I missed the caveats when I was purchasing the enclosure. Since my setup is not officially supported I was pretty bummed. Thankfully, Mantiz’s unofficial support is pretty solid for macOS. If you buy a MacBook now, it most likely will have a greater version so your eGPU enclosure will be DOA (officially). Per, Mantiz’s website they only officially support macOS 10.13.4. I don’t think there is a “perfect” eGPU yet – or at least I can see positives and negatives with each. eGPU.io rates the Mantiz fifth overall so if you are considering buying an eGPU enclosure I strongly encourage you to research other ones. Most of the negative reviews on Amazon reference a design flaw on the main board – but apparently they have been fixed and I did not have any of the issues described in the negative reviews. If you care, it also is not one of the recommended eGPU enclosure by Apple. This means it can’t run the Radeon Vega 64.

It does not currently draw enough power for high end graphics cards. The Mantiz MZ-02 does not come without its’ disadvantages.

5 USB ports, 1 SATA interface, and 1 Gigabit LAN Ethernet port.

Matches MacBook Pro (offers both Silver and Space Gray options).

It provides 87W of power to the MacBook Pro 15″.

This is especially important for folks in the 3D industry who rely on NVIDIA's CUDA system - something currently unsupported in any Mac available on the market today. Plug in an enclosure via a Thunderbolt 3 cable and voilà you've got desktop-class graphics performance for your slim MacBook. That led to the new MacBook Pro being equipped with the latest AMD GPUs, even if there were doubly-more-powerful NVIDIA chips available.īut there's another option, at least in theory: the external GPU. There are always tradeoffs to make, and Apple tends to err on the side of battery life and heat management over raw performance.

There's no denying that graphics performance in current Macs isn't the best. What you need to know about the Mac, Thunderbolt 3, and external GPUs The eGPU kit allows you to connect an HTC Vive VR headset to your Mac running macOS High Sierra for virtual reality game and application development. Apple wants developers to be onboard with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) development and has released a cost-effective external graphics processing unit (eGPU) to help with just that.

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