With most laptops you can’t actually upgrade the graphics without buying an entirely new
laptop.
While some laptops do allow you to upgrade the GPU this is much less common, and many
other laptops don’t even have discrete graphics at all, making them near useless for gaming.
This changes with an external GPU solution, such as Mantiz Venus enclosure which we’re
going to look at in this video, you can use it to easily connect a full desktop graphics
card to your laptop to improve your gaming experience.
The Mantiz Venus enclosure is available in either space grey or silver which is what
I’ve got here.
Basically what you’re buying is the enclosure itself along with these internals, which include
a gold rated 550w power supply, you’ll need to provide your own graphics card though.
Along with the enclosure you also get a power cable and 50cm Thunderbolt cable, so you’ll
have to keep the enclosure somewhat close to your laptop unless you buy a longer cable.
This is understandable as long Thunderbolt cables get pretty expensive.
The dimensions of the enclosure are 16.3cm in width, 33cm in depth, and 21.5cm in height,
so it’s not small, but this does give us a fair bit of room inside for larger cards.
It comes with a couple of adhesive rubber feet that you attach to the bottom, and once
applied these did a really good job at stopping it from moving around when pushed.
On the front of the enclosure there’s two USB 3.0 Type-A ports available.
The top and right hand panel are just solid metal, while the left hand panel where the
graphics card resides has these holes for airflow, and we’ll see how this affects
temperatures later in the benchmarks.
On the back we can see the rear of the power supply, there’s three more USB 3.0 Type-A
ports, gigabit ethernet port, and the Thunderbolt 3 connector.
The network port was a great option, as you can connect to your network using this and
then access the Internet from your laptop using the same Thunderbolt connection to the
enclosure rather than connecting the laptop separately.
Although the Dell G5 that I’m testing with doesn’t support charging over the Thunderbolt
port, many laptops do, and the enclosure can provide power delivery up to 87 watts over
the Thunderbolt cable, so in many cases you could literally plug into the enclosure and
be set.
There’s also space for a graphics card with two slots, so keep that in mind if you’ve
got one of those huge three slot cards.
The enclosure is sort of risen up a bit, underneath there’s this gap which allows the front
fan to exhaust air down.
The side panel removes very easily without needing any tools, you just pull it out from
the bottom.
It’s held in place by these little nubs on the panel, and there’s some foam running
around the edge of the interior giving the panel a snug fit.
Inside we can see the mainboard which has the PCIe connection for the graphics card,
and the 550w power supply behind this.
There’s also a SATA connector on the I/O board, which you can use to attach an optional
2.5 inch drive.
The drive can be mounted inside the enclosure on the opposite wall towards the front, and
will be available to your laptop over the Thunderbolt connection, so it’s also a nice
extra to expand laptop disk space.
Setup is fairly straightforward, first use a philips head screwdriver to remove the PCIe
covers at the back.
I had to first plug in the power connectors before inserting the card into the PCIe slot,
and there are two 6 or 8 pin connectors available.
Once inserted just tighten the screws at the back to keep it secure, plug the enclosure
into the power and connect it to your laptop using the included Thunderbolt cable and you’re
ready to go.
As mentioned I’m testing with the Dell G5 which I reviewed recently on the channel as
it has Thunderbolt 3 support, after plugging the enclosure in to get it working I did find
that I had to perform a Windows update, as I suddenly had a Thunderbolt update available
that I didn’t before, and then I had to reinstall the Nvidia drivers, although if
your laptop doesn’t have discrete graphics you’ll need to install the appropriate drivers
anyway, whether they be from AMD or Nvidia.
After that from then on it was essentially plug and play, after connecting the enclosure
to the laptop the monitor would start displaying an image.
I should also talk about how I’ve got the monitor setup, it’s connected to the graphics
card, however you don’t need an external monitor to use the enclosure.
It’s possible to use the screen of the laptop, however this does reduce performance as the
signal needs to come back over the Thunderbolt connection from the enclosure.
To demonstrate this I’ve got some game benchmarks from PUBG, we can see that when playing on
the external monitor shown by the orange bars rather than the laptop display shown by the
blue bars we’re getting higher frame rates, so it’s definitely recommended for best
performance, however if you don’t have an external monitor you can still use the laptop’s
display.
I’ve also included the results of the 1060 Max-Q graphics inside the Dell G5 too just
for reference, and we can see that it’s actually performing better than the 1080 graphics
in the external enclosure.
This is simply because Thunderbolt 3 isn’t as fast as a full blown PCI express connection,
so in this example if you had 1060 graphics in your laptop you probably wouldn’t benefit
much with an enclosure today, a 1080Ti graphics card would close the gap more but it’s hard
to say without testing.
If your laptop already has decent discrete graphics an enclosure like this would be a
great upgrade a few years from now.
If you’re gaming on your laptop I think it’s likely the graphics inside will become
outdated the soonest, and rather than replacing the entire laptop in a few years to play new
games you should be able to get a decent performance increase using a future generation of graphics
card in the enclosure, as this should give you a nice boost despite the performance loss
from Thunderbolt.
Of course it’s a different story if you have a laptop without discrete graphics, the
enclosure will take you from hardly being able to run any games at all to having a great
experience, even with the Thunderbolt bottlenecks.
As for the temperatures I’ve set the 1080 to run at 50% fan speed to prevent it changing
based on current temperature, and with the side panel on it’s only a couple of degrees
warmer than with it completely off, so the air holes are doing a decent job.
As for the overall volume of the system, here’s how it sounded while playing games.
It’s important to note that this includes the sound of the laptop itself and depends
on the graphics card that’s installed within the enclosure, so realistically it’s a bit
of a pointless demonstration as it will vary, but hopefully it gives you some idea of how
a card inside it sounds.
As for the price it’s not particularly cheap, coming in at just under $400 USD at the time
of recording, and that’s before you include the cost of buying a graphics card, however
despite this I still think it would be cheaper than buying a new laptop with better internal
graphics, making it a good option.
Overall I think the Mantiz Venus enclosure would be a great option for someone that uses
their laptop as their primary machine and doesn’t have a desktop, that way when you
get home you can just connect the laptop to the enclosure easily with a single Thunderbolt
cable and potentially be charging, accessing the Internet, accessing the hard drive within
the enclosure, and getting access to desktop grade graphics all in one.
It would be best suited for laptops that have no discrete graphics, or with older laptops
with lower powered graphics that could use a performance boost and have a Thunderbolt
3 port.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and leave a like if you want
to see more external graphics enclosure reviews on the channel.
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one.