The reasonably-priced $599 kit includes an AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB graphics card bundled inside of a Sonnet external GPU chassis with Thunderbolt 3 and 350W PSU. Video walkthroughĪs noted in the WWDC keynote, Apple is selling a special Metal 2 External Graphics Development Kit to developers. With that being said, it’s extremely exciting to see native eGPU support in macOS, and this makes the future look very bright for Mac users who require the on-demand power than external GPUs can provide. There’s also no internal MacBook screen acceleration, and there’s no indication as to whether that will be supported in future builds. Keep in mind that macOS High Sierra is still in its initial beta, so the experience was far from perfect, as I noted several times in the video. The RX 580, which is an 8GB ASUS Strix model, works too. The Node features a compatible Thunderbolt 3 chipset, so it works out of the box with macOS High Sierra. I don’t own Apple’s just-launched External Graphics Development Kit, but I do have an Akitio Node eGPU and an AMD Radeon RX 580. Although many users, including myself, were able to successfully traverse these blocks and get eGPUs working on lesser versions of macOS, things are now much easier thanks to Apple’s recognition that people desire the extra power afforded by big hulking external graphics units. For starters, eGPUs themselves weren’t supported in older versions of macOS, so hacks were required to get them working.Ī second hoop to jump through, the lack of native support for the latest AMD GPUs was yet another obstacle. One of the more exciting macOS-centric features announced at Monday’s WWDC 2017 keynote was native support for external GPUs within macOS High Sierra.Īs a big fan of the eGPU concept, and as someone who’s taken quite a few eGPU boxes for a spin on older versions of macOS, I was excited to try out the native functionality baked inside of High Sierra.Īlthough you could get eGPUs working in previous versions of macOS, doing so wasn’t officially supported by Apple.

Best egpus of 2017