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‘El Hijo’ is a Spaghetti Western stealth game with heart

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El Hijo

El Hijo is an isometric stealth game starring this 6-year-old as he traverses the desert, searching for his mother. She left him at a monastery, for his own protection, after their Wild West village was ransacked by outlaws. El Hijo — Spanish for “The Son” — decides to escape the monks, and the only way to avoid detection is to stick to the shadows. It’s a puzzle game that plays with light and darkness as a mechanic, sending the young boy on an adventure across the Old American West.

El Hijo inverts the Spaghetti Western genre, which is unabashedly macho and violent, by placing a child at the heart of the game and removing all offensive tools from his arsenal. The game is due to hit Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Switch and PC in mid-2020.

El Hijo

“Stealth made perfect sense, because if you’re a child in a very violent war, like the Wild West, then the only way to move around is to trick your opponents and sneak around,” Honig Studios co-founder Jiannis Sotiropoulos said.

Despite the gun imagery in the game’s cover art, El Hijo doesn’t carry a firearm. Instead, he’s equipped with a slingshot, stones and similar tools designed to distract and disarm enemies.

“He is a kid, so he sneaks,” Sotiropoulos said. The young boy hides inside boats and freshly dug graves, ducking below low walls and slinking behind curtains. He distracts the adults with the slingshot, and he picks up new tools from other lost children along the way. They give him toys, like stink bombs and a spinning top that attracts attention, and eventually fireworks that cause tiny explosions.

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Sphero acquires LittleBits and eyes international growth

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Combined, Sphero and LittleBits have sold more than $500 million in robots and electronics. They’ve reached over six million students globally. And with this acquisition, Sphero now has over 140 patents in robotics, electronics, software and IoT.

This isn’t the first time Sphero has branched out beyond robotics. Last year, it acquired Specdrums, and it went on to produce an updated version of Specdrums’ signature music-centric wearable ring. The company seems to have passed the rocky point at which it laid off 45 employees and re-focussed on educational products. Now, Sphero says it plans to accelerate international growth. Though, it may have to compete with the likes of iRobot, which recently made its own push into the classroom.

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Sega is becoming its weird and wonderful self again

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Even in its darkest years, though, Sega made some good calls. Intelligent mid-2000s acquisitions like Creative Assembly (Total War) and Sports Interactive (Football Manager) were joined in the ’10s by Relic Entertainment (Warhammer 40,000) and Amplitude Studios (Endless Space) to form a strong division in “Sega West.” This policy seems to be continuing: Sega recently acquired Two Point, the team behind Two Point Hospital.

Sega has, of course, seen success beyond these acquisitions. Subsidiary Atlus has surged in popularity: its Shin Megami Tensei spin-off series Persona is now arguably Sega’s strongest non-hedgehog property. RGG division’s Yakuza also goes from strength to strength, with the seventh entry in the series due to be announced next week.

This resurgence, though, has been driven almost entirely by new projects, new divisions and new subsidiaries. Sonic Team, once the crown jewel of Sega, has produced many middling-to-poor Sonic games and not a great deal else. AM2, the company’s most-storied division, has moved from defining genres with games like OutRun, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, Sega Rally and Shenmue to mostly pushing out (admittedly excellent) Project Diva rhythm games and Japan-only free-to-play titles. The successes of today are disconnected from those of its past.

Recently, there are clear attempts to change that.

The decision to allow Christian Whitehead, a prominent member of the Sonic community, to create an official game in Sonic Mania proved astute. The title was released in 2017, within a few months of Sonic Team’s Forces, and surpassed the in-house game both critically and, according to unofficial figures, commercially. Mania represented an embrace of the old way — Whitehead’s Retro Engine was built to recreate the feel of the original Genesis games.

The success of Sonic Mania clearly woke someone up at Sega. Its current slate contains the expected entrants in ongoing series like Yakuza, Puyo Puyo, Total War, Football Manager and Mario & Sonic at the Olympics. But we’ve also seen some “old Sega” working its way back into the fold. Take Streets of Rage 4, a faithful continuation of Sega’s Genesis series that’s being developed and published by a third-party. As with Sonic Mania, this new Streets of Rage game is underpinned by an engine essentially built to evoke the originals.

Sega’s history clearly doesn’t begin and end with the Genesis. Panzer Dragoon: Remake, a return for a Sega Saturn classic, is being handled by Polish company Forever Entertainment. Even the Dreamcast is getting some love: Space Channel 5 VR: Kinda Funky News Flash! is not only the best-named game of the year, it’s a virtual-reality return for a game that represents Sega at the peak of its late-’90s weirdness. (Okay, perhaps Seaman is the peak, but SC5 is not far off.)

Then there’s Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD. The original Super Monkey Ball was made for NAOMI, the Dreamcast-derived arcade platform. Due to the death of Sega’s console, it ended up as a GameCube launch title, becoming Sega’s first ever game on a Nintendo machine. Much like Sonic, though, the series has since meandered. The direct sequel was solid, but Adventure, Banana Blitz, Step & Roll and Banana Splitz — there have been a lot of Super Monkey Ball games — not so much.

Banana Blitz HD is an attempt to bring the series back. The remaster is being developed in-house at Sega, and does away with the main issue with the original — the Wii’s motion controls. Along with updated graphics, the HD version has a bunch of modern-day features like online leaderboards and quick restarts for speedrunners, along with a separate multiplayer-focused section for party games.

