Leaderboard

I finally got it working, Optimus + eGPU to power the dGPU Macbook internal display. There's a slight performance impact from using Optimus, but that's to be expected. reFit/apple_set_os.efi to enable Iris gpu-switch (integrated.bat) to select the iGPU / reboot install the iGPU drivers and run integrated.bat / shutdown -- connect eGPU and boot you should have 3 devices in Device Manager, with the eGPU showing an error icon disable the dGPU in Device Manager and run integrated.bat / shutdown boot with the eGPU connected, check Device Manager for 2 enabled GPUs open Task Manager, there should be a constant 10-15% CPU load from the System process Hibernate (a fix to remove the CPU load) Reboot and the CPU load will be gone, eGPU will work with Optimus! How to shutdown (this is important!) Enable dGPU in device manager gpu-switch dedicated.bat If you get a black screen on reboot, at any point, you probably used gpu-switch and selected a disabled GPU reboot into windows safe mode to fix this

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.

Imho keeping it open source and not doing the trash talk makes you the pleasent guy to go for when it comes to using the script and asking for help.

“The author of that script isn't very smart” from mouth of the smarter half of @MVC. Well, maybe I should recall my artificial intelligence lessons and use evolution algorithms to make the script more smarter if I’m not, right? Fortunately, the EFI side is not a black box. Apart from a few Apple’s proprietary GUIDs, it’s all precisely described by Intel. Time to bury the hatchets @netkas. Sooner or later I will remove the warning box from GitHub, regardless of whether you remove your friend’s defamation posts about me. I’ve nothing against you. My apologies, what I said when you left this forum. At that time, I just had information security course at work, and I shouldn’t apply these things in my free time. A user named “denstorefedepikkemand456” from your forum never asked from me how to fix the 5K iMac issue. The solution is here: https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/7989-script-automating-the-installation-of-egpu-on-os-x-inc-display-output/&do=findComment&comment=138159 I would first contact the creator of the script. That’s me. Like @mmomega and @chrise did. Nice pictures at MR http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/late-2015-imac-5k-r9-395x-gtx980ti-egpu.1957652/ @mmomega Would you update your implementation guide: https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/9386-2015-imac-5k-27-r9395x-late-2015-gtx980ti16gbps-tb2-akitio-thunder2-osx10113win10-mmomega/ and say a couple of words about my quick fix in the mean time, before the 0.9.9 release? As said earlier, the next version gives an option for CUDA processing or eGPU screen output with a 5K iMac. @ALL: Regarding the EFI app, what license would you suggest? GNU-EFI itself is under BSD. Should I keep new findings open source or not? Give your opinion. Researching the eGPU area is just my passion at this point of my life. I don’t know how long, but don’t worry, I’ll see the TB3 phase. I will sacrifice my 2011 Mac mini. It may become a non-bootable brick as I’m trying to replace PCI binary paths. I’ll take the risk. There’s a safe path already that can output text, but I just want to dig deeper. Now I can use my favourite IDE, an everyday tool in my job. Visual Studio 2015. For new readers, take a look at this: https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/7989-script-automating-the-installation-of-egpu-on-os-x-inc-display-output/&do=findComment&comment=137452

following thread... bump