Yukikaze

From the slot's perspective, that is forward compatibility. From the card's perspective it is backwards compatibility But regardless of the semantics, a PCIe 3.0 card works in a PCIe 2.0 slot. It has been tried many, many times on these forums: All modern video cards are PCIe 3.0, while the Akitio Thunder2 (by far the most popular Thunderbolt2 eGPU solution) is PCIe 2.0. So, for example, my GTX750Ti in my Akitio is running a PCIe 2.0 x4 link. It also works on desktops: I ran an old X58 motherboard (PCIe 2.0 only) with a HD7950 (a PCIe 3.0 card) for years.

PCIe is backwards compatible. Any card will work here.

I have three questions to people who have done DA-2 to barrel plug adapters. I have the electrical layout figured out, but there is one thing that is bugging me: The 2.5x5.5mm barrel plug needs to be rated for about 12v, 8a to power up the slot for a video card and the Akitio's internal hardware. Yet, I cannot find a single barrel plug that would be rated for that much. The best I've seen is 12v, 5a (and to be honest, by their looks compared to the 12v, 1a ones, that is pretty questionable), and most are simply unrated and most of the ones that have a rating are rated at something measly like 1a or 1.5a at 12v. That said, there are plenty of 12v, 10a power bricks with 2.5x5.5mm plugs out there, so someone is making plugs that can survive 12v, 8a. So, the questions: 1) Where did you get a correctly rated barrel plug? 2) If you just grabbed one off e-bay or something, are you not worried about overloading it? I am not an electrical engineer, so am I worrying for nothing here? 3) I have some rated at 50v, 1a. Will these work?

The base product seems to be simply an enclosure and a pair of PCIe x16 cables to extend existing slots outside of a case. It is probably envisioned as a means to SLI/Crossfire a pair of large cards (might have enough room for a pair of three-slot cards, or something?). The laptop connection module is where the actual eGPU meat should be, but they have zero information on it so far. Coupled with the poor English and the other products on the "edge gear" Amazon store page...I am not optimistic this will ever amount to anything.

I came across this thing earlier today: http://www.inxtron.com/products/thunderbolt3-hdk I expect this to be a pretty simple to use eGPU solution for a Thunderbolt3 equipped laptop. Board power is provided via a 6-pin connector so getting a DA-2 (or XBox360 power brick) to work with this should be easy and using an ATX PSU is downright trivial. Put this into a small case, and voila, you have an eGPU. Of course, that is the theory: Someone needs to give this a shot. I honestly would, but I don't have Thunderbolt3 on any of my devices. Note that it comes with zero warranty. EDIT: I posted this in a separate thread since I did not notice the original thread. It looks like I got merged here. Thanks, mods

As a side note for people in the US: I've seen a lot of these at Goodwill, selling for less than 10$. Take a look at your local store, it might have one if you need it.

More updates: 1) The eGPU went nuts after I started using a multi-monitor (3+internal) setup at work and a single 4K monitor ((plus the laptop screen) at home. When I'd come back home, the laptop would detect the eGPU, but both screens would go black and the system would become non-responsive. I think it was getting confused as to which output the video should go to, or it would try to apply a setting it could not force. Hard rebooting would fix the issue as on the following boot everything worked perfectly, but it became annoying. 2) The first solution to the above was to boot up the machine, connect the eGPU, wait for it to be detected, immediately disable it in the device manager (failing to do it quickly would cause the same issue with the screens going black), disconnect it, reconnect it and enable it. At that point I would be prompted to restart to apply changes and then everything worked after the system rebooted. It was gentler than a hard boot, but very fussy. 3) Since I can't use Setup 1.30 or modify my boot sequence in any way, I had to resort to my limited BIOS options to try and fix this issue. The solution is to simply disable the iGPU in the BIOS (Advanced -> Device Configuration -> Hybrid Graphics set to Disable). Obviously, this will affect your battery life, but it is not an issue for me - I rarely if ever run my ZBook on the battery for more than an hour or so. 4) As a (very) neat bonus, the eGPU became completely plug-and-play! If I connect the Thunderbolt2 cable while booted to my Windows 8.1, the laptop screen goes black, then both the internal and external monitors come to life and everything works perfectly from that point on. Hope this helps someone with ideas on what to do if problems persist.

