UncleJoe

Hi, I'm the author of the compact utility that I've worked with Nando on. Ironically, I've never actually used an eGPU until now, so I thought I'd share my setup results. Since my room is a bit small, I've setup a bare bones system, which should serve as an example not to be followed (especially if you don't want to set your house on fire


Hardware info:


Laptop: Dell Precision M4600
CPU: Intel (R) Core (TM) i5-2520M @2.5 GhZ (2 cores)
GPU: Zotac NVIDIA GTX 480
PCIe link: x1.2 & Optimus

Please excuse the poorly stitched photo (camera axis moved too much between shots)


Benchmarks (using external monitor):

Resident Evil 5 (DX9), 1280x800, highest settings	130.3 fps
3DMark 06	16792
3DMark 11	4317
Unigine Heaven 4.0	score=1359 minFPS=16.7 maxFPS=96.4 avgFPS=54.0
CUDA nbody (50k particles)	566 GFlops

Over all, I'm impressed mostly by the gaming performance. I was able to run Battlefield 3 at the highest settings and 1920x1080 at ~30 fps. If I used 1024x768, the frame rate goes up to 60. Unfortunately, the low PCIe bandwidth makes it not very useful for image processing CUDA applications, which I need.



Out of the box, plugging the eGPU into the Dell M4600 doesn't work: Windows boots, but reports error 10 or 43 for the GPU in Device Manager. Here's what I had to do in the setup menus to get it to work (thanks to Nando for making it so easy to use):


1. set link speed of ExpressCard slot to 5 GHz (was 2.5 GHz)
2. disable dGPU (Quadro 1000M)
3. compact eGPU only
4. chainload to Windows