2015 iMac (27", 5K, R9395X, Late 2015) + GTX980Ti@16Gbps-TB2 (AKiTiO Thunder2) + OSX10.11.3/Win10 [mmomega]

[mmomega]

 

 

I finally got around to ordering my eGPU setup after quite a few months of reading and researching across the internet and found the information here to be far and above the best collection of resources on the subject. So I felt confident enough to throw some money into the wind and to see what happened, hopefully with it paying off with a working eGPU setup even though I haven't read yet of someone getting it working in Windows on a 5k with a discrete AMD chip. Maybe I just haven't read enough but I haven't come across one yet.

 

I'll start off with the entire list of goodies.

 

iMac Details

 

Late 2015 27" 5k iMac

4.0GHz i7 6700k

32GB 2133MHz Kingston HyperX RAM

512GB PCIE SSD

Radeon R9 395X 4GB Graphics card

 

eGPU Details

 

Akitio Thunder 2 Box

EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC+ ACX2.0 6GB RAM Graphics Card

Corsair CX750M PSU

2.5mm x 5mm Barrel Plug with leads

2 - 4Pin Molex Female + Male extenders ( I just had these lying around)

 

I ordered a 5 set of barrel plugs off of Amazon. The only 2.5mm x 5mm barrel plugs I could find with Prime Shipping. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016IGA60S?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00

I wanted more than one barrel plug for a few reasons. Just in case I somehow messed up a plug, in case the plug just didn't work and if for some crazy reason I decided to run dual eGPU's should the first build work. The barrel plugs worked great. The first thing I did after opening the Akitio box and the barrel plug package was to make sure the plug fit properly into the Akitio connector, and it did, next.

 

So I opened the PSU box and since it was modular all I needed to worry about was 2 cables, one cable had the 8pin+6pin connector for video card power so I sat it aside, then I found a cable with 3 molex connectors on it, this one was going to be my power connector for the Akitio box itself.

I already had 2 - 4pin Molex extension cables from my spare computer parts box. They were pretty much these http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-LP4POWEXT12-12-Inch-Molex-Extension/dp/B00H91B980/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1455665813&sr=1-4&keywords=4+pin+molex+connectors

They already had the usual Yellow, Black, Black, Red wires and pins installed but I only need the Yellow and the Black following the Yellow wires. So I removed the other pins and wires completely rather than snipping the ends off or having to tape up the unused wiring. If you've never done this you can easily find many videos and instructions on how to remove the pins. https://www.google.com/search?q=disassemble+4+pin+molex+plug&ie=&oe=

I just use a stiff paperclip to gentle press in the two prongs that hold the pins in, then slide out the pins. Just spread the two prongs back out a little if you want to reuse them in the connector or on another project.

So I did this twice, 2 4-pin Molex connectors taken down to only Yellow and Black wire with about 8" of  wire and snipped off the pins on the other end and removed about 1/2" of insulation to expose the wiring.

I then took the two yellow wires and the red wire from the barrel plug lead and tightly twisted those together and electrical taped them up.

I repeated this process for the two molex black wires and the black wire lead from the barrel plug. Then electrical taped over both wires.

 

I then had to remove the Akitio casing,  the fan and the end plate the fan was attached to and disconnect the fan from the Akitio board.

I took some big pliers and bent the plate out as flat as possible so that the graphics card wouldn't come in contact with it and left it just like that.

I wanted to test if all of this would even work before I put more time into soldering, heat shrinking and making the enclosure look better.

 

So in went the video card and I took the PSU and Akitio setup to my iMac.

Grabbed a large paperclip and broke it off into about a 1" U shaped piece. Then do the paperclip mod. https://www.google.com/search?q=disassemble+4+pin+molex+plug&ie=&oe=#q=PSU+paperclip

Connected the PSU cabling to the PSU, connected my barrel plug to the Akitio box and plugged the PSU into a wall socket near by. PSU power switched still turned off at this point.

Flipped on the PSU switch just to see what would happen and nothing other than a little glowing green light on it's computer board.

-- So my iMac is still powered up and on at this time, I just wanted to see what would happen, so I plugged in the Thunderbolt cable included with the Akitio to the iMac and then into the eGPU.

