When I saw the heft of the fan included in the Helios FX, I was a little concerned that it would be noisy, but it really is whisper-quiet. My first impression of the Helios FX is that it is very light, which I did not expect.

I ended up going with the OWC Mercury Helios FX and the AMD Radeon Pro WX7100. That saved a lot of early guesswork, research and missteps. Through my research, I found it very helpful that OWC offers a very complete list of GPU cards they have tested. So the best way to find out was to test it, but I knew I was jumping head-on into a situation that might not work.įor my test, I wanted to go with a fairly inexpensive graphics card and eGPU unit. With Mac OS High Sierra, Apple introduced connecting eGPUs to Macs via Thunderbolt 3, but my big question was: “Will this work with a Thunderbolt 2 Mac?” Doing a bit of Google research, I couldn’t find any concrete evidence that told me it could work. When I’m on set, I use my MacBook Pro to backup data and do quick edits, but it’s a laptop and lacks the power needed to handle RAW files in that environment.

2015 macbook pro 13 with external gpu