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US$189 AKiTiO Thunder2 PCIe Box (16Gbps-TB2)


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Thanks! Please have in mind that I'm not an experienced programmer. You describe a place in the kexts where it says "/dict". However when I open the kexts there are many places where it says that. How do I know where to paste your lines?

Thanks in advance!

“sudo nano” commands in my guide should place the cursor to the correct location, just press enter and add IOPCITunnelCompatible true value. I am thinking about to make a simple script for those kexts because after every OS X update, you have to modify them again. The ending “dict” tag should be after those added lines. If you cannot make it work, PM the files and I can modify them.

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About dragging windows from external monitor to internal, does it work only on AMD?

I have no experience of dGPU Macs unfortunately. I can only confirm that it's possible on Win8.1 with Macs having only Iris graphics + AMD eGPU. On OS X it might be possible with also dGPU models, but it depends on the application how it is programmed. Steam games on OS X can often utilise only the external screen and even if you force to run it in windowed mode, you cannot drag the window because mouse pointer is within the game window. If you found some discussion about dGPU models and Virtu MVP, let me know.

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goalque, Dschijn, thank you very much! Now my understanding is clear. As I saw on other threads, even if I use a fully modular psu (like Corsair RM450), I still need to do the paper clip trick w/ 24pin. Is this correct?

Yes, with every "desktop" PSU you use, you will need to apply the paperclip trick for the PSU to turn on.

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goalque: Apparently your inbox is full.

The AMD7000 controller isn't loaded, neither is the AMDRadeonX4000. AMD Support is though, as well as IONDRVSupport and AppleHDAController. Those touch and kextcache commands didn't change anything from what I can see.

Are you sure that IONDRVFramebuffer is optional for AMD cards? I would add the IOPCITunnelCompatible true value to them, but again I don't know where in the kexts to put it.

Here are a couple of screenshots, if that's of any help:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/96852482/Screenshots/Screen%20Shot%202015-03-04%20at%2023.21.55.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/96852482/Screenshots/Screen%20Shot%202015-03-04%20at%2023.23.06.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/96852482/Screenshots/Screen%20Shot%202015-03-04%20at%2023.23.18.png

Oscar

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goalque: Apparently your inbox is full.

The AMD7000 controller isn't loaded, neither is the AMDRadeonX4000. AMD Support is though, as well as IONDRVSupport and AppleHDAController. Those touch and kextcache commands didn't change anything from what I can see.

Are you sure that IONDRVFramebuffer is optional for AMD cards? I would add the IOPCITunnelCompatible true value to them, but again I don't know where in the kexts to put it.

Here are a couple of screenshots, if that's of any help:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/96852482/Screenshots/Screen%20Shot%202015-03-04%20at%2023.21.55.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/96852482/Screenshots/Screen%20Shot%202015-03-04%20at%2023.23.06.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/96852482/Screenshots/Screen%20Shot%202015-03-04%20at%2023.23.18.png

Oscar

Yep, already deleted some older messages. Take a look at this guide for kext mods concerning Nvidia cards:

http://forum.techinferno.com/implementation-guides/6088-%5Bguide%5D-2011-13-macbook-pro-gtx660%4010gbps-tb1-sonnet-ee-pro-win8-1-osx10-9-1-a-2.html#post87145

It might be helpful, but I suspect that the reason is invalid permissions of those kexts or the missing line feeds. Last thing to try is Kext Wizard program. By the way, what's your OS X version?

That "Display" looks odd. It should look like this when the external monitor is not attached:

post-28870-14494999600021_thumb.png

You can track down the reason from system console log, not only those IOPCITunnelCompatible lines. All kind of error messages.

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The graphics card is mostly working fine now, I got a mean fps of 34,6 in Unigine Valley (in Mac OS X) with Ultra settings, 8xAA and 1600x900 resolution. Seems reasonable, though I don't have much to compare with except for goalque who seemed to get a similar score in his video.

There's one big problem though - Indigo, the application I bought the graphics for, isn't stable. After a short period of rendering, it often slows down to a really slow speed, and the samples/second indicator makes small jumps every 10 seconds or so, with an audible little tick from the graphics card. Wait a little longer and everything often freezes and then the computer shots down.