A video card in a desktop is typically horizontal

Wood does not transfer heat well, obstructs airflow to the rear of the card and makes for a fire hazard. That said, in general, having it on its side will do not the setup itself harm. If you could give it some standoffs so that the card would be on the side but not lying on the wooden table, it would be better/safer.

The input voltage of the USB hub is 12V, 3A. That can easily be provided from the ATX PSU by modding a molex connector to a barrel plug of the right diameter. On the ATX PSU's Molex you have 4 wires. Yellow is 12v, Red is 5v, the two blacks are ground. So you take a molex female side connector with wires going out of it, and connect the black and yellow lines to a barrel plug that fits the USB hub (electronics hobby stores or amazon carry those, you can salvage one off an older power adapter). Make sure to get the plug's polarity correctly!

Something like this comes to mind: http://www.amazon.com/Anker®-Converter-Adapter-Cable-included/dp/B005B3VO24/ref=pd_sim_sbs_147_4?ie=UTF8&dpID=41NRVzaqsWL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR160%2C160_&refRID=01PVER34H2D5G6T1VN6S You'd mod a power input for it from the ATX PSU in place of the ac/dc mini-brick it comes with. I am also pretty sure you could get a cheaper version somewhere.

I suggest you look for people who have a GTX970 used with the Akitio. The guides section at the forums here should have what you need, since both the Akitio and the GTX970 are very popular for eGPU applications. For a short version, you need: 1) Akitio Thunder2. 2) A Video Card. 3) If the card does not fit into the Akitio, you need to either make it fit, or you need a PCIe riser. 4) The means to power everything. 5) Thunderbolt Cable (in the case of the Akitio it is included). As for bandwidth: Thunderbolt 1 is equivalent to 4 lanes of PCIe Gen 1. Thunderbolt 2 is equivalent to 4 lanes of PCIe Gen 2. Thunderbolt 3 is equivalent to 4 lanes of PCIe Gen 3.

USB3.0 is pretty damn speedy and will likely be fast enough for you. But, if you wish to use Thunderbolt, you can do it. It will just be more expensive. You can grab a Thundertek/PX enclosure (139.95$ currently, does not include Thunderbolt cable and it is Thunderbolt 1 only, but that is more than enough for this use) and pull out the PCB and place that also into your case. That gives you a second PCIe x4 slot. The next thing you do is grab a PCIe SATA and USB3.0/3.1 combo card (Amazon has a few options and I am sure ebay has more) and place it into the new PCIe slot. Your drives then connect to the card's SATA ports and the USB hub connects to the USB port. End result is two Thunderbolt cables (and about 200$ extra cost).

There are a few obstacles to watercooling an eGPU: 1) Quite a few people want a compact setup (as evidenced by the modded Akitio Thunder2 boxes and mITX GTX970s or lesser cards), which is defeated by the addition of a radiator. If someone makes an eGPU setup in a case based off a mITX case then space is less of an issue and a 120/140/240mm rad can be easily installed (depending on case). That way an all-in-one watercooled card can be easily used, or a custom loop built. 2) eGPUs are already rather expensive. Adding a water block, pump and rad on top of this (or splurging for a card watercooled out of the box) makes an expensive project even more expensive. 3) People who opt for eGPUs typically wish to improve the performance of their existing laptops, or like the portability of a laptop for their main rig, while having a more powerful graphics in a "dock" of sorts. This isn't the typical high-end enthusiast, who would probably opt for a desktop to start with. We're happy with not-quite-desktop performance levels which are none the less usable, as opposed to seeking the bleeding edge (although, as always, exceptions exist). As to how I'd do it: I'd grab a small mITX case, stick in a 240mm rad, the PCB from the Akitio Thunder2 or the Rocketstor, a PCIe riser to the card and an ATX PSU. The PSU powers the pump, card, Thunderbolt PCB and whatever else I'd stick in there. It isn't complicated, just expensive, and in my opinion rather pointless.