The graphics card fans came on, the side lights on the gpu were lit and the Akitio showed me it's pretty blue lights.

OS X was showing the Akitio was being recognized as well under the Thunderbolt section.

I connected one of my external monitors via HDMI to the GPU's HDMI output.

I then installed the CUDA drivers and ran goalque's install script: https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/7989-script-automating-the-installation-of-egpu-on-os-x-inc-display-output/

This pulled and installed the latest NVidia web drivers.

I then booted into OS X  and right away the eGPU setup was detected and I had OS X extending just fine to the eGPU monitor.

I set that external monitor as the primary display. (Go into System Prefs, Display and drag the menu bar from the internal display to the external eGPU monitor)

This makes any games started to start on the eGPU rather than the internal graphics card.

I ran a few tests and benchmarks to make sure it was actually working and it was, everything seemed fine, good job.

 

Now to boot into Windows 10.

 

I had bootcamped Windows 10, go into Windows and installed the latest NVidia drivers and restarted to now boot up with my eGPU, no problem right ?

I get to where I am choosing the Windows partition to boot into and the computer just locks up as soon as I would hit Enter to boot into Windows. Every - Single - Time.

I'll try and keep this already long story shorter than it could be and just go over my boot up process.

 

First while in Windows, no egpu, I opened device manager and disabled the R395X card... everything goes black.. uh oh.

So I have to force shut down the machine by holding down the power button.

At this point I leave the eGPU powered on but I remove the Thunderbolt cable from the Akitio only.

Turn on the iMac and hold down Alt to bring up the partition screen but I continue holding down Alt and never let up.

I reach over and connect the Thunderbolt cable back into the Akitio and then reach back and choose my Windows partition and hit enter,

still holding down Alt

Windows boots up on the internal display first, just the little spinning dots and then I notice my external monitor connected to the eGPU comes to life. Hoorah!

 

I check device manager. Radeon card is still disabled and the NVidia card is now showing up.

The internal display is stuck on 4k resolution, 3840x2160 and I can't change it. My external is a 1080p monitor and I am able to change through all the resolutions it supports easily in Display Settings.

 

I've been doing some benchmarking and testing a little bit today and everything seems to be working just great.

I do Folding@Home and decided to let the GPU go all night to somewhat stress test the setup. Folding can keep the GPU pegged at 80% non-stop and it has been running like that for about 20 hours.

I also slightly overclocked the card with EVGA Precision, +130MHz on the GPU and +175MHz on the RAM and it has been holding steady at 68C all night with fans speeds on automatic under 900rpm.

 

***

I'll also throw in that I didn't install ANY Bootcamp drivers whatsoever when I installed Windows 10. I saved the Bootcamp support file to a USB drive then just plainly installed Windows then open the support file and only installed with WiFi and LAN card drivers so that I could access the internet and download the current NVidia Drivers.

 

Results

 

So the reasoning I give that this project is better for those with multi-monitor setups is that the eGPU doesn't seem to be powering the internal iMac screen, I can't be sure but performance on it seems a tad sluggish. Not sluggish like a slide-show presentation but just slower than when the eGPU is not connected.
Normal video watching like YouTube full screen or Netflix and Hulu seem fine and I have yet to actually check performance on the iMac screen, it just "feels" slower.
It is also now locked at no higher than 4k resolution only when the eGPU is outputting to the 2nd monitor.
If I disable video output from the eGPU the iMac goes back to 5k and I can still utilize the eGPU processing power for rendering projects.

However, eGPU performance on the external monitor is quite, quite good. The only game I have installed in OS X currently is Warcraft. On the 1080p monitor, Ultra Settings and every option set to the highest available setting I was getting on average of 99fps.
I have not done thorough testing of any sort yet other than a few benchmarking programs and Warcraft so these are the results as of now.

 

In Windows 10 I got to run 3dMark but as of yet I had to leave before getting done with FireStrike so I will post those results later.

3D Mark 11 =http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/10969734 GPU Score of 19,343
3D Mark Vantage =http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/5417862 GPU Score of 53,759

3dmark13-FS.GPU=15066

I will try and do more testing within Windows and OS X with results from both cards to show the difference the eGPU makes.

