naturbo2000

As my sig. i5-2520M No external monitors hooked up. I connected my old main-rig monitor up to the eGPU once when I first set it up, but haven't since. My laptop is now my main rig (hence getting a Thinkpad) and use it either solo, or with the eGPU driving the (upgraded) internal LCD for gaming. Test above was via internal LCD if it matters.

365MB/s

I have a PE4L-EC200A (200cm), which works fine at PCIe 2.0. Any PCIe 1.x vs 2.0 issues seem to relate to connector impedance rather than cable length (at least up to 200cm). 200cm means I can use my laptop on the sofa :-)

I have a PE4L-EC200A (2m cable) which works fine at PCIe 2.0

I stand corrected. It is bplus site you linked to. I suspect the pe4l 2.1 is gen3 capable, but it's somewhat irrelevant as laptops seem to be reserving gen3 for thunderbolt.

But bplus doesn't say that it's gen2 capable (since nan do informed them). The link above is to Harmonic Inversion (a US distributor). And they obviously didn't get (or pay attention to) the memo that says it doesn't work. Edit: No You're Right, The Link Is To Bplus

The problem should not be the fact that it's a 100cm cable (I'm using Gen 2 on a 200cm cable on a T420). You say that you've tried going back to the PE4H and that was OK - have you tried the PE4H setup on your T530 (with bios set to Gen 1) or was that with your old T500? If the PE4H is working on your T530 but the PE4L is not, then I'd strongly suspect an issue with the PE4L. If you haven't tried the PE4H on your T530, you should do that next to determine whether it's a hardward issue with the PE4L or a software issue on the T530.

Not if you splice in HDMI connectors you can't. Your current score is gen 2, but adding connectors will cause signal reflections in the cable such that gen 2 stops working correctly (gen 1 is still OK). Higher quality connectors might help.

It will work. But you should check beforehand if gen 1 speeds are ok for you (via bios settings or setup.exe). I can't help but think a 780 will be horribly bandwidth limited. Please post your experiences of gen1 vs gen2 on your 780 if you go this route (preferably gameplay as well as raw benchmarks).

And if the goal is simply a longer cable and you haven't yet purchased it, I can confirm that the 2m variants work correctly at PCIe 2.0 speeds. If I recall correctly, even a single connector on the cable causes speeds to drop to PCIe 1.x due to signal reflections. FWIW there are connectors you could use for PCIe speeds, but they're phenomenally expensive: here

There's nothing wrong per-se with a 75cm cable length - I have a PE4L-EC200A which uses a soldered 2m cable. Works fine at PCIe 2.0. Of course 75cm + HDMI connectors might be too much (given the signal reflection issues caused by the connectors).

As promised - My 560ti448 egpu has watercooling and a mild overclock to 848MHz (max temp 46C running 3dmark11) 3DMark11 (which reckons on 5760 as the best/typical(?) graphics score for a 560ti448) External: P4973 (Graphics score 5513) Internal: P4875 (Graphics score 5383) This is in line with bjorm's much more complete tests in the previous message :-) NB - my external result is from a previous driver version. However I don't have a monitor handy to retest.