Gilros

I'm not terribly surprised. It makes sense with cheap cables like USB, which can be bought for a dollar a meter, but Thunderbolt is pricey. I can't remember exactly why-- something about circuitry at each end of the cable-- but Thunderbolt isn't just some copper wiring bundled with plastic. It's expensive to manufacture, so with "cheaper" products it'd be surprising for cables to be included. It's a bit less excusable with the crazy expensive peripherals, but for a $150 adaptor, I can understand. Sorry anyway.

According to their website the package contains only the adaptor itself and a quick start guide. In addition, this datasheet says the Thunderbolt cable is not included.

The BIOS setting that I changed to fix this had a small description. It basically said that older ExpressCard devices may have issues plugged into an EC 2.0 slot, so to prevent these issues, you can limit the slot to EC 1.0. Perhaps the reason I was having issues is that my PE4H and flat cable were limited to 1.0 speeds. Do you know what HWTools's return policy is, or if there's any other place (like one stateside, without an $18 shipping fee) I could get the cable? I'd be happy to give this a try but $40 is kind of steep if there's no chance of returning it if it doesn't work. I feel like it should though. The guy in the Partial Success thread was using a PE4L 2.1 (with soldered connections), which is rated at EC 2.0. I guess that's the reason he had it set to automatic. Doesn't that make sense?

(Got line breaks working-- looks like IE10 is just stupid. Chrome works.) Would a DSDT override be the right choice? It seems to me that his issues stemmed from using 16GB of RAM. Everywhere else I've looked agrees that issues should only arise with greater than 8GB, and that's what I'm using, so I shouldn't be having issues. Anyway, I'm not getting the "error 12" which would indicate memory problems. Or am I simply wrong about what a DSDT override *does*? The final post in that thread mentions people having similar issues while running off of an mSATA SSD (like me) being fixed by a BIOS update. I'm currently using the latest BIOS (2.54) and I'm still having issues. Finally the power supply I'm using shouldn't be problematic at all. It's a nice, 500W, modular Corsair-- if anything, it's overkill for what I'm using it for. I installed GPU-Z to see what it thought of this. Like in Device Manger, it's detected-- it just doesn't work. It's missing readings for things like BIOS version, GPU speed, and memory. I'm going to keep troubleshooting (I found a few promising threads related to the X220) and update if I find anything. Thanks for your help regardless of my success. - - - Updated - - - My last post, probably. I posted that because I was about to restart and try setting "ExpressCard" to Generation 1 RATHER THAN Automatic, as the OP of the Partial Success thread suggested (I read someone suggesting this in an X220 thread. Go figure.) I booted up and it works! External monitor and everything. I haven't run any intense benchmarks yet to figure out how WELL it's working, but I did run FurMark before and after. FurMark on iGPU at 1280x720 and 8x MSAA runs at about 2FPS. NOW it runs at about 20FPS! Considering FurMark is a stress test, I think this bodes well for gaming. I'm thrilled! Thanks for your help one last time. I appreciate it. - - - Updated - - - Did some testing with games. The performance is odd. In high end games, I can play at higher settings than before (like Rift at ultra instead of low),but in low end games, my framerate is a bit lower-- usually capped pretty hart at 20 to 40 FPS. I think this is a bandwidth issue. The graphics card can process stuff fine but because of the low bandwidth it's constrained to only 30 or so FPS (depending on the game.) Could this be an issue with the PE4H, the cable, or simply the software setting I changed to constrain ExpressCard to Generation 1? It's not a big deal but it would be nice to have higher bandwidth so I could play games at higher FPS. Right now I'm happy enough since this lets me play games at very high settings (when on the iGPU I might not be able to play the game at all), but it would be nice if the limit were closer to 60 FPS rather than 30.

First of all, sorry for the lack of line breaks but my computer won't let me do them on this forum. No idea why. I have to use horizontal lines instead. Hi everyone, I've been struggling with this for a few days and have been unable to find a solution anywhere. Finally, I've decided to give up and ask for help. I'm using a system with the following specifications (bullets don't work either-- bear with me): -ThinkPad X230t w/ i5, 120GB mSATA SSD, 8GB of RAM, HD4000 iGPU, Windows 8 -GTX 460 768mb w/ CX500M PSU -PE4H with ExpressCard connectionFor some reason, this refuses to work. The computer boots fine, the graphics card is recognized fine, THE DRIVERS INSTALL FINE, but then the graphics card never works. The external display never detects a signal. After I restart the computer, the graphics card refuses to recognize the drivers. In Device Manger it reports that no drivers are installed and there are no resources allocated "because [the graphics card] has a problem." All of this works fine before the restart. I can never get it back to that working condition without reinstalling Windows and running through the process all over again. If I try to uninstall the device in Device Manager it gets stuck and never finishes. I have no idea what's wrong. Would Windows 7 worked better? I've seen limited information about Windows 8 with eGPUs but what little I've seen suggests it's not really any different from Windows 7, like most other aspects of W8.Any ideas? I'm really frustrated and potentially out about $150 (between the PSU and PE4H since I already had a graphics card) if I can't get this to work. Thanks for any help possible! h n An