OneXPlayer has built a reputation for making excellent handheld gaming PCs, such as the OneXFly, as well as experimenting with some odd designs that don’t quite hit the mark. This time it’s having a second bash at making an external GPU, called the OneXGPU 2, to give handhelds, tablets, and basic laptops a much-needed gaming boost.
The first iteration of the OneXGPU isn’t brilliant if I can be somewhat blunt. With a Radeon RX 7600M XT graphics processor and an M.2 2280 SSD socket, the $700 device is very pricey and tries a little too hard to be all things for all people. But even with a full-speed USB4 cable, there’s barely enough bandwidth for the GPU and SSD.
So when I read that OneXPlayer has launched a new Indiegogo project (via Videocardz) to fund the development of the OneXGPU 2, I was curious to see what was different this time. While the crowdsourced funding page lacks some critical information, the biggest improvement is that the GPU has been seriously beefed up.
Specifically, it’s a Radeon RX 7800M, and that’s a much nicer prospect than the previous RX 7600M XT. For starters, you’re getting a lot more graphics processing ability as it sports 60 compute units (for 3,840 shaders) compared to the 32 in the RX 7600M. There’s no word on what the clock speeds are but it will have 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM.
Now, before you zoom off to learn more about the Radeon RX 7800M, it’s worth noting that, as far as I can tell, this is the first-ever appearance and even AMD doesn’t have anything about it. I strongly suspect that it’s based on the same Navi 32 GPU that powers the desktop RX 7800 XT, albeit with one MCD (memory-controller die) missing.
If it is a Navi 32 processor inside the OneXGPU 2 then the performance should be really good, even with the reduced memory bandwidth, as the parent chip is no slouch in 1440p gaming. Even more important is that if OneXPlayer has a supply of these chips coming in, then so too will laptop vendors, which means we could see more gaming laptops with a decent Radeon dGPU inside them this year.
As you’d expect, there’s a whole gamut range of connection options: an OCuLink interface, one USB4 port, two DisplayPort 2.0 sockets, a single HDMI 2.1 socket, two USB Type-A ports (probably USB 3 but no idea which generation), a microSD slot, and a gigabit LAN socket. Oh and the M.2 slot is still present.
That’s all well and good, but there’s still the issue of there just not being enough bandwidth, even with a USB4 cable, to fully support a fast gaming SSD and a powerful GPU. This means that the OneXGPU 2 will probably still only support Gen3 SSDs, which is okay, but not ideal for something likely to be well north of $800.
We’ve contacted OneXPlayer in the hope of finding so more details about the OneXGPU 2 and if we learn anything new, I’ll let you know.
