarantee, but he’s not just some schmo with Photoshop and an aliexpress account.
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Guess that’s the risk you take. I’d say I’ve had decent success with approximately 80% of the stuff I’ve bought. They are at CES just now. Is also Of a high enough value it’s covered by credit card protection in UK.
A working final product would help a lot more (not just a controlled demo on CES). Even big companies struggled to get eGPU working on Mac. I generally don’t trust Kickstarter campaigns on complex and expensive devices.
You mean third party reviews? That’s what I want to see before I would consider ordering as well.
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I tend to avoid Tech kickstarters for the reasons mentioned above as well as one more big one: delays are death to tech. Kickstarters are (typically) rife with delays (worse for tech KS). However, with Tech, there’s a significant risk that, during those delays, an established company will release a similar (if not superior) product which might even be available for immediate release.
In other words, for creative endeavors, KS can be great since you get something unique’ish that no one else is going to (bother to) knock off. However, with Tech, if it’s anything useful, there may be established companies with projects well underway that you simply don’t know about.
Finally, once the big products come out, if the Tech KS is running late, it’s going to have a very hard time competing (and getting a bank loan, if necessary, to complete production and shipping). So late can be EOL for Tech projects, whereas creative ones typically keep on trucking.
So I largely avoid Tech KS these days, unless it’s something really unique and mostly non-electronic (e.g., robot arm, exercise kit, etc.).
Good luck.
The other thing with tech is… Support. If it’s one-and-done, there’s no support or upgrades. If the KS produces a company, then there’s a place to order the product once it’s already out and been reviewed.
So the alternative to KS for Tech is to purchase after release (and reviews). The trade-off is that you might save a little money with the KS. So the question becomes… Is that (possible but not guaranteed) savings worth the risk of a total loss and the ensuing buyer’s remorse?
And I won’t even mention the KS drama from late Tech (or other) projects. Lots of Updates, lots of cringeworthy comments, lots of different opinions, and lots of waiting in suspense to figure out whether the optimists or the cynics are correct. If you enjoy all that KS drama, the KS has added value: free entertainment.
If not, I suggest taking wait-and-see approach (especially on Tech KS) to buy later if it pans out.
I’m wondering how they get scores for a Macbook Pro using an nVidia RTX 2080 TI, because as far as I know that’s not a supported card. Can you download drivers from nVidia and use them in the latest versions of macOS?
Unsure, it’s Radeon I use just now. I do remember reading that Nvidia support has improved on a forum so maybe the new drivers work more effectively or there is a workaround?
Domain registered only 7 months ago, no track record to the product, no reviews, still a month from Kickstarter closing.
I don’t see any reason to rush to buy this, or any Kickstarter hardware, for that matter.
So I have been following this quite closely on Kickstarter and subsequently egpu.io following some of you (rightly) putting a bit of the fear into me.
I would normally just run the Kickstarter risk but the guys over in egpu do know what they are talking about and one has been to the stand at CES and was not overly complimentary of what he saw.
I’ve taken the chance to withdraw my pledge on the back of it. I didn’t want anyone who had followed my original post to not get all the information i.e. the chance to change their minds so wanted to follow it up.
This is the particular thread I’ve paid attention to https://egpu.io/forums/thunderbolt-enclosures/blackbeast-pro-thunderbolt-egpu/paged/5/