Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Oakland Police headquarters, as seen in 2012. (credit: Daniel Arauz)

OAKLAND, Calif.—A federal prosecutor seemed to trip up during a Wednesday court hearing in an attempted murder case. The reason? This prosecutor had to explain how cell-site simulators, sometimes known as stingrays, actually operate.

Joseph Alioto, the lead federal prosecutor, initially suggested that the suspect’s mobile phone company, MetroPCS, needed to somehow activate the Oakland Police Department’s stingray immediately following the January 21, 2013 shooting of a police officer. But that’s not how stingrays work—rather, they act as fake mobile phone towers and do not require any affirmative interaction on behalf of any phone company’s network.

Despite the mistake, the Wednesday hearing may prove to be a crucial one in the ongoing case of United States v. Ellis, where four men are charged with the 2013 attempted murder of local police officer Eric Karsseboom in a parking area near an East Oakland apartment complex. (One of those men, Damien McDaniel, pleaded guilty earlier this year.)

Enlarge / The Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box and Sapphire RX 580. (credit: Mark Walton)

The external graphics card (or eGFX), long the pipe dream of laptop-touting gamers the world over, has finally come of age. Thanks to Thunderbolt 3—which offers up to 40Gbps of bandwidth, the equivalent of four PCIe 3.0 lanes—consumers finally have access to enough bandwidth in a universal standard to make eGFX a viable option.

So the theory goes, you can now take most laptops with a Thunderbolt 3 port, plug in a box containing a power supply and your GPU of choice, and enjoy better visuals and higher frame rates in games, and faster rendering in production tasks. You can even whack a PCIe video capture card or a production-ready audio interface in that external box, if you so wish.

Thus far the limiting factor, aside from some potential performance bottlenecks and driver support, has been price. The Razer Core, as beautifully designed as it is, costs a whopping £500/$500 without a graphics card—and that's if it's even in stock. Meanwhile, the Asus ROG XG Station 2—which is most certainly not beautifully designed—costs £400/$400. When paired with a decent graphics card like an Nvidia GTX 1070 or an AMD RX 580, a full eGFX setup runs just shy of £900/$900, not including the price of a laptop to pair it with.