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US$314 Sonnet Echo Express SEL (16Gbps-TB2)


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Presumably you are still using the AC adapter supplied with the SEL. Since the pcie riser and the DC adapter are supply power to the same parts of the circuit (slot), they'd ideally be supplied by a single source. It's recommended you get a molex-to-DC adapter and power the DC jack of the SEL with your ATX PSU. It was pointed out in the AKiTiO thread that use of two PSUs could, and very likely is, introducing ground loops leading to instability.

Thanks Nando, I'll try that too! I've been wondering if I can do this as well since I don't like having my eGPU taking up two plugs plus I have plenty of room for my perfectly good PSU. I just kept buying the wrong barrel plug so I gave up on it. Maybe I should try again!

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Yeah, my riser has a powered input via a molex connector. Doesn't crash under Furmark, crashes under Unigine Valley, and now a couple of games too.

THAT is strange (imho)! Furmark should creat the highest loads, by that "normal" benchmarks and games should affect it in a more challenging way.

Could you monitor your GPU load with MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision X? With that you should see how much power in % it is using. You also can limit the % of power it is using to gain some more stability…

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THAT is strange (imho)! Furmark should creat the highest loads, by that "normal" benchmarks and games should affect it in a more challenging way.

Could you monitor your GPU load with MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision X? With that you should see how much power in % it is using. You also can limit the % of power it is using to gain some more stability…

I can also run furmark without problem but i got crash while playing a game which use something like 50% of power.

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Mark, I see your PSU is not single rail, make sure to get power from different rails for the 6-8 pin, as well as the power for the thunderbolt adapter. The theoretical power limitations per rail for your psu are 12v x 24A, which is less than what your card needs.

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I can also run furmark without problem but i got crash while playing a game which use something like 50% of power.

My experience with the 290x was similar, it did not even matter if the card was under full load, it would crash at idle if I waited long enough. Works perfectly in my friend's desktop ever since I switched to Nvidia.

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THAT is strange (imho)! Furmark should creat the highest loads, by that "normal" benchmarks and games should affect it in a more challenging way.

Could you monitor your GPU load with MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision X? With that you should see how much power in % it is using. You also can limit the % of power it is using to gain some more stability…

I had PrecisionX running when I did my Valley run. The GPU clock was 1162 MHZ whilst the Voltage was at 1.184 V. During Furmark, it was running between 98% and 101% TDP, mostly at something like 99.7%.

Mark, I see your PSU is not single rail, make sure to get power from different rails for the 6-8 pin, as well as the power for the thunderbolt adapter. The theoretical power limitations per rail for your psu are 12v x 24A, which is less than what your card needs.

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My experience with the 290x was similar, it did not even matter if the card was under full load, it would crash at idle if I waited long enough. Works perfectly in my friend's desktop ever since I switched to Nvidia.

Thanks! I didn't notice that at all! Unfortunately, my other modular PCIe cable is somewhere else so I'm taking it tomorrow.

Anyway, I lowered my power target to 84% and changed the GPU clock to -105 MHz (the lowest it can be). Valley still crashed. Strangely enough, the sound works fine when my computer "crashes".

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I still have this issue with my AkiTio for OS X. Under heavy load, OS would crash (similar to what you experience). I already posted the other kernel panic log in the previous thread. I can't recreate lowering the power and gpu clock similar to Windows since OS X doesn't have such utility.

Tried the following combinations

1. New PSU 650

2. 2 different of Riser

3. AkiTio and Riser are powered form PSU (barrel matted with molex)

I guess am now stuck with an AkiTio that will be used to daisy chain Thunderbolt, and stick with Sonnet III-D.

Or I can send my AkiTio and have someone take a look at it and what needs to be done :)

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I just realised that my other PSU is sitting in here: my VS650. I plugged that in, and guess what? It still crashes under Valley. It has a maximum of 600W on its 12V rail, so it has more than enough power for it :(

I can narrow it down to just three things:

1. There's an issue with the SEL supplying power through its PCIe slot

2. The SEL doesn't like Factory OC versions of graphics cards (reference stock-clocked cards may be the safest option)

3. I've been blessed with yet another faulty GPU

I'm now contacting Amazon about my card, hopefully the RMA process will go smoothly.

Worst case solution at this point: Drop £650 on a Sonnet III-D enclosure and another £450 on a GTX 980. Hopefully I can sell the SEL and the 780 Ti (the replacement if RMA is successful)

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I just realised that my other PSU is sitting in here: my VS650. I plugged that in, and guess what? It still crashes under Valley. It has a maximum of 600W on its 12V rail, so it has more than enough power for it :(

I can narrow it down to just three things:

1. There's an issue with the SEL supplying power through its PCIe slot

2. The SEL doesn't like Factory OC versions of graphics cards (reference stock-clocked cards may be the safest option)

3. I've been blessed with yet another faulty GPU

I'm now contacting Amazon about my card, hopefully the RMA process will go smoothly.

Worst case solution at this point: Drop £650 on a Sonnet III-D enclosure and another £450 on a GTX 980. Hopefully I can sell the SEL and the 780 Ti (the replacement if RMA is successful)

Last thing I would say try a molex powered riser. If that does not work, no need to sell the thunderbolt adapter, you are better off selling the 780 ti and getting the 970 or 980. Both cards use under 200 Watt.

