MINISFORUM DEG2 eGPU supports OCuLink and USB4 v2 connections

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The MINISFORUM DEG2 is an external graphics dock with a PCIe x16 connector for a graphics card, support for an ATX power supply, and two options for connecting your GPU to a computer: OCuLink and USB4 v2.

Global pricing and availability details haven't been announced yet, but MINISFORUM introduced the DEG2 in China earlier this month, so we've got a pretty good idea of what it can do.

OCuLink is basically a standard for external PCIe connections, with support for up to four lanes of PCIe 4.0 for data transfer speeds up to 64 Gbps. Not many PCs actually have OCuLink ports though, so it's nice to see that this eGPU also has a USB4 v2 port – the previous-gen DEG1 graphics dock had only an OCuLink connector.

That USB4 v2 port should allow you to use the dock with any PC that has a USB4 or Thunderbolt 3 or newer port.

Like Thunderbolt 5, USB4 v2 theoretically supports data transfer speeds up to 80 Gbps. But that doesn't mean that you'll get better performance using this port than you would if you used an OCuLink connection. That's because you're still limited to 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0.

So while the dock has a PCIe x16 slot that will all ow you to connect most recent desktop graphics cards, you won't actually be able to use more than 4 lanes no matter which port you use to connect the dock to a PC.

The USB4 v2 port does have some other benefits though – it allows you to use this sort of dock not only for a graphics card, but also to add extra functionality to your PC. The DEG2 has an M.2 2280 slot that you can use to add an SSD, a 2.5 GbE Ethernet port, and two USB 3.2 ports: one with support for speeds up to 10 GBps and one that tops out at 5 Gbps.

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