MINISFORUM DEG1 External GPU Dock Station, Mini eGPU Enclosure for RTX 4090, AMD RX 7900 XTX, Support ATX/SFX Standard Power Supplies, Oculink Interface Graphics Dock Station

To start, this GPU dock station is targeted at the Minisforum mini PCs which have an optional Oculink interface. I tested it with the MINISFORUM UM890 Pro, which has 8 cores/16 threads and 64 GB of ram.I had a RTX 3090 Founder's Edition which had been replaced by newer card and was sitting on a shelf gathering dust. I bought the UM890 Pro in 2024 during the Black Friday sale. and by itself, it is a very powerful PC. The only downside is that the embedded GPU cannot produce good frame rates even on the lowest HD settings. It comes with a little board that plugs into one of the NVME slots to provide the Oculink interface, so I bought the docking station to see if it could play games with the RTX 3090.If you are looking to buy this station, be aware that it requires a separate power supply with enough wattage to run the GPU. The Oculink interface does not provide power, and the UM 890 does not draw power from the external power supply. I bought a Be Quiet 750 watt power supply because they really are the quietest supplies I have ever had. The 3090 only needs about 350-400 watts, but the 750 watt power supply was available for delivery the next day.If you have a GPU with the PCIe 5 power connector, be sure the power supply has the right cable. The Be Quiet supplies have them.Installation was a 3 minute job. The power supply mounts on its side using 2 screws. The main cable which would go to the motherboard plugs into the station. The docking station comes with a mounting bracket which screws to the power supply, and the GPU gets screwed down like it would if it were in a case. All 5 screws needed are provided. The last connection is the PCIe 5 power connector to the GPU.The docking station comes with an Oculink cable. The Minisform PC does not come with the Oculink interface installed, so you have to take off the top and insert it into the NVME slot on top of the motherboard. Minisforum mini PCs are super easy to work on, and just about anyone could do it. Once installed, you plug the Oculink cable into the PC and the docking station, and you are done.You will need to plug the GPU into a monitor. I plugged the UM 890 into a separate monitor just in case I needed to install drivers. As it turned out, Windows identified the GPU in the docking station after a couple of minutes without any input from me. I installed the latest Nvidia drivers.My test game was Fallout 76. I got 71 FPS on ultra settings, which is nearly identical what I got with the 3090 on my big tower which has 16 cores/32 threads, 192 GB of ram, and fast PCIe 5 NVME SSDs. The RTX 4080 Super in my tower gets 100-120 FPS on ultra settings for comparison. What was interesting is that even after playing for 30 minutes, none of the fans was loud enough to hear over the game. The mini PC was certainly not being thermal throttled in the least.I compared the cost of this setup to the cost of building my top end gaming rig, and leaving out the cost of the GPU, the Miniforum UM 890 Pro with the GPU docking station and an external power supply was $400+ *less* than the tower. The GPU and motherboard in the tower are higher performance than the laptop CPU used in the mini PC, but I need that for other purposes.If you can get a Minisforum mini PC with the Oculink interface on sale, you should be able to put together a gaming PC for $900-1000 plus the cost of the GPU. It's not as portable as a gaming laptop, but everything will fit in a backpack. And you'll save a lot of money plus have the ability to swap out the GPU for a newer model someday.I am seriously considering making this my new standard build in the future.Note: I have not been paid for this review. All hardware was paid for by me.

Popped a new bequiet! PSU and a 4070TiS into it, connected to UM890 Pro via oculink (while powered down), and was using it for a week with no issues... then after accidentally turning the pc on and forgetting to hit the dock power first (PoE Phrecia's zone loading hard-crashes are something not of this world... who knows what im talkin bout is this mic plugged okay moving on) I realized it just boots up/down in sync with the UM890 Pro regardless, despite not many people mentioning that the "power on the egpu five seconds before the PC" doesn't apply here,at least for these two minisforum devices together. GPU leaps to life on power button press as though it was inside a traditional tower.(You don't realize how loud cases make things until the gpu is out in the open with just its own fans)Sweet!

Works well and you will see a difference between usb4/TB3 vs oculink!Used with r9 6900HX Aoostar GEM12 miniPC.

Works great with RTX 3090 and a PCIe to Oculink adapter board for a standard ATX motherboard. This was added to a Windows 10 PC that already had four GTX 1080ti graphics cards installed ( don't ask ). No issues.

When looking for an upgrade, like going from slow thunderbolt/usb 4 to much faster oculink, you'd expect to pay more. Like I think I paid 150 for my tb dock. This was less. And it was easy. And it just works. Plugged in the cable after using my sfx power supply and the little arm thing for the card stand, and blammo. I didn't even have to go into the bios. Better, it worked with Linux. And I legit didn't have to do anything but connect everything up. I'm still on that first boot. Having your card in a dock is a luxury. It runs cooler, and you can get at it if you want to swap it out, upgrade it, or it locks up. I like to run a cable for the external card, and one for the internal in the pc so I can swap between them. On Linux it means I don't have to reboot if the 7900XT has issues. I can fall back to onboard graphics, fix it, then resume. That's very convenient. It also means I can swap out my system/card at will. Oculink is awesome if you game at 60fps. You won't see much performance falloff unless you are doing insane fps 1080p gaming. Great product minisforum.

Got a used item instead of a new item. Upon arrival wife dropped oculink cable so I had to find it to test it. Item clearly showed signs of use such as tape on the side of the box and had hairs from what appear to be a cat. Item worked fine. Seller was maker of the item so interesting that they fraud you on an item that works well. Happy with the item, unhappy with the scam advertising. Maybe a quality control issue.

Tried to use this for gaming on a 3060 ti with my beelink ser 6 max mini pc. Can't get it to work well enough to play. Every single game stutters and has a minimum 2 second input delay. I'm talking from minecraft, lethal company, hell let loose, foxhole, and even stardew valley. I know it's not my graphics card because when I put it back into my desktop there's no stuttering or any issue with output. I wouldn't bother trying to make this thing even work... eGPUs aren't worth the trouble.