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mmomega

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mmomega last won the day on February 17 2016

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  1. I have both a 980 Ti SC+ and a 1070 being delivered later today. I actually purchased both of my 980 Ti's on Amazon at used pricing. So this was prior to 1070/1080 release at under $400 each. Are webdrivers out yet for Pascal cards ? If so I may put the eGPU setup back together.
  2. Will do soon, I was running those this morning and had to head out before finishing up Firestrike and posting results so probably later this afternoon I can post those.
  3. Ok, I'm not sure if my settings were correct the last time I benchmarked. Here are updated results. 3DMark11 = http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/10969734 GPU=19343 3DMark FireStrike = 3DMark Vantage = http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/5417862 GPU=53759 I am using the most current NVidia drivers yet 3D Mark says graphics driver is not approved. These scores are from within Windows 10 Enterprise N 1511
  4. I completely forgot to link to get the link results until after I ran the tests. I'll re-do them tomorrow. Here's just some screenshots for now. I also noticed in the 3dmark11/13 results, the top results I clicked and the linked results weren't even close to what is noted on the chart. Maybe a mixup ? Actually the results are still in my history 3dmark11.GPU=18523 3dmark13-FS.GPU=15066 Vantage: http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/5415007
  5. I finally got around to ordering my eGPU setup after quite a few months of reading and researching across the internet and found the information here to be far and above the best collection of resources on the subject. So I felt confident enough to throw some money into the wind and to see what happened, hopefully with it paying off with a working eGPU setup even though I haven't read yet of someone getting it working in Windows on a 5k with a discrete AMD chip. Maybe I just haven't read enough but I haven't come across one yet. I'll start off with the entire list of goodies. iMac Details Late 2015 27" 5k iMac 4.0GHz i7 6700k 32GB 2133MHz Kingston HyperX RAM 512GB PCIE SSD Radeon R9 395X 4GB Graphics card eGPU Details Akitio Thunder 2 Box EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC+ ACX2.0 6GB RAM Graphics Card Corsair CX750M PSU 2.5mm x 5mm Barrel Plug with leads 2 - 4Pin Molex Female + Male extenders ( I just had these lying around) I ordered a 5 set of barrel plugs off of Amazon. The only 2.5mm x 5mm barrel plugs I could find with Prime Shipping. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016IGA60S?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00 I wanted more than one barrel plug for a few reasons. Just in case I somehow messed up a plug, in case the plug just didn't work and if for some crazy reason I decided to run dual eGPU's should the first build work. The barrel plugs worked great. The first thing I did after opening the Akitio box and the barrel plug package was to make sure the plug fit properly into the Akitio connector, and it did, next. So I opened the PSU box and since it was modular all I needed to worry about was 2 cables, one cable had the 8pin+6pin connector for video card power so I sat it aside, then I found a cable with 3 molex connectors on it, this one was going to be my power connector for the Akitio box itself. I already had 2 - 4pin Molex extension cables from my spare computer parts box. They were pretty much these http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-LP4POWEXT12-12-Inch-Molex-Extension/dp/B00H91B980/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1455665813&sr=1-4&keywords=4+pin+molex+connectors They already had the usual Yellow, Black, Black, Red wires and pins installed but I only need the Yellow and the Black following the Yellow wires. So I removed the other pins and wires completely rather than snipping the ends off or having to tape up the unused wiring. If you've never done this you can easily find many videos and instructions on how to remove the pins. https://www.google.com/search?q=disassemble+4+pin+molex+plug&ie=&oe= I just use a stiff paperclip to gentle press in the two prongs that hold the pins in, then slide out the pins. Just spread the two prongs back out a little if you want to reuse them in the connector or on another project. So I did this twice, 2 4-pin Molex connectors taken down to only Yellow and Black wire with about 8" of wire and snipped off the pins on the other end and removed about 1/2" of insulation to expose the wiring. I then took the two yellow wires and the red wire from the barrel plug lead and tightly twisted those together and electrical taped them up. I repeated this process for the two molex black wires and the black wire lead from the barrel plug. Then electrical taped over both wires. I then had to remove the Akitio casing, the fan and the end plate the fan was attached to and disconnect the fan from the Akitio board. I took some big pliers and bent the plate out as flat as possible so that the graphics card wouldn't come in contact with it and left it just like that. I wanted to test if all of this would even work before I put more time into soldering, heat shrinking and making the enclosure look better. So in went the video card and I took the PSU and Akitio setup to my iMac. Grabbed a large paperclip and broke it off into about a 1" U shaped piece. Then do the