Water-cooled RTX 5090 with Thunderbolt 5: Gigabyte introduces Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box eGPU
Computex 20252025 is apparently the year in which Thunderbolt 5 finally arrives on the mainstream market. After laptops like the Alienware Area-51 and several docking stations, Gigabyte has also announced an external graphics card that can be connected to a laptop via Thunderbolt 5. This connection has a bandwidth of 80Gbit/s, which means that the performance of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 is expected to be just 14% lower than on PCIe 5.0 x16. It's backward compatible with Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 devices, in which case performance will be lower.
Compared to the direct predecessor, which was based on the GeForce RTX 4090 and Thunderbolt 3, gaming performance on TB5 devices should be three times higher under perfect conditions. That said, Gigabyte probably used DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation to achieve this kind of performance boost. The graphics card inside the Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box is water-cooled in order to maximize performance, but this also means that it won’t be easy to replace the GPU after purchase.
Gigabyte’s new eGPU enclosure comes with a second Thunderbolt 5 port, which can be used to hook up a monitor, docking station, fast Thunderbolt SSD or other accessories. Connected laptops can be charged via USB-C Power Delivery 3.0. Furthermore, the RTX 5090 eGPU has two USB-A ports, another USB-C port, Ethernet and a total of four ports for monitors, including three DisplayPort 2.1b and one HDMI 2.1b.
Price and availability
Gigabyte has yet to confirm any pricing details and a release date of the Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box.
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