Perhaps the best example of Sega’s renewed interest in its past is the upcoming Genesis Mini. After years of licensing terrible third-party hardware running bad emulators, Sega is producing its own microconsole, and it’s doing it properly. The Mini is being brought to life by members of the original hardware team, and the game selection is varied, including many cult titles like Dynamite Headdy alongside the expected big hitters. Sega has called on long-time partner M2 to handle the game ports, and even brought in composer Yuzo Koshiro, who scored Streets of Rage, to create new music for the system’s menu.

Taking all of these things as a whole, it’s clear something has shifted within Sega. The company spent two decades just surviving. Between reviving its own IPs and recognizing when other companies can do better, it’s now seemingly found the formula to exist while rediscovering its roots.

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Riot Games settles class action lawsuit over sexist culture

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The issues at Riot Games came to the attention of the public last year, after Kotaku published an investigative piece into the alleged sexism; the story included interviews with 28 current and former employees. Because the details of the settlement are not finalized, we don’t know what it entails or how favorable the outcome will be for the plaintiffs.

Riot claims to have looked into the issue of sexism in their offices and states, “…gender discrimination (in pay or promotion), sexual harassment, and retaliation are not systemic issues at Riot.” The publisher also seems to attribute their decision to end litigation to their employees being distracted from work, rather than the allegations of sexism: “…we’ve encountered considerable fatigue among Rioters, who have been drained by constant engagement with the internal and external dialogues emerging from these lawsuits and recurring media cycles.”

Sexism has long been a point of contention in the video game industry, both in the workplace and in the products themselves. Crunch time has also been in the spotlight lately, with both workers and consumers calling out the unhealthy and unfair practice of forcing employees to work long hours in order to hit their deadlines. And while the statements from Riot Games come across as a bit of a non-apology, hopefully this settlement is a step in the right direction toward creating a better relationship between the company and its employees.

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The best external graphics card enclosure

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Why you should trust us

I spent more than six years testing, reviewing, and otherwise writing about PCs and other gadgets for AnandTech and Ars Technica, and I’ve put in almost two years doing the same thing for Wirecutter. Much of that work has involved testing the performance of processors and graphics chips. I’ve been building, upgrading, and fixing PCs for more than 15 years, and I spent five of those years in IT departments buying and repairing laptops and desktops and helping people buy the best tech for their needs.

Who this is for

Thunderbolt 3 graphics enclosures connect an external graphics card (also called a GPU, or graphics processing unit) to a laptop or mini PC with a Thunderbolt 3 port. They are for people who want to play games or do graphically intensive rendering work but don’t want to own both a laptop and a desktop computer or to carry around a bulky gaming laptop or power notebook when they’re away from their desk. But the resulting setup isn’t as fast as a desktop computer with the same GPU, an external box takes up about as much space as a small desktop, and an enclosure costs as much as a good graphics card all by itself.

External GPUs make the most sense for people who have nice 13-inch ultrabooks or MacBooks with Thunderbolt 3 ports—these laptops typically have decent dual- or quad-core processors but rely on integrated graphics to maximize battery life while minimizing size and weight.

Don’t buy an eGPU enclosure if you need every bit of graphics performance you can get (more on choosing a GPU below). For starters, a laptop’s processor can’t run as fast for as long as a good desktop processor—more than any other factor, these slower laptop CPUs will hold a graphics card back when you’re playing modern games, especially on 13-inch thin-and-light laptops. Thunderbolt 3 is a limitation, too: The interface allows your PC to communicate with external accessories using either two or four lanes of PCI Express 3.0 bandwidth. In contrast, most desktop computer motherboards devote 16 PCIe lanes to connect the GPU to the rest of the system. Not all GPUs need that much bandwidth to achieve peak speeds, and laptop processors usually restrict performance before PCIe bandwidth becomes a problem. But regardless, some things—like playing demanding modern games at 4K resolutions—usually aren’t possible with an external graphics enclosure no matter how good the GPU is.

External GPUs also don’t save you a whole lot of space on your desk compared with a desktop PC. It’s possible to buy or build desktop systems using mini-ITX cases that can fit a high-performance graphics card in less space than some of the larger enclosures we tested. You can also find smaller external GPU enclosures with built-in non-upgradable GPUs—some models are roughly the size of a mini PC, while others are roughly toaster-sized—but we don’t recommend these because they don’t allow you to upgrade to newer, faster, or more power-efficient GPUs later on.

External GPUs aren’t a good way to save money, either. Most Thunderbolt 3–equipped laptops cost at least $1,000, and you then have to spend $300 or $400 on a good enclosure and anywhere from $150 to $800 for a graphics card. By comparison, a good budget gaming laptop usually costs between $800 and $1,200, and you can build or buy a midrange gaming desktop for between $700 and $1,000 depending on the components you choose.

To use one of these graphics enclosures with a Mac, you need a MacBook Pro from 2016 or later, a MacBook Air from 2018 or later, a Mac mini from 2018 or later, or an iMac from 2017 or later, and you need either macOS 10.13 High Sierra or 10.14 Mojave installed. You also need to stick to Apple’s list of supported GPUs, which includes only recent cards from AMD and none from Nvidia.

If you have a Windows laptop with Thunderbolt 3, follow these instructions to see whether your Thunderbolt 3 port supports external GPUs, and check to make sure you’re using the most current BIOS, Thunderbolt 3 drivers, and Thunderbolt 3 firmware available from your computer manufacturer.

