Alienware Alpha R1 + GTX 960@ 4Gbps-M2E (EXP GDC 8.3) + Win8.1 [igel]

[igel]

There was another thread around here, asking for Alienware Alpha, so here is the answer - yes it is possible to have an eGPU on the Alpha, at least on the first generation Alpha.

 

While the hardware setup was relatively easy, the driver installation was somewhat tricky. The PCIe signal cable for the eGPU needs to be very flexible, luckily the GDX EXP cable is. 

 

Hardware:

Alienware Alpha R1, i3 4130T, 16GB RAM,  750GB HDD (GTX 860M dGPU) 

Windows 8.1 (the original one coming from Alienware)

GDC EXP Beast v8.3 + M.2 E cable

EVGA GTX 960 SC

EVGA G2 550W PSU with the test tool connected on the 24 pin connector. 

 

Hardware connection:

1. To open the alpha turn it on it's top with the vents facing you, there are 4 screws deep inside, 2 on the left side and two on the right.

2. Once the case is off, with the fans on top and vents facing you, unclip the fan housing of the dGPU (there is a label) - the right one, and put it to lay somewhere. There is no need to unplug the fan wires. 

3. With the fan housing out of the way, the M.2 E slot (occupied with the wifi card) is located forward on the right side. There is a small piece of transparent plastic covering the antenna cable connectors and the screw for the M.2 slot passes through it. Remove the screw, and make sure not to lose the plastic piece, then unclip the antenna cables and remove the wifi card.

4. Put in the M.2 E cable from the  GDC EXP and lay the cable straight back towards you, just on the right of the dGPU heat sink and over the top of the vent plate.

5. Replace the dGPU fan. The dGPU needs the cooling as it is powered when the computer is on. 

6. Optionally you can file a short section of the plastic edge of the top cover (above the vents, where the signal cable is going out). Or run your alpha without a top cover. 

7. Connect the rest of the eGPU, PSU and external monitor to the eGPU directly. For the initial setup you need both the eGPU and dGPU connected to a monitor. 

 

Startup procedure:  

1. Monitor

2. PSU

3. Alpha

 

Initial setup:

After powering on, the post and bios screen will automatically appear on the eGPU, but as windows loads, it will appear on the dGPU, so you will need to have that on your monitor. Windows does not install the drivers for the eGPU automatically, and will present an exclamation mark in  device manager. Installing the proper drivers (win 8.1 64bit) from nVidia  doesn't work - produces a error message that the package and the OS don't match. Tried with multiple downloads, same result. Also tried installing the various versions of the 960 driver that are already on the system, but the same version incompatibility.  Luckily Alienware have left an nVidia folder on the root of the system disk, with an older version drivers, but they still support the 960. From device manager select the standard vga adapter and install the drivers manually, making sure to select the folder. These did install fine. Once the drivers are installed you can restart the Alpha and unplug the dGPU HDMI cable in the mean time. 

 

Observations:

Even though I haven't tried updating the drivers any further from the old version that is already on the disk, the GTX 960 eGPU even at PCI 2.0 x1 provided 45% to 50% boost in frame rate in synthetic bench marking (Heaven, Valley) at the highest presets. Lower resolutions where the frame rate is above 90 FPS do suffer because of the x1 bandwidth; at 1920x1080 and 1920x1200 the framerates don't bottleneck the x1 link. The scores are the same as with the same eGPU running on the Lenovo Ideacentre 200. The Withcher 1 and Minecraft with shaders  also showed about 40% increase in FPS.