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Akitio Thunder2 + AMD R9 Nano - help?


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Hi everyone,

 

I have an Akitio Thunder2 enclosure with the Radeon R9 Nano seated and an external power supply powering the R9 Nano. The gfx card's fan is spinning after I plug in the thunderbolt cable to my Macbook Pro Retina 15 inch.

 

The external (750w) PSU is on and powering the gfx card and I have a thunderbolt cable plugged into the Macbook Pro, but neither booting into Bootcamp (windows 10) or nor El Capitan results in anything being displayed to the monitor I have connected through an HDMI cable to my gfx card.

 

What am I missing here? My PSU is 750w so I'm pretty sure it's properly powering the gfx card. The fan is spinning on the gfx card and stops when I unplug the thunderbolt cable from the computer.

 

I'm sure I'm missing something, can anyone help? The plan was that if this doesn't work in any way, then I was going to just eat the cost of getting a motherboard + cpu + case to build a windows machine.

 

Oh, I should mention this is mainly to power my HTC Vive for development. Thanks!!!

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thank you for replying!

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m09gbaraxc8s86p/power.jpeg

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s43qj1ge0wvjmyw/screendmanager.png

 

the second link is the device manager on my mac pro (not my macbook pro) that is showing that "error 12" though I'm not sure I saw that on my macbook pro. I'll check and update this.

 

Any ideas? Thanks for you help.

 

-Justin

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So you are using the AKiTiO PSU? That is way too weak for any eGPU setup. You should power the AKiTiO from the 12V of the 750W PSU!

Do you have other GPUs in your MacBook?

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3 hours ago, Dschijn said:

 

The magic word is "barrel plug":

 

 

 

hmmm, very interesting. I'll make a barrel plug then.

 

To make one, I need a 5.5mm x 2.5mm DC male. I'm going to go ahead and assume 5.5mm x 2.1mm DC male simply won't fit and/or work, though I would delighted to be told I'm wrong.

 

I'm not sure why I thought the barrel plug was only necessary if I were not using an external desktop PSU.  

 

Thank you for your help, Dschijn!

 

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11 hours ago, Dschijn said:

So you are using the AKiTiO PSU? That is way too weak for any eGPU setup. You should power the AKiTiO from the 12V of the 750W PSU!

Do you have other GPUs in your MacBook?

 

I'm curious why you're asking. I assume iGPU refers to the integrated graphics card provided by Intel. My 2015 MBPr also has a Radeon 370X. 

 

I USED TO believe it was an impressive video card until I read the specs on the newer/larger cards that are needed to achieve a minimum of 90 FPS for VR, and to be perfectly honest, the difference on white paper is completely out of control. Completely out of control.

 

 

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1 hour ago, justintime said:

My 2015 MBPr also has a Radeon 370X. 

An important detail. With the molex-to-barrel mod everything should work out of the box on Windows 10 Boot Camp, which has built-in AMD drivers.

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