Getting the best performance

External graphics enclosure

Photo: Andrew Cunningham

Fun fact: All of the eGPU enclosures we tested performed exactly the same. How fast things run for you will come down to the computer you’re using, the processor inside it, the graphics card you install in the enclosure, and the Thunderbolt 3 cable you use to connect the enclosure to the computer. We talk more about the specific performance tests we did below, but here are our general recommendations:

  • These enclosures work best with a quad-core eighth-generation Intel Core i5 or i7 processor or better. Older and lower-power dual-core chips can benefit from an external graphics card, but they’ll limit its performance when you’re playing games or running 3D apps.
  • Not all Thunderbolt 3 ports are created equal; manufacturers sometimes allocate only two lanes of PCI Express bandwidth to the Thunderbolt 3 port, rather than the maximum of four. With fewer PCIe lanes, the GPU and the rest of the system can’t communicate as quickly. In our tests, the processor was almost always the limiting factor, but you should still use a laptop with four lanes of PCIe bandwidth for its Thunderbolt 3 ports. This isn’t information that laptop makers usually publicize, but this page at eGPU.io recommends ultrabooks with four-lane Thunderbolt 3 ports. (The article also discusses an even more obscure spec called OPI, which dictates how quickly components inside your laptop can communicate with one another.) Many of our current laptop picks, including the Dell XPS 13 (9380), the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7, and Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro, all include four-lane Thunderbolt 3 ports and support the faster OPI mode.
  • All of the enclosures we tested came with a short, roughly 1-foot passive Thunderbolt 3 cable. But depending on your desk setup, you may find this cable limiting. If you need a longer cable, plan to spend between $50 and $60 for a 6- to 6.6-foot active Thunderbolt 3 cable from Cable Matters, Nekteck, Razer, or another manufacturer. An active cable is more expensive than a passive one, but it’s necessary to maintain Thunderbolt 3’s full 40 Gbps speeds over the length of the cable.
  • Compared with using a desktop computer, you will give up less performance if you stick to a good middle-of-the-road graphics card, one that costs somewhere between $200 and $500. If you prefer Nvidia cards, that means something along the lines of a GeForce GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Ti, RTX 2060, or RTX 2070. If you prefer AMD cards (or if you use a Mac and don’t have a choice), that means a Radeon RX 580, RX 590, RX Vega 56, or RX Vega 64. Faster, more expensive cards would usually be held back by your laptop’s processor or the 40 Gbps limit of the Thunderbolt 3 interface; cheaper cards would be an improvement over your laptop’s integrated graphics but probably wouldn’t justify the total cost of the enclosure plus the graphics card.

How we picked

We started by exploring Amazon, Newegg, and various company websites to find out what graphics enclosures were available. We focused on empty boxes without included graphics cards, to allow you to spend as much or as little as you want on a graphics card that will work with your system. Enclosures with special, non-upgradable GPUs can look nicer than these general-purpose boxes, but you can’t change such models later on, so if in the future you ever wanted to upgrade your graphics card, you would need to get a whole new enclosure too.

We then found enclosures by using the following criteria:

  • Price: You can buy a decent full-size eGPU enclosure with all the features most people need for around $300. But you might consider paying a bit more if an enclosure is exceptionally small or stylish, or if it includes extra ports or other features.
  • External dimensions and style: Whether the box will sit on your desk or underneath it, you need to know how much space a graphics enclosure will take up (and you also need to leave quite a bit of space around the enclosure for ventilation). We didn’t disqualify any enclosures based on size or looks, but we did pay special attention to models that looked better than the “bulky black box” aesthetic that is common across the category.
  • USB power delivery: Ideally, your graphics enclosure should provide at least 45 W of power through the same Thunderbolt 3 cable that connects it to your computer, removing the need for a separate power adapter. This is enough power to charge most 13-inch laptops at full speed; you’ll need more to charge most 15-inch laptops.
  • Noise and power consumption: The amount of fan noise you can hear and the amount of power your enclosure uses will depend largely on the graphics card you install, but a good enclosure should have enough space and ventilation to keep a GPU from frying itself or throttling its performance. Any built-in fans shouldn’t add much extra noise on top of the GPU’s built-in fans, and it shouldn’t consume a ton of extra power aside from what’s needed to power your GPU and charge your laptop.
  • Ease of installation: The first thing you have to do with a graphics enclosure is open it up and put a graphics card in it, so we looked for enclosures that were easy to open and close. Inserting and removing GPUs or managing the cables inside the enclosure shouldn’t be a struggle. You’ll appreciate these features when it’s time to upgrade to a new GPU in a few years, too.
  • Power supply and supported GPU wattage: As in a desktop PC, a graphics enclosure’s power supply (as well as its available power connectors) determines the kinds of GPUs you can use; faster GPUs need more power. External GPU enclosures advertise both the wattage of the power supply and the maximum supported wattage of the GPU itself; fast, expensive GPUs such as Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and AMD’s Radeon VII usually need between 250 W and 300 W of power when they’re running at peak speeds, and the full-size enclosures we tested were all capable of supplying at least that much power.
  • Internal dimensions: We encountered some tiny graphics enclosures designed for smaller cards, but most boxes are designed to fit a two-slot-wide, full-length graphics card with a bit of extra wiggle room for especially large fans. Generally, if a card is larger than that (to accommodate a huge, three-slot-wide fan, for example), it’s probably overkill for an external graphics enclosure anyway.
  • Extra ports: Most of the ports in your graphics enclosure are dependent on the graphics card itself—that’s what determines how many monitors you can connect at once and what kind of cables you need to use. But some enclosures also include extra USB-A or Ethernet ports so they can function as a docking station as well as an external GPU. We didn’t require extra ports, but we did consider them to be a nice bonus.