[Tech Inferno Fan]

3 hours ago, mmomega said:

I finally got around to ordering my eGPU setup after quite a few months of reading and researching across the internet and found the information here to be far and above the best collection of resources on the subject. So I felt confident enough to throw some money into the wind and to see what happened, hopefully with it paying off with a working eGPU setup even though I haven't read yet of someone getting it working in Windows on a 5k with a discrete AMD chip. Maybe I just haven't read enough but I haven't come across one yet.

 

I'll start off with the entire list of goodies.

 

Late 2015 27" 5k iMac

4.0GHz i7 6700k

32GB 2133MHz Kingston HyperX RAM

512GB PCIE SSD

Radeon R9 395X 4GB Graphics card

 

Akitio Thunder 2 Box

EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC+ ACX2.0 6GB RAM Graphics Card

Corsair CX750M PSU

2.5mm x 5mm Barrel Plug with leads

2 - 4Pin Molex Female + Male extenders ( I just had these lying around)

 

Would you mind running 3dmark13 and 3dmark11 on your external 1080P LCD and posting the link to the results? Yours with a Skylake i7-6700K desktop CPU + GTX980Ti would be near the top of our leaderboard:  https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/8919-implementations-hub-tb-ec-mpcie/#dx11

[mmomega]

I completely forgot to link to get the link results until after I ran the tests. I'll re-do them tomorrow.

Here's just some screenshots for now.

 

I also noticed in the 3dmark11/13 results, the top results I clicked and the linked results weren't even close to what is noted on the chart. Maybe a mixup ?

 

Actually the results are still in my history

 

3dmark11.GPU=18523

3dmark13-FS.GPU=15066

 

Vantage: http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/5415007

 

[chrise]

Thanks a lot for your great guide. We have nearly the same setup (except from your gtx980, I only have a 970).

I tried it the same way as you (complete reinstalled windows), but when i deactivate my igpu, my screen did not get black.

Just the screen changes the resolution. My iMac immediately finds the egpu. But after intalling the newest drivers and make a reboot its still not working.

One time windows crashes at boot (spinning dots) and restarts after 2 miniutes or windows boots but my egpu failed with error 12.

 

 

 

I dont know what Iam doing wrong but its really strange that we have almost the same system but getting completely different results (especially the point that your screen goes black after disabling your igpu).

Maybe someone have an idea

[chrise]

Another idea.

I've bought 2*8gb Ram to increase the orginale Ramsize of 8Gb.

So no I have installed 4/8/4/8 => 24GB RAM.

Due to that, my mac isnt able anymore to use Dual Channe Ram.

Maybe this affects the gpu/egpu to? 

[mmomega]

On ‎2‎/‎17‎/‎2016 at 9:38 PM, Tech Inferno Fan said:

 

Would you mind running 3dmark13 and 3dmark11 on your external 1080P LCD and posting the link to the results? Yours with a Skylake i7-6700K desktop CPU + GTX980Ti would be near the top of our leaderboard: 

 

 

Ok, I'm not sure if my settings were correct the last time I benchmarked. Here are updated results.

 

3DMark11 = http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/10969734  GPU=19343

3DMark FireStrike =

3DMark Vantage = http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/5417862  GPU=53759

 

I am using the most current NVidia drivers yet 3D Mark says graphics driver is not approved.

These scores are from within Windows 10 Enterprise N 1511

Edited February 22, 2016 by mmomega

[Dschijn]

Can you run Firestrike as well?

[mmomega]

16 minutes ago, Dschijn said:

Can you run Firestrike as well?

Will do soon, I was running those this morning and had to head out before finishing up Firestrike and posting results so probably later this afternoon I can post those.

[Tech Inferno Fan]

@mmomega, would you mind downloading PCI scope Trial from http://www.tssc.de/site/products/tools/pciscope/default.aspx, saving a dump (BPD) file of your working configuration and uploading here?

 

@chrise and another offline user are getting error 12 with this system. The supplied info will mean a custom pci.bat via Setup 1.30 (MBR Win10 install) can be created to fix error 12 on this system.

