JimmyKip

So, good news & bad news (for me). Firstly it turns out I have an early 2013 15" Retina MBP not a late 2012 like I thought. But the good news is that last night after disabling the 650m the GTX970 worked first pop, I booked into the 1.2 setup but got distracted and instead of choosing the 1-6 menu options on the first screen the countdown expired & it booted. I was annoyed until the boot finished & my external display was working; once booted I was able to set the resolution of the internal display to the max Retina resolution so it seems like the 970 was driving both ok. Everything was working great, World of Tanks with everything on maximum was giving solid 60fps and looking amazing. But later on I started to have the eGPU die mid-game. I'm pretty sure this is because when I ordered a DA-2 PSU I was sent a DA-3 which only outputs 180W. The whole PSU would die until unplugging & replugging at the wall. I should have a DA-2 arriving in the next couple of days so after doing some re-wiring i'll hopefully have better luck. By the way - when it comes to the wiring, I decided not to use the molex connector on the PSU at all. The moulding around the plug is very flimsy & is easy to remove and expose the wiring; i'm then using a screw-down connector to join that directly to the wires on my 2x 6-pin PCIe connectors and the Akitio barrel-plug. I also put a switch on the sense wire which effectively turns the PSU on or off which makes it nice & simple to get it turned on at the right time during boot etc. Once i've re-done it all with the new PSU & it looks tidy i'll take a couple of pics to show what it looks like; its much tidier than using multiple molex connectors.

Having read through a few other similar setups (that have succeeded) i'm thinking I need to use eGPU Setup to do both PCIe compact & chainloader. I think last night I only did the compact so will give that a crack this evening & report back with results. It'll be something similar to this (anybody who knows better, feel free to correct me ) Boot windows normally with Akitio off, disable 650m, shutdown Power up, holding alt - at boot screen power up Akitio then boot windows. Choose 1.2 Setup and do PCIe compact & Chainloader steps. Reboot & hope for the best! If no good here, then shutdown PC, shutdown Akitio, then do step 2 again.

I'm working on a similar setup, albeit Akitio with GTX970 on 15' Retina MGP - havent' tried to get it running in OSX yet, been focussing on Win10 and haven't had too much joy so far. I can see both display adapters are listed under Device Manager, but the GTX 970 has an error code 35 showing. In that state when I boot, at the choose boot drive screen I power on the Akitio, and choose Windows. The Blue Windows logo appears on the display connected to the GTX 970 briefly along with the spinning balls, then that freezes & the boot continues on the internal display with the external going black. I tried to disable the 650M display driver in Device Manager, and when I did the error code 35 went away, only to be replaced with error code 12 - so i've been trying to use the DIY eGPU Setup 1.2 to get it running, but i'm very n00b to what's going on there and I haven't found a step by step guide for what it is exactly I need to change to get it running. Any advice anybody can give is more than welcome, and if I make much headway tonight i'll let you know what I did to get it running. I may be completely off the rails here, but i'm assuming the end goal is to have either 650M driving internal display, 970 driving external, OR 970 driving both internal & external. I'm just a little lost on how to get to either result