How we tested

External graphics enclosure

Photo: Andrew Cunningham

Of the 29 enclosures we found, we ended up testing six: the Akitio Node Pro, the Razer Core X and Core X Chroma, the Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box (which is internally identical to OWC’s Mercury Helios FX), the Mantiz Venus MZ-02, and the VisionTek Thunderbolt 3 Mini eGFX.

In each of these enclosures, we used four graphics cards: a Zotac Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070, a Zotac GeForce GTX 1660, an AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, and an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT. These are all mainstream cards that cost between $200 and $500, which according to the Steam Hardware Survey is generally what most people are willing to spend on a graphics card. But as we found when we ran our tests, these cards are also fast enough to show where external graphics enclosures, laptop processors, and Thunderbolt 3 restrict performance compared with the same cards running in a regular gaming desktop.

We tested these cards with a Dell XPS 13 (9360) laptop with a two-lane Thunderbolt 3 port, a Dell XPS 13 (9380) laptop with a four-lane Thunderbolt 3 port, a 2018 13-inch MacBook Air, and a 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro. The two Windows laptops both had eighth-generation quad-core Intel processors that represented the best performance you can get in an ultrabook right now, and their different Thunderbolt 3 ports would show how much of a difference having more or fewer PCI Express lanes affected performance. The six-core eighth-generation Intel processor in the 15-inch MacBook Pro is typical of larger professional notebooks and workstations, while the 2018 MacBook Air had a slower dual-core Intel processor; we included that laptop to test the difference between older dual-core processors and newer four-, six-, and eight-core processors.

To test performance, we used the DirectX 12 and Metal versions of the GFXBench graphics benchmark, the OpenCL and Metal compute benchmarks in Geekbench 4, and the built-in benchmarking tool in the PC version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Our pick: Akitio Node Pro

The Akitio Node Pro is a bit slimmer than other Thunderbolt 3 enclosures and has an understated, all-metal design that looks better than most of the plain black boxes in this category (it looks especially at home next to Macs). You can open it and install or swap out graphics cards without any screwdrivers or tools at all, its fan is relatively quiet, and it has a second Thunderbolt 3 port that you can use to connect other accessories. It provides up to 60 W of power to a connected laptop, more than enough to keep most 13-inch notebooks charged while you use them. And it has a neat retractable handle you can use to carry it from place to place, a handy feature we didn’t see on any other enclosure we considered.

Most of the graphics enclosures with a large enough power supply to charge a connected laptop cost between $300 and $400, and the Node Pro is right in the middle of that range. The enclosure measures roughly 5.3 by 10.5 by 14 inches, a bit taller but significantly slimmer than the other full-size enclosures we looked at. A blue LED ring on the front signals whether the enclosure is powered on and connected to a computer. When the enclosure is in use, the built-in fan doesn’t get very noisy by itself; the noise level depends heavily on the size and loudness of the fans on the GPU.

External graphics enclosure

The top pops right off of the Node Pro, making it easy to install a graphics card. Photo: Andrew Cunningham

Installing a graphics card in the Node Pro is easy and requires no tools—the top of the enclosure slides off when you loosen two captive thumbscrews on the back, and two more thumbscrews hold the graphics card in place. Its 500 W power supply and two eight-pin power connectors can support a 400 W graphics card, which means they have enough power to run basically any GPU.

External graphics enclosure

The Node Pro has an extra Thunderbolt 3 port you can use for hubs, docks, external storage, or other accessories. The built-in DisplayPort (above the two Thunderbolt 3 ports) is intended only for when you have something other than a GPU installed. Photo: Andrew Cunningham

The Node Pro doesn’t have the extra USB-A and Ethernet ports that the Razer Core X Chroma has, but it does offer a spare Thunderbolt 3 port you can use to connect a Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C dock or dongle, so you can give yourself some USB Type-A or Gigabit Ethernet ports or an SD card reader if you want that. The enclosure also includes a built-in DisplayPort, but it’s really meant to be used only if you’ve installed something other than a graphics card in the enclosure’s main PCI Express slot; once you’ve installed a GPU, you should be using its display outputs instead.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Technically, Akitio says that the Node Pro is “not designed for use with graphics cards,” despite the fact that the box is the right size for a graphics card, has a power supply more than large enough for use with most graphics cards, and has all the power connectors you would need for any graphics card. We didn’t notice this statement until after we had started testing the Node Pro, because the Node Pro met all of our requirements for a good eGPU enclosure.

The Node Pro’s second Thunderbolt 3 port, for connecting other Thunderbolt 3 accessories such as external drives, does deviate from Intel’s official specification for Thunderbolt 3 graphics enclosures. We recommend against using this second port when you’re playing games or running other 3D apps, since you should use all of that bandwidth for your graphics card, but it shouldn’t be a problem when you’re using your eGPU only to connect multiple monitors or for general desktop use.

That said, the Node Pro worked just fine with every single one of our test graphics cards and test computers, and it never seemed excessively hot or loud even during long benchmarking sessions. Many owners, professional reviewers, and YouTubers say they have used the Node Pro with multiple graphics cards with no problems. You should make sure to test it with your computer and graphics card while you can still return it, just in case you run into a compatibility problem, but most of the time it shouldn’t be an issue.

Upgrade pick: Razer Core X Chroma

External graphics enclosure

Photo: Andrew Cunningham

The Razer Core X Chroma is bigger, boxier, and more expensive than the Akitio Node Pro, but it also includes a Gigabit Ethernet port, four USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type A ports for connecting accessories, and customizable LED lights that can add a flashy, colorful touch to your gaming setup. It can also provide up to 100 W of power to a connected laptop, enough for some 15-inch laptops like Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro (though not for others, such as the Dell XPS 15, that exceed USB-C’s 100 W charging limit). If you’re looking for a Thunderbolt 3 case that can double as a laptop dock, this is the one to get.