paperclip mod. https://www.google.com/search?q=disassemble+4+pin+molex+plug&ie=&oe=#q=PSU+paperclip Connected the PSU cabling to the PSU, connected my barrel plug to the Akitio box and plugged the PSU into a wall socket near by. PSU power switched still turned off at this point. Flipped on the PSU switch just to see what would happen and nothing other than a little glowing green light on it's computer board. -- So my iMac is still powered up and on at this time, I just wanted to see what would happen, so I plugged in the Thunderbolt cable included with the Akitio to the iMac and then into the eGPU. The graphics card fans came on, the side lights on the gpu were lit and the Akitio showed me it's pretty blue lights. OS X was showing the Akitio was being recognized as well under the Thunderbolt section. I connected one of my external monitors via HDMI to the GPU's HDMI output. I then installed the CUDA drivers and ran goalque's install script: https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/7989-script-automating-the-installation-of-egpu-on-os-x-inc-display-output/ This pulled and installed the latest NVidia web drivers. I then booted into OS X and right away the eGPU setup was detected and I had OS X extending just fine to the eGPU monitor. I set that external monitor as the primary display. (Go into System Prefs, Display and drag the menu bar from the internal display to the external eGPU monitor) This makes any games started to start on the eGPU rather than the internal graphics card. I ran a few tests and benchmarks to make sure it was actually working and it was, everything seemed fine, good job. Now to boot into Windows 10. I had bootcamped Windows 10, go into Windows and installed the latest NVidia drivers and restarted to now boot up with my eGPU, no problem right ? I get to where I am choosing the Windows partition to boot into and the computer just locks up as soon as I would hit Enter to boot into Windows. Every - Single - Time. I'll try and keep this already long story shorter than it could be and just go over my boot up process. First while in Windows, no egpu, I opened device manager and disabled the R395X card... everything goes black.. uh oh. So I have to force shut down the machine by holding down the power button. At this point I leave the eGPU powered on but I remove the Thunderbolt cable from the Akitio only. Turn on the iMac and hold down Alt to bring up the partition screen but I continue holding down Alt and never let up. I reach over and connect the Thunderbolt cable back into the Akitio and then reach back and choose my Windows partition and hit enter, still holding down Alt Windows boots up on the internal display first, just the little spinning dots and then I notice my external monitor connected to the eGPU comes to life. Hoorah! I check device manager. Radeon card is still disabled and the NVidia card is now showing up. The internal display is stuck on 4k resolution, 3840x2160 and I can't change it. My external is a 1080p monitor and I am able to change through all the resolutions it supports easily in Display Settings. I've been doing some benchmarking and testing a little bit today and everything seems to be working just great. I do Folding@Home and decided to let the GPU go all night to somewhat stress test the setup. Folding can keep the GPU pegged at 80% non-stop and it has been running like that for about 20 hours. I also slightly overclocked the card with EVGA Precision, +130MHz on the GPU and +175MHz on the RAM and it has been holding steady at 68C all night with fans speeds on automatic under 900rpm. *** I'll also throw in that I didn't install ANY Bootcamp drivers whatsoever when I installed Windows 10. I saved the Bootcamp support file to a USB drive then just plainly installed Windows then open the support file and only installed with WiFi and LAN card drivers so that I could access the internet and download the current NVidia Drivers. Results So the reasoning I give that this project is better for those with multi-monitor setups is that the eGPU doesn't seem to be powering the internal iMac screen, I can't be sure but performance on it seems a tad sluggish. Not sluggish like a slide-show presentation but just slower than when the eGPU is not connected. Normal video watching like YouTube full screen or Netflix and Hulu seem fine and I have yet to actually check performance on the iMac screen, it just "feels" slower. It is also now locked at no higher than 4k resolution only when the eGPU is outputting to the 2nd monitor. If I disable video output from the eGPU the iMac goes back to 5k and I can still utilize the eGPU processing power for rendering projects. However, eGPU performance on the external monitor is quite, quite good. The only game I have installed in OS X currently is Warcraft. On the 1080p monitor, Ultra Settings and every option set to the highest available setting I was getting on average of 99fps. I have not done thorough testing of any sort yet other than a few benchmarking programs and Warcraft so these are the results as of now. In Windows 10 I got to run 3dMark but as of yet I had to leave before getting done with FireStrike so I will post those results later. 3D Mark 11 =http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/10969734 GPU Score of 19,343 3D Mark Vantage =http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/5417862 GPU Score of 53,759 3dmark13-FS.GPU=15066 I will try and do more testing within Windows and OS X with results from both cards to show the difference the eGPU makes.
