When I reviewed the $499 Razer Core V2 a few months back, I was pleased with the design and new features that Razer brought to its external graphics enclosure, even if it was a bit pricey.
With the Core X, Razer drops the price—and a handful of key features—for a more accessible and affordable ($299) take on external graphics acceleration.
The Core has always worked seamlessly with Razer's own laptops, but the Core X touts greater compatibility than before, now pulling some Apple MacBooks into the fold.
While I ran across some uncomfortable bumps and wrangled with some manual updates in my testing, overall, the Core X did the job.
It can juice up nearly any Thunderbolt 3-equipped laptop with a late-model graphics card for a sizeable performance boost.
It's a good value if you're willing to forgo the de facto docking ability that other graphics boxes deliver.
In the end though, I still prefer the Core V2, but it is hard to ignore the $200 in savings with the Core X.
That money could step you up to a higher grade of graphics card.
An eGPU Reduced to Essentials
First, let's talk about what an external graphics enclosure does.
(These devices are sometimes dubbed "eGPUs," for "external graphics processing units.") In an eGPU, you install a desktop graphics card and connect it to a laptop, allowing an underpowered portable to become a gaming machine.
When you're done gaming and are ready to hit the road, you simply unplug the eGPU and leave it at home.
So, then, how does the Razer Core X manage to trim a whopping $200 off the price of the Core V2? It begins with the size: The less expensive Core X is noticeably larger than the Core V2, measuring 9.06 by 6.61 by 14.72 inches (HWD), compared with the V2's 8.6 by 4.13 by 13.38 inches.
That doesn't sound like a big margin, but in person, it's larger than I'd like—the differences all around do add up to a wider, chunkier box.
You can fit a whole PC in some similarly sized Mini-ITX cases, so you'll need to put aside some desk space.
Like on the Core V2, a collapsing rear handle allows you to pull the drawer out easily to install or swap your card.
Inside is a 650-watt power supply, a cooling fan, the PCI Express card slot with a release lever, and two eight-pin cables for powering the card.
The box comes with a Thunderbolt 3 USB-C cable, though, like so many such cables included with Thunderbolt devices, it's criminally short.
Note some upsides to the larger size of the Core X.
For one thing, it allows you to install a three-slot-wide graphics card (more on compatible cards below); the Core V2 could not handle such big cards.
The 650-watt ATX power supply further cuts down on cost.
In contrast, the Core V2's power supply was a 500-watt model, but it was designed to a form factor to allow it to fit in the smaller box.
That slimmer hardware had to be more efficient and, therefore, was pricier to make.
Also, the Core X drops the customizable Razer Chroma lighting, a familiar feature of many of Razer's products.
As a result, it's fairly plain—a literal black box.
You'll see some design flourishes, but it's all dark, apart from any lighting emanating from whatever graphics card you install within.
In terms of functionality, this makes it harder to tell at a glance if the box was properly powered on; I had to occasionally peek inside to check if the card's own lights were active.
Ports are another area in which the Core X exhibits some cost-cutting.
The new eGPU box is missing both of the USB ports and the Ethernet connection of the Core V2, losses that I consider unfortunate.
The ports on the back of the Core V2 allow the eGPU to serve as both a graphics accelerator and a docking station.
That functionality, alas, is gone here.
Other makers' eGPU boxes, such as Gigabyte's Aorus GTX 1070 Gaming Box and models from PowerColor, also include ports that the Core X excises.
With those ports aboard, attaching the Thunderbolt cable could also hook up, say, a keyboard, a mouse, and an external hard drive.
Having those USB ports on the box is useful, but just as important, most of the ultraportable laptops you're likely to use this device with won't have Ethernet jacks of their own.
A wired connection is key for gaming, so the Ethernet port going away is a particular bummer.
You could always get a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, but that's a clunky dongle and an extra connection to deal with every time you need to connect or disconnect.
What the Core X Works With
Despite the loss of those ports, connecting the Core X to a laptop remains straightforward.
Like the Core V2, it employs Thunderbolt 3 over USB-C as the conduit.
As we'll get to below, getting the laptop working with the Core X can be a bit murkier (depending on the machine and the state of its drivers and OS), but connecting with a single cable is praiseworthy.