I cannot comment on getting the eGPU to play well with your Mac, but plenty of people have done eGPU on Macs and the implementations forum has plenty of material to take a look at. Someone probably has an identical Mac there with a working eGPU. What I can comment on is having all external stuff in that one case: The short version is that it is possible (even including the case ports working). Here is the longer version The simplest way would be to put a USB3.0 powered hub (with like 8 ports) into the case, alongside the PCB of whatever eGPU enclosure you plan to get and use USB to SATA adapters to enable the laptop to access the external drives. To get the external case USB ports working, you will need some way to connect the case headers to the USB hub. Thankfully, adapters exist for this and are readily available. To power the external drives and USB hub you can use the same PSU that will power the eGPU, since you will have plenty of connectors to spare (and all the USB hub needs as far as extra power goes is 5v). The end result will have you connecting two things to your Macbook: 1 Thunderbolt cable for the eGPU PCie and 1 USB3.0 cable for everything else. If you hook up the keyboard and mouse (or their wireless receiver if you use a wireless set that needs one) to the same hub inside the case, that means no extra cables to hook up. The aforementioned adapters for USB3.0 (this is for a typical USB3.0 motherboard header connector - it might be different for your case, but since you already have it it will be easy to check): https://www.amazon.com/RAYSUN-20Pin-Header-Adapter-Motherboard/dp/B00P5VG1DE/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1464845877&sr=8-5&keywords=usb+3.0+to+internal+header For USB2.0: https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-designed-motherboard-external-connector/dp/B000V6WD8A/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1464845836&sr=8-7&keywords=usb+to+internal+header

Just a heads up for anyone with an older machine that only has TB1 and wants TB to PCIe capability: The Thundertek/PX enclosure is currently on sale for 139.95$. Price does not include shipping (+13.38$ for ground shipping in the US, no idea on international costs, but they do provide the option to ask for a shipping quote). Since the Akitio Thunder2 and the Rocketstor are 229$ and 234$ currently, this is significantly cheaper. The obvious drawbacks are: 1) Thunderbolt cable not included (can be bought for ~20$ on ebay). 2) Only TB1 speeds. 3) The PCIe x4 slot is not open-ended, so a riser is required, or the rear of the slot needs to be modded. 4) Needs to be modded for use with dual-slot cards (but the same is true for the Rocketstor, and the Akitio in the case of long cards). I am currently trying to resist buying one just to play around with it...

Wait a sec. Why do you need USB3.0? To connect an eGPU you need some means to connect it to the PCIe of your laptop. That can be done via Expresscard, miniPCIe, Thunderbolt 1/2 or Thunderbolt 3. None of these are USB3.0. The USB3.0 cable in that kit is only used as the physical medium, you still need a miniPCIe slot to connect the small card into. You need to: 1) Find where your laptop's miniPCIe slots are and connect the extender to them. 2) Figure out how to power up a desktop power supply without an actual computer. I suggest you do some more reading here on the forums, there are a lot of guides and other people who have made it work with miniPCIe, as well as guides to getting a PSU working without a computer. Judging by your question I am not entirely sure you know what you are doing. Please be careful so you do not damage your hardware. If you are not sure about something, ask!

Where did you get that thing from? I'd really like one (or two) to play around with. Just a note. I found something similar here: http://graniteriverlabs.com/thunderbolt-flint-river-boards The TBT-FR on the Asus board probably stands for ThunderBolT Flint River, where Flint River is the codename for the Falcon Ridge controllers (in this case, the L5520 variant with 2 TB2 ports). It looks to be an development board of some sort. Granite River Labs only sells these to "licensed Thunderbolt Developers". I wonder what the costs/conditions for that are.

It is a hard question to answer, to be honest, since it is highly dependent on the application/game in question. For example, synthetic benchmarks often do not care about PCIe bandwidth, but some games are more sensitive to the reduction. It is also typically the case that the higher the resolution, the less the bandwidth matters (simply because the card needs more time to crunch the data, so there is less of a need to keep it constantly fed with more). You can also check out this article at TechPowerUp. It uses a GTX980, but your scaling should be in the same ballpark. The result you are interested in is the "x4 1.1" row in the graphs, since that is the equivalent of a TB1 link. It shows a lot of results for specific games and also an averaged percentage of max performance at the summary page here.

