EpicBlob

e-gpu stands for External Graphics Processing Unit (your graphics card). This is connecting a desktop class GPU to your laptop, small form factor pc, or any type of computer that has the GPU out of the box. The big reason for this is physically, a desktop graphics card isn't able to fit within a laptop. The graphics cards inside laptops also aren't comparable to a desktop card. But the CPU of a desktop and laptop aren't too(too) far apart so it is mostly the GPU that limits the computer.

The main point is to give laptops/other systems desktop-class power. This is great for games, video editing, 3D modeling, or pretty much anything that requires horsepower.

Do you have PE4L, if you do then check in bios that your expresscard speed is set to 2.0. Then, did you halt Win with F8 then connected expresscard and booted to win?

Also check link speed when gaming or other intensive GPU activity.

Hey guys, I have a 4530s with a 2670qm cpu with intel hd 3000 and an expresscard 2.0 slot. I plugged in a 560 and everything works great but my link speed is stuck at 1.1opt instead of 1.2. Any ideas on forcing the full link speed?

1. (Optional) Set your computer to always boot in Win 7. Go to System Preferences in mac OS X and as Boot Drive select Windows 7.

2. Shut down the Computer (reboot is not sufficient)

3. Make sure your entire setup is plugged in and on except your computer which should be turned off. egpu is turned on and the expresscard is plugged into the sonnet echo adapter, adapter is plugged into your MacBook thunderbolt port. Also, if you have an external monitor, it is plugged into your egpu.

4. Turn on the computer. Your screen will turn grey and you will hear the Mac Chime. While the screen in white, unplug the expresscard from your sonnet echo adapter.

5. Your screen will now turn black. When the Windows icon appears and is loading, plug back in the expresscard to your sonnet echo adapter.

So I'm sure someone has used the HP Probook 4530s for an e-gpu computer, but I'm wondering how it went for them. It seems like it would be a great computer.

-Expresscard 2.0 slot

-Cheap base price

-Upgradable CPU

-Upgradable Screen

-Popular among the hackintosh crowd so my guess is you could get OS X on here and use an e-gpu on the mac side.

Any known issues with the laptop? And if I were to buy one, I'd probably put in a 2670QM i7 processor, 8gb ram, and a 1080p screen, so it could be a great laptop for external graphics.

What do you guys think?

Thanks for your suggestions, though I intended to get the MSI I came accross a very cheap deal on this EVGA gtx 660 Now the specs for its power requirement are

Minimum of a 450 Watt power supply. (Minimum recommended power supply with +12 Volt current rating of 24 Amps.)

Total Power Draw : 140 Watts

I was planning on getting a generic PSU on ebay

Will it work with the card? it has a 12v/22A rating.

A 550w power supply will be plenty. The 660 only needs one six pin, and a 550w power supply will easily be able to give a constant 140w of power.

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A 550w power supply will be plenty. The 660 only needs one six pin, and a 550w power supply will easily be able to give a constant 140w of power.

Edit: Yeah I agree with Khenglish lol forget what i said. A bad power supply can ruin the system, so getting a better one that costs a biit more isn't a bad idea. I'm not too familiar with power supplies but I'm guessing a 80 plus bronze certified should be ok?

Thanks bjorm! I saw that you used the MSI GTX660, does it matter if I use EVGA or ASUS... Is there any performance difference?

Each different card shouldn't matter. I use the MSI Twin Frozr II 660 and it works great. Also, I would definitely look into getting this card. Overclocked, dead silent, and doesn't get too hot while gaming. Been very pleased with it.

Hi Nando..

I recently donated for your Setup 1.2, but I'm still having problems, wondering if you could help me out...

I'm running a late 2012 Mac Mini (2.3GHz i7, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD). The GPU I'm using is an old-school Nvidia GeForce 9800GT.

I have the Sonnet TB>expresscard adapter, and the PE4L. I pretty much have the same setup as the OP's Macbook Air 2013 in terms of my eGPU stuff.

I have got so far as to get Windows booting with my GPU showing in device manager (drivers installed) and the Error code 12.

So I've tried using Setup 1.2 to fix that, but I don't think I have the correct pci.bat or startup files.

