antweb

When I use RealTemp it's more often HOT than LOG, but it stays around 95 which is more or less borderline. Will have to do for now. After flashing several BIOS yesterday and playing around with my power settings, I found my Lenovo power manager at fault. It somewhat didn't like my Windows power profile. Once I set everything to performance in the Lenovo manager, my multiplier problem disappeared. Now I'm ready to test Gen2. Fingers crossed.

I know, but I'm trying to get a stable Gen1 setup before I start looking into my Gen2 issues. Turns out, my temperature issues are not as bad as expected. With the fan set to full blast, I was able to keep the temp around 88C in BF3. Strangely enough, I'm still having the performance drops. My CPU multiplier is going down from 30 to 8 for one or two secons every 30s or so. And it's not eGPU related. Have same behavior when running dGPU only. I wonder if the BIOS update messed something up for me. I didn't have these issues before I installed everything for eGPU.

That's what I thought, thanks for confirming. I even have temp issues when running a Virtualbox + Netflix on my Linux. It's not just eGPU related. Although I feel the performance loss most when gaming. Will have to take my T420 apart, clean all fans/heatsinks and replate the thermal grease I guess.

I did manage to install latest NVIDIA drivers for my GTX 660 by disabling dGPU through Setup 1.x and now have all 3 GPUs active on my system without any warnings running perfectly with x1.1 eGPU speed. BUT it seems like this is already enough to make my CPU the bottleneck in Battlefield 3. After some minutes of playing I get massive FPS drops. All points to my CPU downclocking because it overheats (goes up to 95C). Guess I'll have to fix this issue first before I can try out x1.2 speeds. But coming back to your guide, if I understood correctly, a DSDT override only affects the address allocation for my GPUs. Are you sure it's neccessary for a T420? It looks like it's not really required for my system.

Thanks for the detailed instructions! I checked the wires on the adapter and moved them around a bit to have some more space in between. My Windows didn't crash right away, but the performance still is extremely bad. I will give your setup method a try once I find some more time next week.

By now I suspect the HDMI connection of the PE4L to cause all this trouble. I moved the setup on my desk around a bit and actually got into Windows with a x1.2 link. I tried the render test in GPU-Z and it started off very sluggish until my eGPU changed back to x1.1. The problem is that I can't seem to find a way to arrange my hardware without bending the HDMI cable by at least 90 degrees...

This is strange. Auto (Gen2) should boost performance significantly as it allows a x1 2.0 link with twice the bandwidth. Maybe the x1.2 link is just not stable enough for you as well. Which driver are you using and are you booting your system with Setup1.x? I ran benchmarks with Gen1 and both 3DMark 06 and 3DMark 11 finished without any problems. When I switched back to Auto after that, my system crashed the second I tried to open GPU-Z.

Important observation I made yesterday: once I set my ExpressCard reader to Gen1 in BIOS, everything seems to work fine. I'll try to do some stress testing tonight.

I'm running out of ideas with my eGPU setup, so I think it's about time I ask for some help. First of all, here's what I have: ThinkPad T420 with Quadro NVS 4200 Core i5-2520M 12GB RAM EVGA GeForce GTX 660 ("Superclocked") Corsair CX430M PSU (430W) PE4L v2.1b with EC060A External screen with DVI connection to the eGPU Windows 7 x64 And this is what happened so far: The day I got my kit I connected everything and booted up my existing Windows installation. After playing around with the existing Quadro drivers and Desktop drivers, I got it all up and running and managed to run some benchmarks. But then I decided to do a clean Windows installation and this is where all the trouble started. First I had trouble installing the drivers, but after several ties and removing my Intel HD drivers, I got the hang of it. Now with the NVIDIA drivers for my eGPU on the clean Windows installation, my Windows just breaks. I've experienced a mix of following symptoms so far: - eGPU actually initializes properly and has 2.0 x1 link but runs extremely unstable (even dragging windows is sluggish) and falls back to 1.1 x1 eventually - eGPU boots up with 1.1 x1 link and seems to run okay but randomly gets a "driver recovered/ not responding" error or just crashes the entire system varies betweeen just a couple of seconds on desktop and some minutes of Battlefield 3 - random black screens / system freezes - Windows get's stuck in login screen (sometimes manages to load Desktop with if I wait for several minutes but with broken themes) / Windows get's stuck on shutdown I've tried various settings in Setup 1.x and several driver versions (Desktop and modiefied Verde) but I just kept making things worse. Seemed like a messed up Windows first, but even a second clean installation didn't help. Once I unplug my eGPU, everything is back to normal. I also tried to test with 4GB of RAM only and with dGPU disabled. I've already wasted too many hours on this... Can someone provide me with a working configuration (driver version/Setup 1.x options) for a similar configuration? Or is there a way to debug this properly? That way I could at least narrow down the problem..

Alright, it was not the ExpressCard driver. Clean Windows install didn't help. Once I installed the 314.22 Verde driver and rebooted (with dGPU disabled through Setup 1.x), it started slowing down extremely again and when I checked the device manager, my eGPU had an error code 43. Maybe it's the same problems MystPhysX encoutered? Is there any driver you can recommend for a iGPU + dGPU + eGPU setup?

Setting the link speed to Gen1 in BIOS actually got rid of the Windows glitches. I tried to force the speed to Gen2 in Setup 1.x afterwards and that just destroyed my OS. Now I can't even boot it up properly with the eGPU attached. It hangs at the logon screen and then shows the desktop with the classic Windows theme (same as in safe mode). I suspect that the driver for my ExpressCard USB 3.0 controller messed things up for me. It crashed the system, so I uninstalled it. But who knows what might be left of it. I'll just do another clean Windows installation without it and see if it changes anything.

Hi everyone, I've got myself a eGPU setup and after some initial testing, I'm having some stability issues. My driver keeps crashing (sometimes manages to recover, other times it just gives me BSOD) and the overall performance on Windows is bad (even dragging windows is sluggish and leaves a nice trails, etc...). But only when I do these things on my external screen (so through the eGPU). According to GPU-Z, the system sometimes boots up with a x1 2.0 link but then falls back to 1.1 when the card is under load. The whole problem does seem to be somewhat random though, as I was able to play Battlefield 3 for at least 15min with the 1.1 link before it crashed. Other times it crashes the second I open my browser. I've tried several driver versions (both Desktop and Notebook), but all have the same issue. Strangest thing is that I didn't have these issues when I tested the setup for the first time with my old windows installation. I'm not sure about the link speed, but the driver was working fine. Can't exactly remember, but I think I was using the desktop 314.22 back then. Am I just missing an option somewhere or did I mess up my hardware? Here's my setup: ThinkPad T420 with Quadro NVS 4200 EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Corsair CX430M PSU (430W) PE4L v2.1b with EC060A External screen with DVI connection to the eGPU Windows 7 x64 (clean installation) NVIDIA Verde 314.22 (modded inf)