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rMBP 15" + Sonnet Echo Express Pro = No Joy


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Hi all,

Ive been following the forum for a few months now and have finally bitten the bullet in an attempt to put together a nice stable Ultrabook + eGPU setup. Despite the excellent reporting and tutorials from various people, I have well and truly hit a brick wall mainly (I assume) because I don't have enough understanding of the PCI registers required to get this setup running.

Components are as follows:

rMBP 15" - Early 2013 (MacBookPro10.1)

Sonnet Echo Express Pro (its the latest revision which includes an internal 6pin pci power connector)

Sapphire ATI Radeon 7850

So, at this point, I have got the system running as follows:

Windows 8 pro 64bit booting with no errors in efi mode

Mac OS X 10.7 booting on a separate partition, same HD

rEFInd installed under the OS X partition.

rEFIt efi shell installed into the EFI partition

This is what the system does under different circumstances:

1) If I connect the eGPU enclosure and then just boot straight into Windows 8 efi, the blue flag comes up with the rotating circle of dots as normal but then just stays there. I have left it overnight to see if it would do anything but no joy. Probably not very interestingly, I booted into OS X to see what would happen and it did the exact same thing ie. just sat there not booting into the OS.

2) At this point, I installed rEFInd/rEFIt shell in order to follow Shelltoe's instructions for the (here)rMBP, GTX 560 ti and TH05 adapter, figuring that if I could do similar, it might kick in.

I used the pci commands to get the VGA device pci info to set with mm in the startup.nsh. It definitely shows up and lists settings so the card I think has initialised, but when I boot from this, windows bluescreens almost immediately on boot.

At this point I think I am past what I am capable of doing on my own so am hoping that I can get some advice - I am more than happy to shell out for DIY eGPU setup if this will help but I couldn't be sure from the info page if it will actually work correctly on this setup.

Thanks for reading.

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Ok, update time...

So I've now tried a different tack:

1) Install OS X then run bootcamp assistant and use it to install Windows 8 Pro 64bit in BIOS mode (hybrid partition style).

2) Bought a copy of DIY eGPU Setup 1.2 from Nando and installed it.

This gets me no further unfortunately as, when I power up the rMBP with the Sonnet Echo Express connected with one of the three GPUs I've got for testing installed, it wont even get past the Grey Screen.

If I disconnect the enclosure and boot, then I can get into the eGPU setup menus.

If I get into the eGPU setup menu and then connect the enclosure, no amount of fiddling with settings that I can get my head round will get the setup system to detect it.

I think the problem I have is that (unless I'm being blind here) no one has used the Sonnet Echo Express Pro combined with an MBP yet so there aren't any guides out there for exactly how to go about getting this to work.

If there is any chance that someone with some experience with these setups could provide even a quick pointer, Id be very grateful.

Thanks in advance (hopefully)...

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Your critical path in getting BIOS/MBR Macbook boot working is in delaying the PCI reset delay signal. The no-longer available BPlus TH05 had a factory switch allowing you to do this but these Sonnet/OWC products do not have them. The solution? Hack one in.

borealiss covers the detail of how to do this at http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/2731-egpu-2011-macbook-air-13-inch-no-error12-no-scripts-required.html#post40861

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I used the pci commands to get the VGA device pci info to set with mm in the startup.nsh. It definitely shows up and lists settings so the card I think has initialised, but when I boot from this, windows bluescreens almost immediately on boot.

Actually I think you were pretty close on your first try. The bluescreen is most likely caused by the buildin Intel HD. Try to disable it in device manager or (if you're unable to boot into windows without bluescreen) delete igdkmd64.sys from your "C:\windows\system32\drivers" Directory (using Paragon NTFS for MAC OS or Windows recovery tools).

I still think EFI Mode is the way to go for 15'' MBP's... though I recently installed Win7 BIOS mode on an additional partition. I'll try to make it work with my EGPU and report back how to do so (just in case you don't want to install WIN8 EFI again).

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Just wanted to say big thanks to both of you for taking the time to assist...

I'm actually going to try both suggested routes; @Tech Inferno Fan, I have just ordered a PCI e extender, a nice low profile atx case to put all the bits in and some spare connectors/cables. This is going to take a few days to arrive so in the meantime I am going to go back to the EFI setup as recommended by @Shelltoe. I actually have a couple of different MacBooks now so will keep one with MBR boot and one with EFI boot so I can test with both setups.

