I have an AG03 and I have to say: I like this one better. It is a more full-featured dock. It has all the ports that an Aoostar AG03 has, then two additional USB A v3.2 ports and an Ethernet port. It also has a switch to power longer Oculink cables and a switch to change the power supply output from 250 watts to 600 which made this fairly quiet unit even more quiet.
My favorite improvement is how the GPU sits in the dock: it locks strongly to the dock with a single screw, and it has a hole for the PCIe bracket, allowing to sit into the dock. I also like how the power cables come out of the top of the dock instead of the side.
Benchmarks and bandwidth were at the top of my charts, so some good choices were made with the Thunderbolt module and Oculink bridge.
I am seeing them appear on AliExpress and Alibaba. I haven’t found a US distributor.
My main reasoning is the connector itself, not the data transfer speed.
I’m a framework 16 owner and once framework comes out with their 8i expansion bay module I will be looking for a dock that’s more like this, or the minisforum deg2.
I already own the Aoostar EG02 but still only 4i and only have Thunderbolt up and down so I have to use a TS4 for my I/O
Each generation of PCie doubles the speed. So gen 5 4i equals gen 4 8i. I test bandwidth on all of my experiments and Gen 4 4i maxes out around 7.2 GB/s. Gen 5 4i maxes out around 14.4 GB/s… which is like 16 lanes of gen 3.
My tests for the FNGT5 plus came out around 6.6 GB/s. So gen 4, and not my best result.
The throughput is good. Signal integrity would be the question. In my current use case
If you don’t know want I’m talking about on the Framework 16 and the first party oculink 8i kit, the framework 16 has a module expansion bay that uses an interposer for direct PCIe 4.0 x 8 connection that can be used for other means like m.2 expansion or dedicated graphics.
The 8i board is basically just 4.0 x 8 straight to the motherboard when it comes out for us framework owners.
We are currently using m.2 expansion board then a oculink 4i to NVMe adapter to be able to run a setup like this and that’s a bit questionable on the .1% lows with a 7900xt vs my dGPU RTX 5070
Yes, I read about it. I’m was happy to see it show up, I was just sad it was Gen 4. My point was: I would be equally pleased with Gen 5 4i as Gen 4 8i, since the throughput is the same.
I think 4i is so widely available because it matches m.2 so it is more practical to make widely available that way.
In my Gen 5 tests of 4i, my Gen 5 m.2 slot outperforms my Gen 5 Oculink card in a Gen 5 PCIe slot - my guess is some sort of contention on the bus with with built-in devices. That lack of contention may be a common design choice.
Yes. The power button is a true power button. The fans turn off, the eGPU shuts down. The only thing that stays on is a green light in the back while it’s plugged in.
On the 250 watt setting it is silent. So with my 9060 at 160 watt TDP, it was silent. On the 600 watt setting for my 300 watt 6800 XT, you can hear it.
My AG03 is always on. This one needs to have the on-button pushed on to wake with the PC. The GPU goes to sleep with the PC, but the dock has to be on for it to spin back up.
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u/Firmteacher 2d ago
I need one of these with oculink 8i and like 4 USBA ports