The Core X Chroma measures about 6.6 by 9 by 14.7 inches, which definitely puts it on the chunky side, but its rounded corners make it look sleeker than boxes like the Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box. But the most noticeable bit of design flair is its series of Razer Chroma LEDs, an array of programmable multicolored lights on the front of the enclosure. Razer’s Synapse software for Windows and Mac, though bloated and difficult to navigate, comes with several premade color and pattern combinations (my personal favorite is a series of blinking reds and oranges that simulates fire), but you can program your own too. If you have other Chroma accessories, you can use the same software to coordinate your accessories’ colors, and if you have color-changing Philips Hue LED bulbs installed, you can color-coordinate your entire room. The green lights inside the Core X Chroma aren’t customizable, though—you can turn them on or off, but they’ll always stay green. The enclosure will nag you to install the Synapse software the second you connect it to your computer, or you can download it from Razer’s site directly.

External graphics enclosure

The guts of the Core X Chroma come out easily when you pull on the built-in handle, making it easy to work on. Photo: Andrew Cunningham

Getting into the Core X Chroma is easy. A handle on the back of the enclosure unfolds—pull on it, and the entire inside comes out, so you can very easily install a graphics card and organize your cables. Just slide the innards back into the shell of the enclosure when you’re done. The only thing we didn’t like about this system is that nothing is holding the inside and the outside of the enclosure together, so you can’t use the handle to carry the enclosure around when it’s fully assembled. This isn’t a big deal if you have the enclosure sitting on your desk all the time, but it makes the Core X Chroma more difficult than the Node Pro to travel with.

The Core X Chroma’s 700 W power supply supports up to 500 W graphics cards—more than the Node Pro, though both are overkill in this regard—in addition to powering a connected laptop and the enclosure’s LEDs. And as with the Node Pro, we didn’t notice excessive fan noise aside from the coolers on the graphics cards we tested.

External graphics enclosure

The Core X Chroma includes four USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port, unlike the Node Pro. Photo: Andrew Cunningham

The other thing that makes the Core X Chroma an upgrade over the Node Pro is its set of built-in ports—you get four USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports and one Gigabit Ethernet port. These ports make the Core X Chroma a handy docking station if you use a lot of external peripherals or prefer a wired network connection when gaming.

Budget pick: Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box (550 W)

External graphics enclosure

Photo: Andrew Cunningham

The 550 W version of Sonnet’s eGFX Breakaway Box (which also comes in a 650 W version that’s overkill for most GPUs) typically costs between $100 and $150 less than our other picks, money that you could spend on a more powerful graphics card instead. But its design is also more utilitarian than that of our other picks, it has fewer features, it’s not as easy to open, and its fan is a bit noisier.

The Breakaway Box is a plain 7.35-by-8-by-13.4-inch cube that looks like a cheap mini-ITX computer case. It’s functional but not very attractive, with a big blue S on the front. Opening the Breakaway Box is also like opening a cheap mini-ITX computer case: After removing three thumbscrews, you pull the top of the case back and then lift to expose the inside of the enclosure. You then need to remove one more thumbscrew and two regular screws to install your card. Putting the case back together may take a couple of tries; if you don’t have everything aligned properly, the screws won’t go back in.

External graphics enclosure

Working on the Breakaway Box is more like working on a small desktop PC in a cheap case. Compared with setting up the Node Pro or Core X Chroma, taking it apart and putting it back together involves more work. Photo: Andrew Cunningham

The 550 W power supply supports up to 375 W graphics cards, a slightly lower amount than our other picks but more than good enough for high-end-but-not-totally-unreasonable cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and the AMD Radeon VII. This version of the Breakaway Box can also provide up to 87 W of power to a connected laptop, enough to power any 13- or 15-inch laptop that charges over USB-C.

External graphics enclosure

The Breakaway Box is a no-frills enclosure with no extra ports on the back. Photo: Andrew Cunningham

Fan noise from the Breakaway Box was definitely more noticeable than from the Node Pro or the Core X Chroma, enough that we could hear it over smaller single-fan cards such as the GeForce GTX 1660 we used for testing. That sound is definitely not a dealbreaker considering the enclosure’s price, but it is one reason why we recommend the Node Pro or the Core X Chroma unless you’re looking to save money. Another reason is that the Breakaway Box’s base has plastic feet rather than rubber ones, so it slides around more easily on a desk.

Benchmarks (or: Why a gaming desktop is still faster)

Adding an eGPU enclosure is a good way to improve your laptop’s gaming performance and connect it to more monitors, but in many cases an external setup doesn’t perform as well as the same graphics card in a decent desktop computer, even one that’s a few years old. A Thunderbolt 3 enclosure limits your speeds in two ways:

  • Your laptop’s processor can’t run as quickly for as long as a desktop processor. This is mostly due to heat; there’s less airflow inside your laptop, and its fan and heatsink are smaller, so your laptop’s processor needs to slow down after a while to reduce its heat output and prevent damaging itself (also known as throttling). Modern laptop processors also have fewer processor cores than desktop processors, which means they can’t get as much work done at once; laptop CPUs usually have two or four cores, while desktop processors usually have between four and eight.
  • Even the fastest Thunderbolt 3 ports are limited to 40 Gbps transfer speeds, about a quarter of the bandwidth that the PCI Express x16 slot in most motherboards can provide. Cheaper graphics cards don’t need more than 40 Gbps of bandwidth, but more expensive graphics cards require the extra speed to achieve peak performance when running games. This TechPowerUp article shows that a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti gives up between 5 and 10 percent of its maximum performance when its bandwidth is limited to PCI Express x4 speeds, even when the processor and all other variables stay the same.

