theitsage

On November 21, 2016 at 0:33 PM, caste said:

Has anyone tried using the AKiTio Node with:

• Macbook (Air or Pro released previously than 2016) via Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter or
• Macbook Pro 2016 via Thunderbolt 3

If yes, are there any issues or it's almost plug n play?

I got an AKiTiO Thunder3 yesterday. It uses the same Thunderbolt 3 board with the Node. The good news is it works. The bad news is there's lots of work to make it functional.

Apple built a restriction in macOS to prevent most Thunderbolt 3 devices from working. As goalque mentioned, there's a binary hack to give handshake to all Thunderbolt 3 enclosures. Without doing that, you'll see the Unsupported status in macOS. I've tried a PCIe flash drive and RX 470 GPU. They show 40 Gb/s x1.

The Thunder3 doesn't work as well as Thunder2. Plugging in an external monitor would freeze the system. @goalque which Thunderbolt enclosure are you using?

macOS 10.12.1 cripples eGPU to some extent. Try 10.12.2 Beta - I was able to use my RX 470 eGPU with Beta 2. If you're not participating in Beta updates, you can change your Update catalog to receive Developer Beta builds.

sudo softwareupdate --set-catalog https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.12seed-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

If you ever decide to stop receiving Beta update, you can run this.

softwareupdate --clear-catalog

@goalque  The “whoosh” is music to my ears! Thank you for your guidance. I tried running the metal test but got the following error:

<unknown>:0: error: no such file or directory: 'x86_64-apple-macosx10.12'

4 minutes ago, Mark said:

 

That's great news! What did you do to get it to work? Did you do the same thing as you would on a TB2 MBP?

Exact same process with the addition of Apple TB3-TB2 adapter. It was not working in 10.12 and 10.12.1. 

As long as your MBP runs macOS, the adapter can definitely do MBP - TB2 <--> TB3 - eGPU.

Just now, rwssoccer1 said:

Very nice! What eGPU solution are you using to connect it to the MBP?

AKiTiO Thunder2 with Apple TB3-TB2 adapter.

eGPU shows progress in 10.12.2 Beta 2. It now has Metal Support and Acceleration.

21 hours ago, RKelley said:

 

Prior to Sierra, the nvram boot-arg for Nvidia was "nvda_drv=1"; now it is "NvidiaWeb".  Download, edit the eGPU setup script from @goalque -  search for:   boot_args="nvda_drv=1"

 

Change the "nvda_drv=1" to "NvidiaWeb" in all occurrences.  Save, exit, then re-run the script.  Otherwise, the Nvidia drivers will get loaded but not run on boot.

Thank you for the explanation. I have only tried AMD GPUs so I didn't encountered that - will keep that in mind when I use an Nvidia GPU though.

2 hours ago, RKelley said:

Yes, the existing script by @goalque still works fine.  It needs an "adjustment" to work in Sierra (namely the nvram boot args), but it works well.  I used it both in El Capitan and Sierra today.

Can you elaborate on this nvram boot args adjustment?

21 minutes ago, goalque said:

This HDK is not for resale and is not intended for the retail market.

I am sure that the internals are the same.

 

They use my script. Looks good though. +$350 extra price for the shiny enclosure without thermal certification or electrical safety label.

 

They don’t care about hardware certification or software licenses, unstoppable unless Apple/Intel lawyers come tapping on their shoulders.

They probably haven't made enough for the lawyers to get involved. 

I love how there's no Late 2016 MacBook Pro in any of Bizon TB3 enclosure photos yet they claim full plug-n-play. The port layout in the rear looks identical to AKiTiO Thunder3 and Thunderbolt 3 dev kit. - http://www.inxtron.com/products/thunderbolt3-hdk

On October 31, 2016 at 6:18 PM, goalque said:

Not alarming if the speed activates to 20Gb/s x2 with a Belkin 40Gb/s cable and TB3 chassis.

 

This should lead you on the right track:

 

https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/10057-automate-egpu-efi-mac-bootscreen-on-egpu/&do=findComment&comment=151531

 

However, I suppose that you’ve already done so. Hopefully the problem is due to the bidirectional TB3-TB2-adapter. How did you check Metal acceleration? If OpenCL works, the -clpeak option may give us clues about transfer bandwidth in GBps (enqueueWriteBuffer/enqueueReadBuffer).

Thank you for the quick response! I revised the script to alter X4100 rather than X4000 since 10.12.1 beta. OpenCL does not work. System Profiler does not show "Metal: Supported" like it would with older MBP and MBA (even when I have an external display plugged in). The external display has output through the eGPU but OS visuals are lagging.

I want to think it's the TB3 <-> TB2 adapter. I'll have another adapter today to test and report back.

23 hours ago, goalque said:

Open up Terminal, and provide the output of the following command:

system_profiler SPThunderboltDataType | sed -e '/Port (Upstream)/,/Cable/!d'

No 40 Gb/s string, right?

I can also confirm the two USB-C ports on the base Late 2016 MBP show 20 Gbps.

I've tried my RX 470 eGPU which has been working great with an 11" MBA and 17" MBP. Unfortunately there's no Acceleration or Metal Support when connected to TB3 MBP. All the supporting kexts loaded and external monitor work through the eGPU though. Any ideas?