  6. I have folding@home running at the moment so I don't want to restart the computer yet but I am fairly confident that when I had the 395X enabled in Windows the internal monitor ran at 5120x2880 in Windows10. I'll check sometime today to verify.
  7. got the eGPU to run in Windows. For me the bootup was : have the egpu powered down : booted up the iMac holding down Alt and continue holding it : Once I could choose the partition I continued holding Alt while I turned on the eGPU. : count to 5 : Still holding Alt I chose Windows and continue holding until the Windows loading swirly thing showed up : at that time the external monitor that was connected to the eGPU came alive and everything was detected fine. This worked 100% for me Also, in Windows I had gone into device manager and clicked disable on the M395X prior to restarting. With the 395X disabled, the 980TI 'seems' to be powering the 5k screen but the resolution is set only to 4k and I couldn't change this. It got late so this is as far as I got tonight, I can do some more testing in Windows tomorrow. Downloading some benchmark software to test it out.
  8. reinstalled 10.11.3 and the card was picked up right away, script ran beautifully and external monitor came on immediately after restart. Just now the built-in 5k display is only showing on maybe 1/3rd of the screen , showing as 2560*2800 18" screen.
  9. I received everything today, hardware wise everything is fine. The problem comes in I think because I'm running 10.11.4beta3 and the script can not find a driver for this version of OS X so everything seems to just halt at that point. I found the drivers for 10.11.4 installed those along with the CUDA drivers and tried every boot up process I could find and the Mac just won't recognize the card. Running the script it sees the card and says GTX 980 Ti installed but just can not find the drivers for the card and this version of OS X so I'm going to try going back to 10.11.3 and running the script again. 346.03.06b01 are the drivers I found from MacVideoCards that are supposed to be for 10.11.4b
  10. Long-time reader, recently joined the forums. I would just like to say, Thank You for all the work you've been doing to get this working and helping all of us other guys with our setups. It takes a special person to not only help someone with a setup exactly the same as their own but to go above and beyond to try and get everyone working. It's really cool what you're doing and have put into this project. I don't know if I could buy you a beer but I'd for sure contribute to any donations for the hard work you've done to make it almost a simple plug n play for the rest of us. I should have my eGPU setup by Tuesday, 5k iMac and 980Ti. I'll be reporting back soon. Thanks again guys.
  11. My Akitio box and barrel plug(s) will be in Monday, EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC+ on Tuesday and I'll probably pick up the power supply (Corsair Modular 750W) on Monday as well.
  12. Interested in this as well, my Akitio will be in on Monday and 980Ti on Tuesday. Chrise have you gotten any further along with Windows? I may be picking your brain as well within OS X.
  13. This is perfect, I'd like to say thank you so much for doing the leg work. I'm planning on getting a 2015 5k iMac soon and was just playing with the idea of running an eGPU for the external monitor and like you the increase to rendering output. Very exciting news. Time to get started myself on an eGPU solution. **** Got the iMac last week. A 5k 27" i7, 32GB 2133MHz, 512GB SSD Just ordered the Akitio and now looking at video cards and I believe I'm going with the 980Ti as well and using your info as the basis for my setup. I may be adding my own thread soon. Hopefully within a week.
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