Those are the main reasons we recommend having a laptop with at least a quad-core Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, and why we recommend against buying hugely expensive high-end graphics cards.

To demonstrate the real-world impact of these performance bottlenecks, we also ran all of our tests using the same graphics cards in a desktop system with a six-core AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor and 16 GB of RAM—not a cutting-edge system, but a representative midrange gaming desktop that currently costs only a few hundred dollars to throw together and is fast enough to show the benefits of a desktop processor and more PCI Express bandwidth.

The Geekbench 4 compute tests, which are designed to test how well different GPUs run “image processing, computational photography, and computer vision,” showed us what a mild processor bottleneck looked like. For example, we found that the RTX 2070 performed between 55 and 65 percent better than the GTX 1660 regardless of whether we put it in a desktop or connected it to a laptop, and the performance was similar on the two Dell XPS 13 test laptops, suggesting that Thunderbolt 3 wasn’t holding the cards back. But regardless of the GPU, the laptops scored between 8 and 12 percent lower than the desktop. The AMD cards, especially the higher-end 5700 XT, showed an even more pronounced difference—and with that card the 9380 version of the Dell XPS 13 actually performed a bit worse than the 9360 version of the Dell laptop, suggesting that the 9360’s faster Core i7 processor helped more than the 9380’s faster Thunderbolt 3 port.

External graphics enclosure

The GFXBench tests, meanwhile, demonstrated how processor bottlenecks could affect faster cards more than slower ones. We found that the GTX 1660 performed similarly in all tests—a bit faster in the desktop, but barely—and that on the higher-end cards the 1440p version of the test also ran at about the same speed across the laptops and the desktop. For both the RX Vega 56 and the RTX 2070, however, the 1080p version of the test ran significantly better on the desktop than on the laptops. Again, this particular test didn’t seem sensitive to Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth, since the two XPS 13 models performed nearly identically.

External graphics enclosure

The more intense Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark showed the limits that laptop processors would have with modern high-end games, even when paired with midrange graphics cards. The benchmark measured CPU and GPU performance individually as well as general performance, so we could see much more clearly where the processor limited even the performance of the slower GTX 1660. The desktop system ran the game at more than 60 frames per second on average, even with the midrange GTX 1660; the laptops had trouble clearing the mid-50s, even with expensive graphics cards.

External graphics enclosure

And while the processor remains the most important thing overall, the Tomb Raider benchmark also showed us how Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth can be more of a factor for games—the faster processor in the 9360 version of the Dell XPS 13 allowed that laptop to post slightly higher CPU scores, while the GPU performance of the 9380 version of the Dell XPS 13 was a little better because it had more bandwidth. This difference became more pronounced the faster the GPU was, suggesting that top-end cards like the GeForce RTX 2080 would be even more constrained.

External graphics enclosure

You can see an even clearer difference on laptops that have only two processor cores instead of four—systems like the current MacBook Air, or two- or three-year-old laptops that include sixth- or seventh-generation Intel laptop processors. The AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 performed much better in some of our benchmarks when we connected it to an eight-core 15-inch MacBook Pro than when we attached it to a dual-core MacBook Air.

External graphics enclosure

The competition

OWC sells 550 W and 650 W Mercury Helios FX enclosures that are identical to Sonnet’s Breakaway Box models in specs, features, and price. The only difference is that the OWC versions don’t have the glowing blue S on the front. Like the Breakaway Box, the Mercury Helios FX is relatively inexpensive but noisier and cheaper looking, and lacking in the handy extra ports included with the Node Pro and Core X Chroma.

The Razer Core X is almost identical to the Core X Chroma, but it’s usually $300 instead of $400, and it doesn’t include either the customizable LEDs or the Gigabit Ethernet or USB-A ports. Without the LEDs, the Core X’s boxy black frame isn’t as nice to look at—functionally, it’s a fine enclosure, but we think the lights and ports on the Chroma model are worth paying a bit more for.

The VisionTek Thunderbolt 3 Mini eGFX is by far the smallest enclosure we tested, and it even has two USB-A ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port. Because of its smaller physical size and smaller power supply, however, you can use only shorter, mini-ITX-style graphics cards in it—cards as powerful as an RTX 2070 are available in this size, but your options are more limited and you sometimes pay more than you do for a standard-length card. But the biggest problem we found with this enclosure was that the included cooling fan was extremely noisy, and the included external power brick is bulky and ugly.

The Mantiz Venus MZ-02 is a full-featured enclosure generally available for between $320 and $400. It has multiple USB-A ports on the front and the back plus a Gigabit Ethernet port; it can deliver up to 87 W of power to a connected laptop, too, and it has a reasonably attractive all-metal body that’s easy to open up. But our review unit had noticeable, annoying coil whine, something that wasn’t present in the other enclosures we tested.

This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

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Americans are waiting three years to replace their phones, study finds

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Strategy Analytics conducted an online survey with 2,500 smartphone owners aged 18 to 64 years old in the US. Company SVP David Kerr explained that there are several reasons behind consumers’ decision not upgrade as quickly as they did in the past. To start with, buyers perceive newer phones’ offerings as marginal upgrades not worth getting a new device for.

The increasing prices of flagship devices are also proving to be prohibitive — in fact, Kerr believes that prices for 5G phones would be a key barrier in their adoption, even though a lot of people understand how important the feature is. Customers who spend over $1,000 on phones and who’ll likely purchase a 5G device when it becomes available only make up 7 percent of the people the firm surveyed.

