miro_gt

what I realized is that bandwidth problems are quite big. Even Expresscard 2.0 giving double the rate or Expresscard 1.0 - the bandwidth is hardly comparable to what current internal GPUs are using (PCIe 2.0 @ x8 or x16), i.e. 8 to 16 times faster than Expresscard 2, which is 16 to 32 times faster than what I got here as external. at this point it doesn't make sense for me to try anything else with eGPU unless there's thunderbolt port available, and even then I would be skeptical as this would about equal PCIe 2.0 @ x2, so to get the performance the driver HAS to use good compression to pass through the link. what is needed is a link that is like 4 times faster than thunderbolt, lol. Dang, the truth hits hard.

well there's something seriously wrong with the setup. While benchmark scores are great, FPS is not - I've tried two games so far and both perform worse than my internal GPU which is over 5 times slower than this. I'm assuming the bus is to blame for this, as my internal is connected at x16. makes me think that the bus is of great importance, despite benchmark scores. For example, maybe lenovo T420s with its nVidia 4200m connected at x16 would give more FPS than lenovo T430s with its nVidia 5200m connected at x8. (source notebookcheck gpu-z screenshots). oh well.. EDIT: apparently I'm not the first person to figure that out: http://forum.notebookreview.com/e-gpu-external-graphics-discussion/418851-diy-egpu-experiences-134.html#post6582485

x1E wont happen as my LAN is on port 6, or at least that's what it says on the schematics (I haven't checked it). as far as the x2 setup - I think falcontx didn't have success, but would have been nice if it worked I may look into that later. I had to overcome lots of overheating issues and ended up taking out the cards own fan as to free passage for airflow (the dock has its own fan in the bay), as well as the plastic cover that it had over the heatsink. Works out great

lots of modifications took place as to manage the fitting of the PowerColor HD 7750 1GB GDDR5 into the advanced dock, and to deal with the overheating issues due to the small space, but I consider the project done since last night as temperatures topped out at ~87 deg C in a 22 deg C room at full continues load, i.e. me playing Blacklight Retribution at 1024x768 with all on high except textures that were on medium. The game (free on steam) is playable but still slows down here and there. overall very happy with the result, considering the limitations of physical space, power consumption, BIOS issues, and the x1 PCIe link. here's my first run, with temp monitoring software running on the laptop screen using its own nVidia GPU: NVIDIA Quadro NVS video card benchmark result - Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T9500,LENOVO 8891CTO score: 11179 3DMarks gpu-z screenshot: http://oi50.tinypic.com/e6t9at.jpg ... kinda fun to see the only one system (mine) that tops the chart right there being twice as fast as the second place systems, lol.

the ultra bay uses PATA connection, and there's PATA-to-SATA chip that allows connecting of SATA HDDs via caddy.

idea: get advanced dock and use its external PCI port to combine with the expresscard slot to use 2x eGPU speeds.

hi falcontx, I have two T61 computers and I'm interested in doing eGPU setup as well. Can you post some 3DMark06 scores of your setup running via ExpressCard only? from your posts you're using T9300 CPU and doing eGPU with GTX570 over PE4H, but what OS are you using ? thanks

Hi all, apparently I just joined, which could be a good news I've got fed up long ago by the NBR kids and the whole manufacturer influence thing over the mods and what not so here I am, in hopes that I can express my views freely, lol. Not that I'll be leaving NBR though, but you get my point. Well Tech Inferno Fan got in here after some stupid argument, unclewebb is hosting throttlestop here since ver.4 as I remember, so I figured just couple more people need to join (if not already) and it would be a all-you-need type of forum for all, heh. I've got great threads started in NBR in the Lenovo community there specifically for the T61 laptop over the years, but I guess no need to repeat those in here. However I'm sure I could be of great help in such discussions. Nonetheless I provided the test laptop for the last middletons BIOS that enabled Dual-IDA with many other things on those machines, along with some beta testing for earlier versions of throttlestop an year or so ago. anyways, I've been around computers since the beginning, i.e. the 8086 days so I've seen it all. That must have been my first overclock when the computer was running at 8MHz and I made it to run at 12MHz via jumpers, heh, been some time since the 640KB RAM days. Besides computers I got interest in turbo cars as well, which I'm sure will be cool topic to discuss if somebody is doing a project like that, as I got turbo honda running for the past 5-6 years as well, despite everybody's saying that it's gonna blow up due to the power output for a stock engine. I also happen to be el.engineer so that comes in handy sometimes .. maybe I'll share pictures of my own "computer" board that I designed as school project some 5 years ago - LCD panel, num keyboard with letters, 8051 microcontroller and "huge" 2kb memory chip, and all that controls an air gun on a stepper motor that shoots ping pong balls with compressed air into a target and keeps score I think I'm going to skip the rest 27 pages of introduction, lol, but this is my first post nonetheless.