prosetheus

I would also much rather have AMD over nvidia (lower price plus better performance), but nvidia and adobe have this deal going where they have locked out AMD out of Mercury Engine hardware acceleration. The only one powerful enough to bypass that was Apple which got Mercury Engine hardware acceleration unlocked for Mac OS only. Another over optimistic guy got screwed like this: Adobe Community: Should I return my 7970m for a GTX670/675?

Hey guys, I'm looking to get a second hand M18x R1 from someone who is selling it in my city. I have a Lenovo W520 at the moment, and although its a fantastic machine, 2 things are really bothering me about it. 1. The W520 body cannot handle 2820QM on turbo boost, gaming results in a lot of throttling unless I disable turboboost in Throttlestop. 2. The temps remain around 89C with above turbo disabled and a cooling pad and are easily 93C-95C with turboboost enabled, and hit 97C mark while rendering footage. I am not really that much of a hardcore gamer to go with SLI, but my main purpose will be using the M18x for non-harcore gaming and video editing/post production (the increased screen size and added capacity for more storage are big pluses, but mainly I hope that I will see lower temps. I will also be using only one GPU (has to be nVidia because Adobe is only CUDA compatible). I was hoping for some help regarding a few issues that would like to get cleared up: a. Can I assume that the M18x R1 with only a single gpu (for now) be able handle heat from a 2820QM on full turboboost and 3 harddisks for hours? b. How many harddisks can the M18x R1 accomodate in total? And can the optical drive also be replaced by a HDD in a caddy? How expensive would that caddy be and how easy would it be to install in into the laptop body? c. Can the M18X R1 have optimus or GPU switching, as in is it possible to use intel HD 3000 as well? And most importantly, since I will be getting this second hand, what are some general things I need to be aware of with this laptop to check to make sure that everything is OK? By that I mean any known faults/issues that I can check at that time? What kind of stress tests do I need to run? And also, how much would a new battery cost in case I needed it, and about the general cost and availability of spare parts on ebay. Thats a lot of questions, but then again, the M18x is not really a cheap machine, and I could really use all the advice and tips from experienced users. Thanks in advance.

Appreciate your insight, was extremely helpful. Its great to hear that CUDA perfoms so well on the eGPU solution. I am sure that I will be able to leverage similarly impressive performance using eGPU for Adobe Mercury engine. Thanks a lot!

Hey Jaster, I'm really curious whether you face issues with lack of bandwidth with CUDA over egpu. I always wondered if I could use it to power the mercury playback engine in adobe premiere pro. Let us know what your experiences are with CUDA.

I myself waited quite a while for the gigabyte u2442 (I think it had socketed CPU's and TB, or was supposed to) but then finally caved in and bought a Lenovo W520 (2820qm + Quadro2000m) because I needed CUDA for video editing as well. It turned out to be a surprisingly capable gaming machine as well (skyrim is surprisingly playable 1080p, all high, 2xAA), but the CPU temps soar up to 92 to 95 degrees celsius during quad core optimized games (Crysis 2, GTA 4, Planetside 2) and there is a lot of throttling without throttlestop. An egpu solution is important or I could face huge problems in a while. Even a laptop cooler isn't cutting it for me. I dont know how people with 15 inch gaming laptops cope.

Thanks for the patient reply MystPhysx. I actually repeated that and asked about esata as well. Its just frustration, I was very much looking forward to getting very close to desktop performance through egpu at this point. But thanks for clearing that up again. TB raised my hopes a lot and now we go into waiting again.

what about DisplayPort (T and W series lenovos have them) or even esata?

Well, the reason why I hoped (and wish!) that there was a workaround with this is that DisplayPort was also supposed to be able to transmit video of quality much greater than just the 1080p of the initial HDMI spec, and so I assumed that it must obviously be allowed to pass through more data and/or better compression and thus hoped that it could be non-apple systems 'thunderbolt' solution. I hope to hear what some others might have to say about it. Though your logic does seem right to me.

Hey Nando, Great to see that the eGPU community is still going strong and growing healthily. I used to follow the DIY eGPU scene since october of 2011 and held out as long as possible for economical TB solutions but finally caved in and got a lenovo W520, which is a rock solid machine itself, although due to the overpowered components in a cramped chassis with poor cooling, its kind of hard to harness the full power of the dGPU and CPU simultaneously. I do fully intend to set up my own diy egpu implementation and the w520 seems to handle that just fine, but I wanted to ask if there is any way to utilize the bandwitdth of the DisplayPort in certain laptops? From wikipedia its bitrate specs are : 1.62, 2.7, or 5.4 Gbit/s data rate per lane; 1, 2, or 4 lanes; (effective total 5.184, 8.64, or 17.28 Gbit/s for 4-lane link); 1 Mbit/s or 720 Mbit/s for the auxiliary channel. Since displayport, as rare as it still is, is still far more commonly found than TB, is there some way that the egpu setups can use this somehow? I wish to apologize in advance if my theory sounds idiotic or ill thought out, and at the same time thank you immensely for being so patient and helpful.