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The ASUS ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA is a highly portable and elegant looking notebook PC which comes with integrated Intel graphics. Intel graphics is generally fine for most productivity and casual use, but the ASUS ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA also has two Thunderbolt 3 ports to dramatically increase its graphics performance to support graphics intensive gaming, virtual reality, and 3D modeling and rendering software.
To add this level of graphics performance, you will need to add a high end external graphics card like the PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 8GB GDDR5 which traditionally needed to be used in a desktop PC motherboard. With new Thunderbolt 3 external graphics docks like the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box, you can now connect external graphics cards through the dock to a Thunderbolt 3 enabled notebook PC. This allows you to keep the mobility advantages of a notebook PC while providing the flexibility to add graphics performance and access to more peripherals when back at your desk.
Note to get the maximum performance, you should use the 40 Gb/s Thunderbolt 3 cable that comes with the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box or you can use a third party cable like the Belkin Thunderbolt 3 40Gbps USB-C Cable (0.5m).
To determine how much additional performance could be gained by using the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box with the PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 8GB GDDR5, we ran the Rise of the Tomb Raider's DX12 benchmarking to compare frames per second (fps) results.
Without the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box, the ASUS ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA was only able to achieve an overall score of 6.66 fps using the game's benchmarking stats while running the game on an external 4K display.
By adding the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box, we were able to see a drastic increase in performance, achieving an overall score of 44.41 fps using the same 4K display.
In addition to improving graphics performance, the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box also delivers power to the ASUS ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA over Thunderbolt 3 by leveraging USB Power Delivery technology.
With the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box and the ASUS ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA being connected using the Thunderbolt cable, we look at the USB Power Delivery negotiations which show the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box declaring it can output 15 watts (5 volts @ 3 amps), 36 watts (12 volts @ 3 amps), and 60 watts (20 volts @ 3 amps). The ASUS ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA then requests to pull 56 watts (20 volts @ 2.8 amps) which is accepted by the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box.
The ASUS ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA on a half charged battery can be seen to draw around 50 watts (2.5 amps @ 20 volts) of charging power from the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box, which confirms that the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box is able to charge the ASUS ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA properly using USB Power Delivery over the Thunderbolt 3 interface.
It's great to see that the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box not only upgrades graphic performance but also provides charging power to various Thunderbolt 3 PC's like the ASUS ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA. Additionally, the TUL-PowerColor Devil Box also serves as a docking solution for high speed LAN gaming and enables other USB accessories like storage, mice, gaming controllers, and keyboards to be attached.