Since smartphone shipments have been suffering for quite a while, tech giants like Apple are already looking for other ways to generate revenue, such as launching TV and music services. If Samsung and Apple do come up with a particularly impressive phone, though, buyers might give in and purchase one earlier than they were planning to: the study says their fans have strong brand loyalty, with 70 percent expressing interest in a repeat purchase. Samsung seems to be particularly popular among Gen Xers, while Gen Zers prefer Apple.

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Tactics’ and the evolution of Netflix’s video game strategy

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Netflix has even bigger plans for the future, though its ambition remains largely tied to the Stranger Things franchise. It hired Telltale Games to make a more complex narrative adventure set in the Duffer brothers’ universe, but that project fell through when the studio shut down in 2018. There’s still a location-based, augmented-reality Stranger Things game in development by The Walking Dead: Our World studio Next Games, due out for mobile devices in 2020.

And then there’s The Dark Crystal. Netflix is preparing to release its own series based on the 1982 Jim Henson film on August 30th, with a story set years before the events of the movie. Simultaneously, Netflix is extending its video game tendrils to a new franchise with The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics.

As a turn-based role-playing game, The Dark Crystal Tactics is more complex than the Stranger Things experiences, more steeped in video game nichery. Essentially, it’s the next logical step for Netflix.

“It’s one more step toward a more traditional, more hardcore genre.”
– David Whitfield, En Masse

“Stranger Things 3: The Game was a really, really close companion to the show, storywise,” said En Masse Entertainment product manager David Whitfield. En Masse distributed the PC and Mac versions of Stranger Things 3, and it’s publishing The Dark Crystal Tactics. “It was a little bit more pick-up-and-play, friendly for anyone who isn’t super into games. In terms of Tactics, I think it’s one more step toward a more traditional, more hardcore genre game. So someone that’s a big fan of Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, it will really appease that audience.”

Dark Crystal Tactics will have more than 70 missions set in the wild and magical land of Thra. The game will feature 20 to 25 character classes and five worlds to explore, and it’s due to hit Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Mac later this year. Everything about the game is closely aligned with the story and tone of the Netflix show, which follows a crew of Gelflings in their battle against the Skeksis.

This creative alignment doesn’t happen by accident.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics

“I think they’ve been an excellent partner,” En Masse director of live services Stefan Ramirez said. “There’s definitely a working relationship we have to keep in mind. Like the IP holder for the Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and then there’s also the Jim Henson Company, and then BonusXP. Luckily, we all work together really well, but there are some approvals and things like that, that we have to make sure we’re synced on.”

Netflix closely monitors the development of its games. Chris Lee is director of interactive games for Netflix, and at E3 2019 in June, we talked with him about the studio’s approach to Dark Crystal Tactics and Stranger Things 3: The Game.

“We’re there to help reinforce the authenticity.”
– Chris Lee, Netflix

“We sit down with the game development studio and we partner with people we think are really talented and who can do amazing work, so our goal isn’t to then box them to say, the game’s gotta look like this,” Lee said. “It’s to say, we’re working with you because of what you can do. Looking at this source material, how do we bring this to life in the right way? You gotta get them right. There’s never a moment where you step back and let it go, being there to help reinforce the authenticity.”

BonusXP president Dave Pottinger was there as well, and at the time, he called Stranger Things 3: The Game “the most secret project that has ever been conceived on the planet.”

The Dark Crystal Age of Resistance Tactics

“We have paper covering our office windows, nobody’s allowed into our office, it’s like five NDAs to have a contractor work on the project,” he said. “And that level of secrecy, we weren’t really used to. We’re used to getting the game to beta and having anybody that we can come and play it, and of course that’s not possible on this project.”

It’s all worthwhile, if only for the opportunity to contribute to beloved franchises, Pottinger said. When working with a company as large as Netflix, developers expect some red tape.

Dark Crystal Tactics is a far cry from the open-world adventure game it could’ve been, given the source material. However, it’s a bigger and denser game than Netflix has commissioned in the past, and it’s a clear sign that the company isn’t slowing down when it comes to interactive spin-offs.

“It still is similar to the Stranger Things games in that if you’re a fan of Dark Crystal, you just love the show and you just want to get more Dark Crystal, it’ll serve that purpose,” En Masse product manager Lee said. “But I think this is probably the next step toward really aiming for a specific genre.”

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Google’s internal community guidelines discourage political discussions

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As you may remember, a couple years ago an anti-diversity screed infuriated Googlers when it argued that Google should drop attempts to include different cultures and genders. More recently, Google has faced controversy over its warning that employees who protest the company at Pride must do so in their personal capacity, and it’s been charged with a retaliation culture. “Don’t assume you have the full story,” the guidelines caution employees.

The guidelines include “key things to remember”:

  • Be responsible. What you say and do matters. You’re responsible for your words and actions and you’ll be held accountable for them.
  • Be helpful. Your voice is your contribution — make it productive.
  • Be thoughtful. Your statements can be attributed to Google regardless of your intent, and you should be thoughtful about making statements that could cause others to make incorrect assumptions.

The guidelines instruct Googlers to “avoid controversies that are disruptive to the workplace” and that make fellow employees feel like they don’t belong. “While sharing information and ideas with colleagues helps build community, disrupting the workday to have a raging debate over politics or the latest news story does not,” the guidelines read. As a final note, the guidelines point out that, due to local laws, Googlers may discuss pay, hours, other work terms or conditions and violation of laws.

