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It appears to be I guess I'll be using headphones anyway so I won't hear it.

Okay, that's good to know. The card does operate correctly even with the noise. Are you saying there is no advantage to switching to a MOLEX to Barrell connector instead of a powered PCIe riser cable?

Hi, I've not posted on here since I built my eGPU for my 2015 MacBook Pro over a year ago. That unit was an Akitio Thunder2, RM 650W PSU, CoolerMaster 130 case, powered riser cable with a Zotac GTX 770 card. It's mainly used for playing Elite Dangerous on and it has been working perfectly. Recently I had the opportunity to upgrade the GTX 770 to a GTX 980 Reference card. It was pretty much a straight swap out except for the cards power connectors. On the GTX 770 these were 1 x 8-pin and 1 x 6-pin connectors. On the GTX 980 these are 2 x 6-pin connectors. Simple enough with my 650W PSU I just switched connectors. I am using the same powered riser cable for the PCIe connection. The unit boots up and works okay on Windows 10 via the display port connection. It will even play Elite Dangerous on Ultra settings and give a steady 60fps. So all good! Why am I posting here and asking for help??? Well, I noticed that when playing Elite Dangerous I could hear a high pitched electronic screaming noise coming from the unit. At first I thought it was the GTX 980 power coil as apparently they do sometimes do this. However on closer inspection the noise is coming from the Akitio board. It appears to be power related, so I tried to stress the card (and hopefully use more power) by using 3D Mark 11. Sure enough when running the benchmark tests the Akitio board makes a very high pitched electronic screaming noise. The noise stops when the tests stops. So it is caused by load on the graphics card and therefore I presume power, or lack of it. Do you think power is the problem here? If so, what should I do? I don't use the 2.5mm power adapter input on the Akitio board because my powered riser cable has a MOLEX adapter attached to it. Should I scrap the powered riser cable and get a non-powered version and then create a MOLEX to 2.5mm DC adapter plug for the Akitio power socket? Would that supply enough power for the GTX 980. The GTX 770 never had this problem, but I presume the GTX 980 draws a lot more power under load. I've attached some pictures below. Any help or advice you can give would be appreciated. Thanks, X6

I've been happily running my external Aikito Thunder2 card and NVidia 770 on my MacBook Pro under Windows 8.1 via Bootcamp. Today I wanted to start using the 770 with OSX 10.10.2 so I updated to the latest NVidia web drivers: WebDriver-343.02.02f04.pkg I can confirm that installed okay and it running according to the NVidia system preferences panel. I re-modified the kext files: /System/Library/Extensions/NVDAStartup.kext /System/Library/Extensions/IONDRVSupport.kext /System/Library/Extensions/AppleHDA.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleHDAController.kext to add the: <true><key>IOPCITunnelCompatible</key><key> key with value</key><key> true </key><key></key> for each section containing <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key> I then ran: sudo kextcache -system-caches and rebooted but the 770 does not show up. Has anyone got any advice on what I should try next to resolve this? Thanks, X6 </true>

I managed to build my eGPU unit at the weekend with a Zotac GTX 770 2GB from eBay. The rest of the set-up was the same as described here. Couldn't have been easier. I'm running both Windows 8.1 in Bootcamp and OSX 10.10.1 happily with no problems. I sourced the RH 90 degree riser adapter from here: http://www.boston.co.uk/products/rsc-r1u-e16r.aspx The powered riser cable from ebay here: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/201099227577 I didn't need to power the Akitio motherboard using this set-up.

Are you saying that with the powered riser cable and the 90 degree adapter the Akitio board wasn't getting power, and that by removing the 90 degree adapter and just using the powered riser cable it works fine? I need the 90 degree adapter otherwise it won't fit in my mini-itx case. I have the same set-up that I am about to build tomorrow so I'd like to confirm that before I build.

Perfect, thanks!

I'm currently in the process of purchasing all the components listed here but I'm struggling with the PCI-x powered riser because I'm buying in the UK from ebay.co.uk. The only risers that seem to match the one listed are on ebay.com. I'm assuming that I need the version with the capacitors as most do not seem to have these. Does anyone know of any UK sources for these?

Thanks for the updates. Can you confirm if when you are using the external GPU that the MacBook fans are not spinning up? Does the MacBook stay at normal operating temperatures?

Excellent, I have the same MacBook setup and I am looking to do something very similar. Would you mind sharing an idea of costs? Cheers!