Hello, first off, I am new to these forums so please forgive any mistakes that I make. I currently finished a DIY eGPU setup, but am having trouble getting my gpu to go under full load. I have a Dell Studio 1558 with an intel i5 520m and ATI 5470 mobility radeon HD 1024MB running Windows 7 x64. For the eGPU I have a PE4L v2.1b-EC2C adapter, 500w EVGA 80+ bronze PSU, Nvidia Geforce 9600gt sc, and an E-Machine 16:10 1440x900 monitor. I have an adapter on my 9600gt sc to convert the DVI to VGA for the monitor (this monitor only supports VGA). Now that specs are out of the way I can proceed with the problem. Everything works in my setup. I have the latest drivers on both my ati 5470m and nvidia 9600gt sc. I can hot plug my egpu into my express card slot and it will be recognized with no error codes in the device manager. I can disable my ati 5470m within device manager and then the laptop screen will go black and only my monitor will be displaying an image. Now when I play a game (I'll use Minecraft for example) I get about a quarter of the fps that I'd get on my ati 5470m. Upon inspection in MSI Afterburner, the nvidia 9600gt sc will only go up to 6% load when playing a game. When playing a game on my dGPU the load goes up to 90%+ (this is when the eGPU is off and I'm playing games on the laptop alone). Now I've explored a couple of other forums with people using a nvidia 9600gt in their build and their performance is much better than what I am receiving. As far as I can tell in the bios there are little to no options for changing things other than date/time or enabling the wifi card (certainly no overclocking or graphics switching/disabling). I've triple checked all of my connections on my eGPU. I do not have Optimus installed nor the eGPU setup 1.x (which I still don't understand). I understand that in order to have Optimus you have switchable graphics and I know for a fact that my i5 520m has onboard graphics. However, according to other forums regarding this on a Dell Studio 1558, it's not possible to have switchable graphics because the dGPU is hard mounted to the motherboard. I'm no sure if there is anyway to enable, but I'm willing to try anything. Now I could really use some help or any advice to lead me in the right direction as I have hit a dead end.