I have read countless posts regarding how to customize it to my Mac Mini and 9800GT, but I'm having no luck in decoding what it means and you need to change....

Can you possibly help me with a pci.bat and config settings for my Mac Mini?

Or even explain what the code within the files means, so I can try to make one?

If you need more info from Setup 1.2's diagnostics or anything, just say. Thanks for your time and effort on this Nando!

Edit: I should add that I installed Windows a while ago through bootcamp, and not the way the original post has specified. Could that be the reason maybe...

I'm running the same setup you are except that I am using a newer nvidia 660. Your card could be the issue because older cards didn't compress as much memory as the newer kepler and fermi cards do. Do you have a 4xx-7xx nvidia card you might be able to test it with?

Also, You will be pleasantly pleased with the results for your Mac Mini Incredibly small form factor with awesome performance.

This is AWESOME! I have been waiting for this solution to come for so long! I will definitely try this out over the weekend!

However I have a question regarding OSX. Many of us use OSX for video editing, and if I were able to use this method to boost my graphics card on OSX that would make my life complete. Currently my macbook retina's 13" graphics is a bit too slacky and slow for what I do in terms of editing.

Do you think it would be possible to make this work for video editing on OSX any time soon?

Kind Regards

It seems like we will have to wait until Apple makes graphics card compatible with thunderbolt and it's OS. If you use an older macbook pro with expresscard, a non-thunderbolt egpu is virtually plug and play with OS X.

Did anyone know if the GTX 650 Ti (GK106) have Optimus feature?

Yes it does have Optimus capability.

Well I think the only main reason you would purchase an AMD card over a nVidia for an e-gpu is that you wouldn't want to use Optimus (built in screen acceleration, eliminates external monitor). But since it's almost impossible to get the igpu in the rmbp working under EFI which is necessary for Optimus, I'd say that leaves the upside out of the question.

Going from a 560 to a 660 still gave me a huge boost with expresscard (I use a ViDock and sonnet echo adapter) but with native thunderbolt you would probably be able to get a much stronger card. A 760 is said to be capable of reaching 670 levels which is what several people with e-gpus had, so that might not be a bad option.

Same works with a macbook and egpu using the sonnet echo expresscard adapter. Start with expresscard plugged in, pull it out right after the computer starts up, then plug it back in during the windows loading screen or after windows has loaded (both work)

Thunderbolterizer!

Anyone have a quadro card they'd like to test out with this? Seems like this is the first time someone has gotten a thunderbolt e-gpu to work under os x.

I have my external graphics card working with a 2012 mac mini and bootcamped windows 7. It was essentially plug and play for me including a few easy to read steps. EFI worked with my mac mini fine (took a long time actually getting windows 7 and EFI on it though).

Are you using an expresscard egpu with the sonnet echo TB/Expresscard adapter or a straight up TB enclosure? Cause if it's the expresscard I could give you the steps to get it working.

I got a MSI Twin Frozr III 660 2gb for $195 on newegg (not sure if that's still the price). The 660 is a GREAT card and definitely worth it for $200.

Here it is, guess I bought it at the wrong time! But I would definitely advise getting this card. Even while playing Battlefield 3 or Far Cry 3 and putting my ear right next to it (I have it as an external graphics card) I could barely hear a thing.

MSI N660 TF 2GD5/OC GeForce GTX 660 2GB 192-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card - Newegg.com

I have a quad core i7 3615qm (pretty close to your 3770t) and a nvidia 660 running at 1.2opt and got 23081 for 36mark06. So the 1.3opt definitely gives the gpu a nice boost. Would it be possible to get some benchmarks of games? The added bandwidth would probably be much more apparent.

I use the MSI Twin Frozr 660 and it's a great card. My hard drive is louder than the card even while playing battlefield 3.

That 450w PSU requirement is for a desktop. The 140w is how much the graphics card itself will consume.

Villagetronic (company that sells the Vidock) has a product called the ViCard that is made to connect the Vidock or expresscard e-gpu to a desktop.

I have 4gb 1600mhz ram, so that shouldn't be too much of an issue. I'll be upgrading to 8gb in the near future though.