If I manage to get the EFI setup working, I will try and put together a guide for anyone following in my footsteps :)

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Actually I think you were pretty close on your first try. The bluescreen is most likely caused by the buildin Intel HD. Try to disable it in device manager or (if you're unable to boot into windows without bluescreen) delete igdkmd64.sys from your "C:\windows\system32\drivers" Directory (using Paragon NTFS for MAC OS or Windows recovery tools).

Ok, update time again...

Tried the simplest option first... Used Win8 USB recovery tools and restored EFI image that I'd made previously - well worth noting that this worked perfectly, exactly the same as when run on PC: select the repair option, then advanced, then restore system image from USB disk. So I didnt have any issues booting into Win8 so I tried to disable the HD4000 but strangely this caused corruption and I couldn't get back into Win8, even in safe mode). So I re-imaged again and then renamed (rather than deleted just in case) the igdkmd64.sys driver file per Shelltoe's instructions, a few reboots and cold boots just to ensure stability and then hooked up the eGPU. Unfortunately this left the same problem, Windows starts to boot up to the rotating circle of dots but then just sits there spinning away.

Now onto the better news. Following the wiring guide created by @MystPhysX (here) I have created and tested a wiring loom, very straight forward to make using cheap bits bought from eBay (when I get this working and do a guide, Ill detail further). When using this to power the GPU directly from an ATX PSU, I can EFI boot into Windows, get the drivers installed and am now just stuck with the last hurdle which is error12.

Now I've got to this stage, I've just tidied the whole thing up, using epoxy resin to secure the wires into the wiring blocks and seal off all of the open ended wires etc. and have ordered a nice sff ITX case (Fractal Design Node 304 if anyone's interested + I can use the case switch to control the ATX power on pin :)) to install all of the pieces into ready to get this finally running.

Next week, once everything is installed into its new enclosure, Ill be playing with a few options to complete the project, these are the ones I've come up with so far...

1) Disable various devices on the PCI-E buses and see if this clears enough resources.

2) Go back to the MBR booting Windows8 machine with DIY eGPU setup and try the compaction method to free up the necessary resources.

3) Cry, since my bit of searching around the forum doesn't seem to reveal anyone else struggling with error 12 on an EFI booting rMBP (then I'll grovel for help!)

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So you're able to boot EFI mode but receive error 12 with "mm 0001013E 1 ;PCI :8"? This command fixed all error 12 and error 43 problems in my case. Did you delay EGPU's initialisation? It's not recommanded in EFI mode while it's needed for MBR. It's just a suggestion but it might be your 2013 model using another bridge for thunderbolt. You could try to find out using "pci -i -b" in efi shell (post some screens if you cant figure it out).

Was actually successful using my EGPU with MBR but is not really enjoyable to setup so I won't post instructions for now.

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Since you did the DSDT Override did you try using 36-bit compaction with iGPU + eGPU and demote the dGPU to 32bit space? (Might be iGPU+dGPU+eGPU with dGPU demoted to 32bit I forgot)

I get the same type of message and freeze thing otherwise.

I don't have any experience with MBR / Thunderbolt, so that's about all I can contribute

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Hi Mate, thanks for the reply. Your DSDT Override instructions were spot on!

I managed to get the Large Memory block but unfortunately I haven't then managed to get the PCI compaction working using Setup 1.2. I've had a PM from Nando advising manually creating the pci.bat as done by @kloper (here) rather than letting Setup 1.2 do this automatically so that will be my next step. Fingers crossed :)

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Ok, it now works - Once I'd spent about three weeks understanding and tabling the PCI configuration space that the whole system needed, I was able to manually set these in the EFI shell and then automate the whole thing. You can achieve the same effect in BIOS boot using Setup 1.x and a manually created pci.bat (as I was forced to do on the early 2011 15" MBP that I have also got it running on).

One thing to be very aware of between the 15" and 13" rMBP and MBPs is that the MAC EFI forces the discrete graphics to be the primary graphics so installing Windows in EFI mode cases a huge number of IRQ NOT EQUAL blue screens. With patience and reboots, it is possible to get it installed - it wont blue screen once you've got it running.

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