The use of an industry-standard port, as opposed to a proprietary connection, allows for versatility and increases the lifespan of the product.
That's the direction that eGPUs are moving in today, and different from the one taken by one of the eGPU pioneers, the Alienware Graphics Amplifier ($174.99 at Dell) , a few years back.
(That eGPU box is still available, but it uses a nonstandard interface connector that works only with select Alienware machines.)
A wide swath of late-model graphics cards work with the Core X.
In Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1000, 900, and 700 series, all cards from the GeForce GTX xx80 Ti down to the GeForce GTX xx50 will work.
So will the mighty Nvidia Titan X, Titan V, and Titan Xp, as well as a selection of workstation-focused Quadro cards: the Quadro P4000, P5000, P6000, and GP100.
Here, pictured above, we've dropped in a GeForce GTX 1080.
Also, because of the larger chassis size we described earlier, you can use third-party cards with larger coolers than the ones on reference-style cards like the GTX 1080 pictured here.
If you'd like to use an AMD card, you also have a host of options from the last several AMD card generations.
The Core X works with the Radeon RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56, as well as the whole Radeon RX 500 and RX 400 Series.
You can also use a host of older Radeon cards: the R9 Fury, R9 Nano, R9 300 Series, R9 290X, R9 290, and the R9 285.
Razer is making strides in laptop compatibility, as well.
Because of the USB-C connection, an industry-standard port, many laptops were physically compatible with past versions of the Core, but functionality was hit-and-miss.
It depended on the type of USB-C port, for starters; not all USB-C ports support Thunderbolt 3, by a long shot, and that's a necessity to work with an eGPU like this one.
Plus, BIOS versions, software drivers, and Windows versions had to be in line.
In practice, only a handful of systems worked seamlessly in the past, and finding out which ones were a sure thing before you bought an eGPU was difficult.
There is still no easy "master list" that will tell you if your laptop is compatible, but it's much safer nowadays to assume that most machines that meet the relatively standard requirements will.
Now that I've had a chance to test the Core X with a variety of laptops, it's clear that the eGPU situation has improved, even if we are not in the 100-percent-plug-and-play promised land just yet.
The Compatibility Experience
Installing a card is about as easy as it can be, maintaining the simple process from the Core V2.
Simply pull out the drawer with the rear handle, unscrew the bracket (unless it's extra-tight or your card gets in the way, this can be done by hand), and push the card into the slot.
From there, you can put the screw back to hold it in place and attach the needed power connector or connectors from the Core X's internal power supply.
Then, you can just slide the tray back in, make sure the power supply's switch is flipped on, and plug the Thunderbolt 3/USB-C cable into the back of the Core X and into your laptop.
The Razer Blade Stealth worked out of the box, simply by connecting to the Core X and powering both on—it remains the path of least resistance.
In the course of testing the Core X with a stack of non-Razer Windows laptops, there were plenty of head-scratching moments and necessary manual steps before consistent success.
As long they had a Thunderbolt 3 port, though, I eventually got every Windows laptop I tried to run off the GeForce GTX 1080 inside the Core X with the process explained below.
The list of Windows laptops I got to work with the Core X comprised a Lenovo ThinkPad X280, a Dell Latitude 7390 2-in-1, an HP Spectre x360 15, and a Huawei MateBook X Pro.
My first recommendation: Run Windows 10 Update until you're at the very latest Windows rev, before you even get started.
(For us, that was Windows 10 RS4 at the time we tested the Core X.) When you plug in the eGPU for the first time, you should allow some time for Windows 10 to set it up—you should see a pop-up that it's preparing a new device or installing drivers.
Much of this work is done in the background, so give it some time, which usually ends in another notification saying your device is ready to use.
Also, when you attach the Core X for the first time, you must click through a Thunderbolt 3 popup alerting you that a new device is connected.
From there, you should see the Core X listed, and you can tell the computer to accept this device once, accept it every time, or reject it.
The only issue I encountered with this step was with the Latitude 7390, which provided no notifications when the device was plugged in.
