Powercolor Devil Box brings external graphics to lethargic systems

If you're stuck with a system with inadequate graphics horsepower with no way to upgrade the GPU—laptop, a mini PC configuration, and so forth—you may wish you could sell your soul for a solution, but that's a little extreme. A little less extreme is to invite the Devil into your home. Powercolor's Devil Box, that is.

The Devil Box is another of a small number of external graphics card enclosures out there. It's based on AMD's XConnect technology introduced earlier this year and works with "qualified" graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia.

A 500W power supply sits inside the Devil Box. It's an easy process to setup and use—just plug a compatible graphics card into the enclosure like you would a free PCI-E x16 slot on your motherboard, attach the power cables, and then connect the Devil Box to your ultra-thin laptop, Skull Canyon NUC, or whatever other system you're injecting with an external graphics upgrade using the included Thunderbolt 3 cable.

The PSU can provide up to 375W of power to the graphics card, with the rest of its capacity going to four USB 3.0 ports (one on the front, three in back), a GbE LAN interface, and up to 60W for charging devices over the USB 3.1 Type-C port.

There's also a 2.5-inch drive bay inside for installing an SSD to use as external storage, though that's a complimentary feature and obviously not the main selling point. The Devil Box is all about the graphics. To that end it supports AMD's latest Radeon RX 480 and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards, according to Newegg, which is the only place it's available in the U.S.

Powercolor said it's only making a limited number of these available to be sold in the U.S., Germany (Mindfactory), the U.K. (Overclocker), China (JD), Japan (Amazon), and Singapore (Banleong). It's priced at $380 (€419) and that's without a graphics card. That's pricey (though not as much as the Razer Core at $500) and you'll have to decide if it's worth the cost or if that money would be better spent on a new system altogether.