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‘Streets of Rage 4’ is shaping up to be a worthy sequel

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The gameplay teaser that followed half a year later showed a 2D game that seemed to play like the originals, but the art style still didn’t seem “right.” Why is the art such a massive departure? Would the game feel as direct and satisfying to play? Those were the kind of questions I was (silently, unlike many fans on social media) asking myself.

Then came the musicians. Last month, the game’s publisher Dotemu announced that Motohiro Kawashima and Yuzo Koshiro, whose contributions to the original soundtracks are legendary, were on board, joined by Hedeki Naganuma (Jet Set Radio), Keji Yamagishi (Ninja Gaiden) and Yoko Shimomura, who’s most famous for the Kingdom Hearts series (before that she had worked on music for Final Fight, Street Fighter II, Legend of Mana and many others). To call it an all-star group would be an understatement. At the very least, then, this game would sound great.

So, I came to my 30-minute demo at Gamescom with some trepidation. In all honesty, I expected to hear some great music scoring an underwhelming tribute to a long-dead game series. I was wrong. Streets of Rage 4 plays, and looks, like a dream.

The game is being developed by three studios: Lizardcube, who brought Wonder Boy back to life in 2017 with The Dragon’s Trap, is doing the artwork; Guard Crush Games, responsible for the hilariously good XBLA beat-’em-up Streets of Fury is lending its engine and handling the programming; publisher Dotemu is assisting in game design and, naturally, publishing.

It took just a few seconds playing Streets of Rage 4 for me to understand how much love has gone into this game. The characters are hand-drawn, but precise, mirroring the feel of the original pixel art, and everything is richly animated. It still has that saturday-morning-cartoon feel, but with a frame rate 12 times higher. That’s a style that publisher Dotemu seems enamored with: the Wonder Boy remake Lizardcube worked on is understandably comparable, and Windjammers 2 similarly supplants decades-old pixel art with sharp hand-drawn lines.

Streets of Rage 4

Then there’s the background art. While the classic Streets of Rage games had gorgeous, but fairly static backdrops, 4‘s stages are teeming with life. In the level I played, there were people eating at roadside bars, flies swirling around trash, pots boiling on stoves, cherry blossoms falling on wet paving that reflected the city behind — it’s really quite breathtaking when you stop and admire the scenery. Not that there’s much time for that.

Streets of Rage 4 fills your screen with multiple foes to kick, punch and throw aside. It follows the formula of the originals, introducing new enemies as solo threats before adding them to the pool of characters you’ll face off against in huge brawls. This gives you a little breathing room to learn each opponent’s patterns and quirks, and ensures a continually increasing difficulty level through the game.

The controls will be familiar to veterans, and easy to pick up for newcomers. You could feasibly play this game with a Genesis controller: There’s an attack button, a jump button, a ‘special attack’ button and that’s it. Specials are, as in 2 and 3, more like moves in Street Fighter than the original game’s screen-clearing cop car. Rather than arbitrarily limit how often you can do a special, the moves take away some of your health, which can be replenished with regular attacks until you get hit. There’s also a leaping special, which can be pulled off, appropriately, by pressing jump and special at the same time.

Streets of Rage 4

Streets of Rage 4 feels tight. The controls are responsive, there’s a sufficient weight to attacks and the same patterns and techniques I used decades ago worked as expected. The special system is nicely balanced, encouraging you to risk your health in the hope that you can evade hits until you regain life. There are also some environmental hazards, like electricity, acid and fire, which should add some variety and strategy to fights. There’s no throwing out the rule book here, just little tweaks and changes, as you’d expect from a sequel.

At present there are three playable characters, although that could increase before the game’s eventual launch. Series mainstays Axel and Blaze are joined by a new character named Cherry. She’s the daughter of Adam Hunter, who was the final playable character from the original game, and had cameos in later games. Cherry plays a bit like Skate from the second game (which tracks, as he’s her uncle) and is faster-but-weaker than the lumbering Axel. She also has a guitar on her back and one of her specials is using it like Pete Townshend on an unsuspecting enemy. I’m already a fan.

Ironically, the one thing I expected to love about Streets of Rage 4 wasn’t there. I could barely make out the music because publisher Dotemu’s booth at Gamescom was far louder than the tiny speakers connected to the TV. Thankfully IGN has uploaded some gameplay from the level I played, and while there’s still some work to be done with character voices and foley, I like where it’s going. There’s also a new Motohiro Kawashima track on Dotemu’s Bandcamp that sounds as wild as anything he created for the old games:

So, yeah, against all odds, Streets of Rage 4 has won me over in record time. While the developers haven’t announced when the game will arrive, we do know that it’ll be available on all the expected platforms: PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and PC. I imagine Dotemu will continue to trickle out information on characters, enemies, music and the like over the coming weeks and months before announcing the release date and pricing.

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iDevices’ Alexa-powered smart light switch finally goes on sale

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The light switch doesn’t require a separate Alexa device, so you could use it instead of an Echo or other smart speaker. You can control the Instinct using the Alexa app, including the creation of Routines to automate daily tasks, and you can access Alexa skills too.

Another potential use for a smart light switch is in the entryway to your home. You could turn on your AC, play music, turn on your lights and open your blinds the moment you step through the door, all by pressing one switch. Or it could be handy in the kitchen when your hands are full and you want Alexa to read out a recipe for you.

The device includes a motion sensor and ambient light sensors, and although these functionalities aren’t available yet they should be enabled in a future over-the-air update.

Instinct is hub-free and compatible with iOS and Android devices. It’s available now on Amazon for $99.95.

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