I am running a short board 970 Zotac right now with no issues. Performance on par with the 780 SC ACX it replaced. Both the 970 and 980 can be powered by a DA-2 power brick.

3dmark11 run on laptop internal screen, no OC:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7,Apple Inc. Mac-3CBD00234E554E41

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I still have this issue with my AkiTio for OS X. Under heavy load, OS would crash (similar to what you experience). I already posted the other kernel panic log in the previous thread. I can't recreate lowering the power and gpu clock similar to Windows since OS X doesn't have such utility.

Tried the following combinations

1. New PSU 650

2. 2 different of Riser

3. AkiTio and Riser are powered form PSU (barrel matted with molex)

I guess am now stuck with an AkiTio that will be used to daisy chain Thunderbolt, and stick with Sonnet III-D.

Or I can send my AkiTio and have someone take a look at it and what needs to be done :)

What video card are you running?

*780 TI from your signature, so at least we can narrow the problem to cards using 300Watt of power.

Aware of anyone running 780TI with no problems? Maybe different bios version/manufacturer? We can at least make a black list of problematic cards for future reference.

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Last thing I would say try a molex powered riser. If that does not work, no need to sell the thunderbolt adapter, you are better off selling the 780 ti and getting the 970 or 980. Both cards use under 200 Watt.

I am running a short board 970 Zotac right now with no issues. Performance on par with the 780 SC ACX it replaced. Both the 970 and 980 can be powered by a DA-2 power brick.

3dmark11 run on laptop internal screen, no OC:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7,Apple Inc. Mac-3CBD00234E554E41

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What video card are you running?

I have the EVGA GTX 780 Ti reference model. I have previously tried the following cards on my AkiTio (760, 770, and 780) both have same results. Is there any utility for OSX to see the GPU temperature? I do have iStat Menus, but it doesn't show any information about GPU. It show's which one is being used but not the utilization related to the GPU.

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I changed my 770 for a 970. No crash yesterday but it sill can happen anytime. The performance increase is awesome : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4850HQ,Apple Inc. Mac-2BD1B31983FE1663 but i got a new problem : a terrible buzzing noise ... The strange thing is that the noise seems to become from both graphic card and sonnet adapter.

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I changed my 770 for a 970. No crash yesterday but it sill can happen anytime. The performance increase is awesome : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4850HQ,Apple Inc. Mac-2BD1B31983FE1663 but i got a new problem : a terrible buzzing noise ... The strange thing is that the noise seems to become from both graphic card and sonnet adapter.

Try running Unigine Valley for a couple of hours. This is possibly the best program for testing GPU stability.

Which Sonnet adapter are you using by the way? The buzzing noise could just be the capacitors whining, I get that on my set up sometimes as well, I think that is normal.

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I changed my 770 for a 970. No crash yesterday but it sill can happen anytime. The performance increase is awesome : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4850HQ,Apple Inc. Mac-2BD1B31983FE1663 but i got a new problem : a terrible buzzing noise ... The strange thing is that the noise seems to become from both graphic card and sonnet adapter.

can you please post your testing. Are your running this via osx or windows?

yeah try using unigine the max settings and highest resolution.. Try to test 4 consecutive times...try also luxmark..

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OK. so it's not with the card really since you upgraded to 970 and still got the random crash.

No, I didn't get any crash since I upgraded the card.

I haven't try to run unigine, playing any game couple hours was far enough to get a crash with a 770. My problem was stability on time, not on load.

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Hey guys, goalque has PM'd me a very good suggestion. I used a powered Molex x8 to x16 riser, however, it had a ground (black) wire. In theory, by removing it, I would also remove the ground loop that's the issue with using two power supplies to power the slot.

What I've done is removed the ground wire. It was easy as I was able to remove the pin from the Molex connector. I've also used both PCIe cables from my Seasonic (so it now has access to the full 576W from the 12V rail rather than 288W from a single cable).

I ran Unigine Valley on Windows. I was able to run it for 20 minutes before crashing to desktop (as opposed to crashing the entire computer). I thought that it was Valley with the problem, but when I ran Valley on OS X, it froze the whole system after 5 minutes.

I'm just going to up sticks and buy a Sonnet III-D enclosure.

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So is it conclusive to say that this setup will work with a MBPr 2014 iris model, with bootcamp win 8.1 and optimus?

EVGA GTX 980

Sonnet SEL

8x to 16x riser

External PSU

It is very likely that it works out of the box and it's plug and play, if you use a powered x8 to x16 riser with only a single 12V yellow wire (no ground). I bought one from Cablematic. I cannot guarantee this solution is safe, but was stable on gaming. Better is to use molex-to-barrel-plug adapter without 12V/7A adapter included with the SEL. GPU fans start to spin only when the riser is powered via molex from PSU.

In my previous setup I had SEL + EVGA GTX 780 and it performed the same compared to AKiTiO, but Optimus support was even better. It worked every time and no sluggishness when booting. You just need to wait for some 5 seconds to external screen appear. I also discovered that when you booted from an external thunderbolt SSD drive attached to the second port of the SEL, it didn't affected to the performance, but you always lose internal screen Optimus, and there is no workaround for this. If you like to have eGPU on OSX side as well, and don't need quad core CPU, I recommend MBPr 13" late 2013, but some CPU hungry games on Windows 8.1 are not very playable via internal screen.

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