In fact, the Thunderbolt software notified me that the device may not work properly with the laptop, and indeed, it gave me more trouble than any others.
A combination of manually updating Thunderbolt drivers and some timely reboots eventually got it working, but this is a good example of how this process isn't quite streamlined or guaranteed to run smoothly with every system.
Once the Core X was connected successfully on any laptop, it became evident that downloading and installing the latest GTX 1080 desktop-card drivers (or the equivalent for whichever card you're using in the Core X) was a must; only the Razer Blade Stealth had them out of the box.
This was a necessary step with no exceptions, so save yourself some time and go to Nvidia or AMD for the latest drivers for your card once it's physically connected before attempting to use it.
Another complication was with laptops that have built-in Nvidia graphics, separate from the integrated Intel graphics in the processor.
The HP Spectre x360 15 and Huawei MateBook, for example, both packed an Nvidia GeForce MX150, and that initially confused the Core X.
Even after the graphics drivers were updated properly (as with the other laptops), these two would not run the 3D applications using the GTX 1080 in the Core X.
Trying to force applications to use the GTX 1080 through Nvidia's control-panel software did not help, nor did disabling the MX150 in Device Manager.
As it turns out, Razer has a solution.
The company offers a free bit of software called GPU Switcher Tool, which provides a simple UI for choosing which graphics card you want to the system to run applications through.
When I used the GPU Switcher Tool, I chose the GeForce GTX 1080, and then checked Device Manager again.
There, I saw the laptop was disabling the built-in discrete GeForce MX150 GPU (as I had tried to do manually, earlier).
But the software did something else in the background, because the Core X then started working once the GPU Switcher Tool was installed.
I wish the availability of this software was made more obvious; I only became aware of it when I contacted Razer.
But it is listed near the bottom of the Razer Core setup page.
This utility is definitely a workaround, an extra step that further removes this from a plug-and-play experience, but once it's installed it's very simple.
The Spectre and the MateBook both finally ran applications off the GTX 1080 once the Nvidia card was chosen through the tool (you can set either GPU to be used automatically by default), and I am as confident as I can be that this process would hold true for other laptops with discrete graphics.
The Apple Angle: eGPU on macOS
One of the big additions touted for the Core X is its compatibility with some Apple MacBooks.
That compatibility is largely thanks to a recent Apple update to macOS that enables general eGPU support.
For an eGPU to work with a Mac, macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 or later must be installed, and, of course, the Mac needs to be a late-model one with a Thunderbolt 3 port.
An important caveat to all of this: Right now, MacBooks only display graphics acceleration from eGPUs to an external monitor, not natively on the laptop's own screen.
Sure, you may have wanted to use a larger display for gaming or 3D professional work, anyway, but it's inconvenient to have that state of affairs forced on you, and some people may have no interest in buying or finding space for a desktop monitor.
With the Windows machines, in contrast, you can "loop back" the graphics acceleration over Thunderbolt 3 to see better frame rates on the laptop's own display.
This is a key distinction to keep in mind.
Also, know that using the Razer Core X with a Mac will require a compatible AMD graphics card—Nvidia cards are not supported.
The selection of Mac-compatible cards you can use in the Core X is a bit narrower than on the Windows side.
You'll need an AMD Radeon RX 570 or RX 580, a Radeon RX Vega 56 or Radeon RX 64, or a late-model AMD workstation card.
The latter cards are an elite, pricey bunch: the Vega Frontier Edition Air, the Radeon Pro WX 7100, and the Radeon Pro WX 9100.
You'll only be considering installing one of these if you're looking to run a professional application suite that benefits from GPU acceleration.
eGPUs are also not currently supported in Bootcamp, so you won't be able to install and run Windows games off the Core X.
Being able to do that would be a lot of an eGPU's appeal for Mac gamers looking for a power boost, since many games release on Windows only.
So keep that in mind if you're considering this setup.
Firing Up My Core
Once you get all of that installation detail out of the way, it's safe to say the Core X dramatically improves 3D performance.
I ran 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme, a strenuous 3D test from UL, on the aforementioned Windows laptops to get a sense of the speed boost, and found consistent improvements fitting of the connected GTX 1080.
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