Sonnet's Echo SE I T5 adds a PCIe slot to Thunderbolt 5 Macs for $399.99, for any card except a graphics cardSonnet's Echo SE I T5 adds a PCIe slot to Thunderbolt 5 Macs for $399.99, for any card except a graphics card

Sonnet is selling the Echo SE I T5, a desktop enclosure that connects one PCIe expansion card to a Mac over Thunderbolt 5, for 399.99 dollars from its own store.

Sonnet's product page says the enclosure works with Apple silicon Macs, with Intel Macs that have Thunderbolt 3, and with Windows and Linux computers that have Thunderbolt 5, Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 ports. It is aimed at the Mac mini and MacBook Pro, which have no internal slots, AppleInsider reports. Sonnet lists video capture and playback cards, audio interfaces, SAS, SATA and Fibre Channel adapters, 10 and 25 gigabit Ethernet cards and RAID controllers as the kind of card it is for.

Echo SE I T5 specifications

From Sonnet's product page, read on 8 October:

Sonnet says the bandwidth is twice what Thunderbolt 4 or 3 can give a card. AppleInsider gives 6,800 MB/s; Sonnet's own page says up to 6,000 MB/s, and we use Sonnet's figure. The spare card space can hold a daughter card that adds ports to the main one, and the power connector lets the enclosure run cards such as AJA's Kona 5 and Blackmagic's DeckLink 8K Pro G2, which Sonnet names.

Can you put a graphics card in it?

No. Sonnet describes it as taking almost any Thunderbolt-compatible, non-GPU PCIe card. That is a Mac limit as much as Sonnet's. Apple silicon Macs do not support external graphics cards at all, which is the same wall WiCi's wireless Nvidia enclosure runs into, and even the free NullMoth driver that gets an RTX card working does it on Intel hardware with security features switched off.

Our take

This is a niche product, and the niche is real. A video editor who needs a capture card, a studio running a PCIe audio interface, or anyone who wants 25 gigabit networking has needed a Mac Pro or a slower Thunderbolt 3 box. Thunderbolt 5 roughly doubles what the card gets, and that is the difference between a capture card that drops frames and one that does not. Sonnet already sells a Thunderbolt 5 10GbE adapter for anyone who needs only fast networking, and the Echo is the general-purpose version.

Two cautions. Check your Mac has Thunderbolt 5; on an older port the box works but the bandwidth halves, and that removes most of the reason to buy this one rather than an older model. And check the card against Sonnet's compatibility chart, because not every PCIe card has Mac drivers, and that is the problem most likely to stop a project.

APPDOOK's view is that the Echo SE I T5 is the right size of answer to the Mac mini's missing slots: one card, quietly, at a price below what any Mac with slots costs. It will not turn a Mac mini into a gaming PC, and Sonnet is honest about that.