[cyphersk8]

Having trouble getting OSX to recognize the eGPU with my 5k iMac. Installed the drivers using the Goalque script, but it still says I have a AMD Radeon R9 M295X when going to 'About This Mac'. Anything else I have to do? I'm running Yosemite. When I first booted after installing the drivers my 5k screen was stuck into a smaller resolution in the middle of the screen (sort of how it is when you airplay an iPhone). Putting the monitor to sleep and waking it back up made it go back full screen, but the resolutions are broken. It looks like it's set to 1920x1080 only, everything is massive and seems squished. 

 

Goalque script says "Your system is eGPU enabled and Nvidia web driver is up to date." I see the 980Ti under the Graphics/Display Hardware info. I can drag windows successfully to the external monitor (a tv in this case). When I open a program over there that supports GPU acceleration it is not found. 

 

Let me know if you have any ideas on this issue. Seems like you got it work just fine on your 5k.

[cyphersk8]

I seem to have resolved a few issues by reinstalling the CUDA drivers from NVIDIA. It now recognizes the card and my programs do too. However, that said, I have a few things I'm still hoping to sort out. The first big issue is that the resolutions on the 5k are all wrong. Everything is scaled massively, it does not look like it used to and when using the 'scaled' options it still does not look right. When I boot up, I get a 1/3 screen, dead center, but sleeping the display and waking it fixes that.

 

When I set my second monitor as my default... the 'About This Mac' displays the 980Ti as it's graphic card. Great! Except I can't use that as my main monitor, I want and need the 5k for all my main work. If I make the 5k my main display (by dragging the white bar in System/Display Preferences) it goes back to saying the AMD 295X is my GPU. Resolutions are still wack no matter which it claims it is using. If I disconnect the external HDMI monitor, it doesn't change.

 

Second, games don't seem to recognize the eGPU. I was testing it on Starcraft 2, from my 5k monitor as default, and it was getting 13fps on Extreme settings. I'm pretty sure that's because it was running off the AMD and not the 980Ti. If I open SC2 on the secondary monitor, and then go into windowed mode to drag the game to my 5k, the power supply makes some crazy noises. I'm running a 750w Corsair PSU so I'm not entirely sure why. Everything is soldered and secure. The noise seems to change with what it's trying to display. The SC2 game was terrible on the 5k in windowed mode. It wouldn't play the menu screen at a reasonable fps. If I switch it off windowed mode the PSU goes back to being silent, the game goes back to full screen on the secondary monitor and it seems to run smoother. I was getting around 66fps playing on extreme on the secondary monitor.

 

Any thoughts on what I can do to get my 5k to display properly again? Any idea why my PSU goes bat shit crazy when I'm running a game on the external? I have the 750w PSU connected to the 980Ti by the 8 pin and 6pin+2pin from the PSU cabling. I'm also running power to the Akitio from 6pin connector on the PSU to 2 molex connectors. Those molex connectors are wired together (as a precaution) and hard wired to a 12v DC plug. Everything is grounded and running through an UPS. 

 

Cheers. Thanks in advance.

[Dschijn]

@cyphersk8 Better ask all the OSX questions here: https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/7989-script-automating-the-installation-of-egpu-on-os-x-inc-display-output/

 

Regarding the PSU... some cards (especially the new ones) can cause coil whine/buzzing with certain PSUs. The noise you hear should change with the FPS changing. Maybe that very high resolutions are a bit too extreme for an eGPU to push over TB2. For gaming you really should focus on using the external monitor.

Edited March 4, 2016 by Dschijn

[cyphersk8]

@Dschijn thank you! I've posted a more coherent post over in that thread. Hopefully it explains my set-up and issues better. I'll look into coil whine/buzzing, but it doesn't sound healthy! I can't imagine that would be acceptable for a PSU to make that kind of sound. I wasn't pushing the resolution on the external monitor, it was 1920x1080 (Samsung TV), but I was maxing out the graphic qualities. It ran great, 66fps at Extreme settings, but that whine from PSU was still happening. 

 

I've attached an example of the noise while running Starcraft 2 on my external (tv) display through the eGPU.

 

Cheers.

psu_noise.m4a.zip