It's not like it runs horribly at medium settings 1080p, but I'm really looking towards getting a solid 60 with at least decent settings. And I also heard that CUDA cores greatly affects performance with external nvidia cards, so 960 on the 660 or 1344 on the 660ti would destroy the 366 on my 560.

Edit: I think I'll buy a 660 and use the money saved to purchase 8gb of ram for my mac mini.

WHen you say that your 560 is bottlenecking on you in BF3, have you determined *what* is causing the bottleneck? Is it tessellation? Anti-aliasing? Are you running at 1920x1080 at Ultra gfx settings? Your 560 might be bottling necking you now, but how do you know that the 660 won't bottleneck in the exact same regard? Find out first what the bottleneck is, and then find a GPU that can address this issue and overcome it. For all you know, upgrading to the 660 Ti might not help you at all, and you'd be out $300.

Please take it for what you will, but do understand why I say that the bottleneck isn't bad for me. For others, perhaps running all their games at full 2560x1440 at Ultra with all hardware pumping features is a requirement. If that's the case, then yes, the bottleneck will be horrible for you.

Thanks for the reply. My goal is to play battlefield 3 as close to a constant 60fps as possible, and with my 560 I'm able to get close to that while on low settings 1080p. But I'm hoping that a bit stronger card would give me the kind of boost to achieve 60fps at medium settings. Kepler cards also allow for txaa, which I've heard isn't as power hungry as msaa. Another reason I want to upgrade my card so that it will last me at least until midway through college (currently a junior in high school). If I were to upgrade to a TB enclosure later down the road, my card would only have more potential and I'm just not sure how long a 660 would last me compared to a 660ti. You do bring up good points about some in game settings which could be bottlenecking my card, I'll do some tweaking once I get home. I'm also getting $100 off from my parents and found friends that would buy the three $50 in-game coupons that come with nvidia cards, so in reality price isn't an issue.

Hey guys I'm planning on purchasing a 660ti as my 560 seems to be bottlenecking on a few games I play such as Battlefield 3. I was wondering how much of a difference I would see in games, even with the expresscard bottleneck. CPU shouldn't be an issue at all, as it is a 3rd gen quad core ivy bridge i7. Do you guys think it would be worth buying such a card or would a 660 be more than enough? I do plan on buying a somewhat futureproof card so if the 660ti will give me enough of a boost, I'll go ahead and bite the bullet.

I second that. I'm planning on upgrading from a 560 to a 660ti or 670, so I want to know how much of a boost I will obtain at 1.2opt. I have a desktop quad core i7 ivy so that shouldn't bottleneck at all.

Yeah I think the problem is that usb-3 does not carry pci-e lanes like express card and thunderbolt do.

Hey guys so I'm thinking of building a PC just for streaming gameplay so my current system doesn't face the huge bottleneck while using fraps or anything (specs at the end). Main reason being is I have a horrible cpu so gaming+recording is pretty much impossible lol.

One of my friends has some desktops that he doesn't use anymore, which I could get away with scrapping its PSU, motherboard, memory, and a hard drive with 64bit windows 7 (I don't know specific model numbers for the parts but I can check this weekend). The only other parts I believe I need is a capture card and cpu.

My question to you guys is what's the lowest of each (price wise) I could get away with to have a decent streaming only pc. I'm just starting out to record gameplay, so 720p is fine for the capture card. And I know an AMD quad core is like an i3, but would one of the new Vishera models work? And I'm trying to spend as little money as possible.

Thanks!

Computer Specs:

2011 macbook pro 13inch 2.3ghz dual core i5 sandy bridge, 8gb ram, 250gb samsung 840 ssd

Vidock External Graphics Card (NVidia 560)

27inch 1080p monitor

Question for people who have a sandy bridge i5-2520m dual core laptop(8gb ram) with x1.2opt setup, will it run battlefield 3 on maximum settings on internal screen? (with a card like gtx460/560ti)?

With a 560 on my external screen, I'm able to run at 1080p low settings mostly staying around 50-60 with a few drops to 40. On my internal given the resolutions 1280*800, it stays at a much more constant 50+

Keep in mind that Battlefield 3 multiplayer (which is what I'm guessing you'd be playing) is a very CPU intensive game, so a weak dual core i5 doesn't really meet up to it's standards.