A wild new external GPU enclosure has surfaced that is designed to provide an RTX 5090 or RTX 5060 Ti gaming experience over a wireless display connection. Known as the WiCi One, the enclosure uses a Wi-Fi 7 connection instead of DisplayPort or HDMI to project a display signal to a laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone. The base model starts at $1,999 for the RTX 5060 Ti version.
The WiCi One is a high-end GPU enclosure targeted at gamers, creators, and AI developers, featuring not just a dedicated RTX 50 series GPU but an Intel CPU, Wi-Fi 7 module, and NVMe storage included in the enclosure to provide wireless display connectivity and additional storage for machine learning workloads. The eGPU enclosure uses a virtual GPU driver and its Wi-Fi 7 module to provide display output to a host machine. The internal NVMe SSD is designed to use TurboStream, which is a feature that turns the SSD into a working VRAM pool, improving the complexity of AI models that can be deployed on the GPU.
Popular Now: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess 3DS port is getting closer to release as New 3DS performance improvesA couple of gaming benchmarks were provided on the WiCi One product page, advertising up to 110 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K Ultra with DLSS 4, and 90 FPS at 4K Cinematic with DLSS 4 on the RTX 5090 version. The RTX 5060 Ti version was capable of providing 80 FPS and 60 FPS, respectively, in the same titles at the same settings.
The marketing pitch for the WiCi One revolves entirely around its wireless display capability, making it one of the first (if not the first) eGPUs to use a wireless connection to run. Besides the benefits of not having to use a display cable at all for display output, one of the best advantages of the WiCi One's Wi-Fi 7 support is its compatibility with virtually any device that has Wi-Fi 7 functionality. With most eGPU docks, you need a device that supports Thunderbolt, USB4, or OCULink to use it (unless you're willing to rip out the M.2 SSD in your device and put in an adapter).
Wi-Fi 7 has enough bandwidth to run a display connection, featuring a theoretical maximum limit of 46Gbps. For perspective, that is more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4a, which has 32.4 Gbps of bandwidth. However, the creators of the WiCi One noted in a blog post that they had to modify the way Wi-Fi is used on the eGPU to optimize for low latency by transmitting data asynchronously to make Wi-Fi 7 usable as a wireless replacement for USB4 or Thunderbolt.
Frequently Asked Questions
Open a question for an answer from TweakTown's coverage of this news, or ask your own below.
How does WiCi One's gaming latency compare with a wired Thunderbolt or USB4 eGPU connection?
Which operating systems and host devices support WiCi One's virtual GPU driver?
Does WiCi One connect directly to a host over Wi-Fi 7, or does it require a Wi-Fi network?
What resolution and refresh rates can WiCi One transmit over Wi-Fi 7?
Have a question that isn't listed here? Ask below, and TweakBot will answer it.
The WiCi One comes in two models: a baseline model starting at $1,999 featuring an RTX 5060 Ti GPU and Core i3 100U CPU, and a flagship $2,599 model featuring an RTX 5090 GPU and Core Ultra 7 255H CPU.
