Razer recently shared with the gaming community the details of their much-talked-about Razer Core. The Razer Core is the world's first plug-and-play external graphics card enclosure and is accessible via a Thunderbolt 3 or USB Type-C port and gives additional muscle to flex for graphics-intensive gaming.
Min-Liang Tan, the company's co-founder and CEO, stated in a press release, "Razer continues to innovate in the laptops category where big systems brands either cannot or will not. This time, in collaboration with industry leaders, we've created the world's first external graphics card solution of its kind, bringing the GPU power of a desktop PC to the latest Razer laptops, such as the Razer Blade Stealth Ultrabook, through a single Thunderbolt™ 3 connection with plug-and-play convenience."
Tan added, "All consumers, non-gamers and gamers alike, now can easily migrate from their Razer laptop for on-the-go performance to driving a full desktop experience using Razer Core, including enhanced graphics and simple connectivity to peripherals."
The Razer Core can easily accommodate several AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards that measure no more than 12.2 inches x 5.98 inches x 1.73 inches (310 mm x 152 mm x 44 mm). This means those cards that are single double-wide, full-length and PCIE x16. Also, the GPU enclosure can provide up to 375W of power.
The Thunderbolt 3 connection provides fast delivery of data between the enclosure and the Razer Blade Stealth ultrabook of up to 40Gbps. This is equally important when editing 4K videos or playing one of the latest games. Plus, the connection also charges up the Razer Stealth.
The Razer Core also provides four additional USB 3.0 and a Gigabit Ethernet ports.
The supported AMD Radeon GPUs include the R9 Fury, R9 Nano, R9 300 Series, R9 290X, R9 290, and R9 280. These AMD cards are fully supported by the Blade Stealth via its AMD XConnect system. The supported NVIDIA GeForce graphic cards, meanwhile, include the GTX Titan X, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980, GTX 970, GTX 960, GTX 950, GTX 750 Ti, and GTX 750.
Razer is ready to take pre-orders of the Core, which costs $499.99. The company is also offering a $100 discount for those who also purchase the Razer Blade Stealth (starts at $999.99) or the Razer Blade (starts at $1,999.99). Shipping will start in April.
The graphics card to be mounted on the Razer Core need to be purchased separately. A short video of the Razer Core during the CES 2016, courtesty of Tom's Hardware, has been uploaded.