Yep. If your Expresscard is PCIe Gen2 x1, it is the equivalent of PCIe Gen1 x2. Thunderbolt 1 is a PCIe Gen1 x4, so it has twice the bandwidth than the Expresscard solution. If your Expresscard is PCIe Gen1 x1, then Thunderbolt 1 will have 4 times the bandwidth. In either case, it is quite a bit more breathing room for your card to work with. Also, there is also the Thundertek/PX, which is a Thunderbolt1 solution and cheaper than the Akitio (keep in mind that it doesn't come with a TB cable, but a TB cable can be found on Ebay for 20-30$ - I bought one last week for 19.50$). You will be modding either device to work with a GTX970, so you should be able to save some money on the cheaper Thundertek (unless shipping is going to kill that off). I suggest you browse the guide forums to see both solutions used.

Is there a reason why you don't want to use a Thunderbolt solution? If you have the money to spare, and can obtain an Akitio Thunder2, it would be definitely superior.

1) Expresscard can be either one PCIe 1.0 lane or one PCIe 2.0 lane. mPCIe can be either one PCIe 1.0 lane, or one PCIe 2.0 lane, or even one PCIe 3.0 lane. Assuming both are the same generation in your case (and they quite likely are), then they behave identically (but, as you pointed out, the Expresscard is a lot more convenient). mPCIe is more likely to have a BIOS whitelist of some sort, however, so if it doesn't work, Expresscard might still do. 2) Sorry, no idea... 3) The link speed established via the PE4C will be dependent on the host laptop. Since the T420s is an older model, it will establish a PCIe 2.0 link, regardless of the video card you use. That said, the GTX750Ti should work.

To be honest, I did not test hotplug in the sense of hooking it up with the OS already running. My use case is that I drag the machine home from work, put it onto my desk and immediately connect the TB2 cable. Then I power up the machine when I need it. When I head out or to work, I power down, disconnect everything and off I go. I did not notice any video or mouse latency issues, stuff runs just as smooth on my dGPU and on my eGPU. The only thing that happened to me was that once I offloaded PhysX processing to the K2100M dGPU my Heaven benchmark framerates tanked in a peculiar way (1080p and 720p resulted in the same framerate, which made no sense). My theory for that one is that the extra long PCIe chain between both the eGPU and the dGPU introduces too much latency (measured bus load was minimal, so bandwidth wasn't the issue here).

1) The build quality of the ZBook is superb. There is no flex anywhere and it is very very sturdy. It was one of the first things I noticed when I got it. 2) Yes, the Expresscard is running in gen1 according to my testing with a P4EC, but contrary to other reports, it is at least working for me. That said, I do not use that for eGPU. The bottom cover is easily removed and the mPCIe slots are very easily accessible. I wouldn't use it because taking the bottom off to dock up with the eGPU is a bit too annoying for me, but it should be easy to do so. 3) As my ZBook is my company laptop and comes with Win8.1, I can't really play around with it to test Win7 on it. That said, Win10 is more like Win7 than Win8, and it should work for eGPU purposes. Mine might be upgraded to Win10 in the near future. I'll update my eGPU guide on the forums if I do. 4) My ZBook has a Quadro K2100M, and my eGPU is a GTX750Ti, so I cannot comment on AMD's drivers. That said, since I have no actual use for the Quadro professional features, I just use the same desktop driver for both the dGPU and the eGPU. No problems with extra heat have been detected. Heck, I can even overclock the socks off the K2100M and it will still run cool. The rest of the HP drivers have given me no trouble, except for the Intel WiFi card ones. I switched to the Intel latest and stopped having all sorts of WiFi connection drops which the HP driver gave me. I guess it is a bunch of bugs that got fixed in more recent driver versions that HP did not adopt. 5) Define Plug-and-Play in this sense. 6) No idea. 7) I'll be able to do this later this week. If I don't get around to it, ping me in a PM.

I am running a Dell power brick that came with my P4EC. I am using a Gigabyte Low-Profile 750Ti with an increased Power Target Limit of 60W (modded BIOS). I am not seeing any crashes or issues of the sort you are reporting.