Akitio Node Titan

PRICE £330

Mac users who spend enough time looking at accessories, add-ons, or tools needed for a hardware upgrade will inevitably run into OWC (Other World Computing), via their massive portfolio of clever products and guides that aim to make life easier on MACOS. They sell all kinds of Thunderbolt enclosures, with many aimed at storage expansion, catering for hard disks, 2.5-inch SATA and NVME SSDS.

Akitio is OWC’S EGPU enclosure brand, just as compatible with Windows PCS as well as Macs. Their portfolio has enclosures for full-length, half-length and dual graphics cards, but it’s the Node Titan that is their most recent external graphics enclosure, coming with an impressive specification, and an all-metal build in a shade of dark grey that feels solid and high quality.

It has unique removable thumbscrews, making it very easy to open the enclosure and replace your card. There’s also a retractable handle for transport that pops up from the top. Airflow comes in via one side only.

It’s a relatively compact design too, 13.5cm wide, which is considerably less than both the Sonnet Breakaway Box and the Razer Core Chroma.

It’s not quite as slim as the Asus XG Station Pro and it’s notably taller as well. But unlike the Asus, which suffers from a slightly weedy external PSU, the Akitio has a beefy 650W internal PSU that should be able to handle a wide range of graphics cards.

Another less fortunate difference is that the Akitio Node Titan can be noisy. The fan is positioned at the bottom, and although it could be removed and replaced with something more efficient, it looks a little tricky to access.

It also lacks any extra ports, which seems like a bit of a missed opportunity, given the possibilities when connecting up a Thunderbolt cable.

But in its favour the Akitio Node Titan is fairly reasonably priced, given it can support a wide range of graphics cards. It’s not as easy to find in the UK as other enclosures though. At the time of writing we couldn’t find it on Amazon and instead had to look at some Macspecialist vendors.

VERDICT

Premium quality and well priced, but lacking extra ports