The way Indigo's GPU acceleration works right now, is that the CPU and GPU work together, so called hybrid rendering. That means the GPU will bottleneck the CPU if it's too weak, and the CPU will bottleneck the GPU if it's too slow. And I'm pretty sure it's the latter happening here, because the CPU is working at 100% when rendering. I'm wondering if there's a bug bogging down the CPU, causing the GPU to idle, and just putting out those tiny bursts of rendering power. I also wonder what exactly causes the system to crash, if it's a system error, or if it's the GPu's fluctuating power consumption (if my hypothesis is correct). Are there any special errors in the console to look for?

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Here's a video of how it looks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMFZAwC-1Ck&feature=youtu.be

This time I tried to quit Indigo before it crashed, but after I quit Indigo the system was extremely sluggish, with a ten second delay on everything I did. The CPU was down at idle by then, so I suspect something is up with the GPU.

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Here's a video of how it looks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMFZAwC-1Ck&feature=youtu.be

This time I tried to quit Indigo before it crashed, but after I quit Indigo the system was extremely sluggish, with a ten second delay on everything I did. The CPU was down at idle by then, so I suspect something is up with the GPU.

I haven’t extensively used OpenCL apps, only LuxMark benchmarking and Blender plugins. You could also try those apps to see if it’s application specific problem, but most likely that sluggishness and eventually system crash is due to AKiTiO’s fluctuating power consumption. You can confirm this by using an energy meter on your power strip. GPGPU computing does not need that much bandwidth as gaming/OpenGL apps which transfer lots of data. I have a compiled an OS X version of the Clpeak program that measures peak values of all the OpenCL devices in your computer, showing also transfer bandwidth (GBPS) numbers.

I would advice to use only eGPU rendering if possible. I guess you already tried that 6pin taping trick method.

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Those 6 pins have been taped all along, yes. I don't own an energy meter unfortunately. I will try LuxMark ASAP though, to see if its any stable. Indigo's pure GPU rendering mode isn't released yet, but it's coming soon. Are you suggesting pure GPU rendering should be more stable, and in that case: why?

About the bandwidth - even though OpenGL apps use a lot of bandwidth, Unigine Valley ran just beautifully.

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Those 6 pins have been taped all along, yes. I don't own an energy meter unfortunately. I will try LuxMark ASAP though, to see if its any stable. Indigo's pure GPU rendering mode isn't released yet, but it's coming soon. Are you suggesting pure GPU rendering should be more stable, and in that case: why?

About the bandwidth - even though OpenGL apps use a lot of bandwidth, Unigine Valley ran just beautifully.

Just my opinion that stressing the CPU in eGPU systems may not be a good idea, because of the bottleneck of the mobile CPU - even if it’s quad core. That way we can minimize the possibility for crashing as CPU + dGPU may generate too much heat and the CPU still needs to handle eGPU Thunderbolt connection. The whole purpose of the eGPU for me is to outsource heavy calculation and keep the laptop cool.

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Here's another question for you guys: if my 7970 turns out to run nicely with the new Indigo release, how would a 7990 behave in an AKITIO? Would I be able to use both the coprocessors in parallel for OpenCL rendering under OS X? or would I only be getting the rendering punch of one 7970?

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Here's another question for you guys: if my 7970 turns out to run nicely with the new Indigo release, how would a 7990 behave in an AKITIO? Would I be able to use both the coprocessors in parallel for OpenCL rendering under OS X? or would I only be getting the rendering punch of one 7970?

A very good question. The codename of HD 7990 is “New Zealand”, which is not included in the kexts, but it has two Tahiti XT cores, so in theory it might work. I have kept an eye on 295X2 (Vesuvius) that houses two Hawaii XTs and discounts are tempting…

R9-295X-8QFA XFX Radeon R9 295X2 UK Price £518.22

I don’t know whether AMD’s dual-GPUs work on OS X, but I know for sure that OS X is able to detect at least 3 AMD eGPUs with a single chip. I am very curious if someone is going to try that :D I think that the max eGPU amount is limited by the PCIe resources. For instance, if your Mac can support up to 2 Nvidia cards through Thunderbolt connection and if you are using two dual-GPUs, OS X can actually detect them as 4 individual eGPUs:

http://forum.techinferno.com/provisional-guides/8579-%5Bguide%5D-2013-13-macbook-pro-2-x-titan_z%4016gbps-tb2-akitio-thunder2-osx10-10-a.html

Because you have a dGPU, it may reduce the amount:

http://forum.techinferno.com/provisional-guides/8578-%5Bguide%5D-2012-15-macbook-pro-titan_z%4010gbps-tb1-akitio-thunder2-osx10-10-a.html

Regarding some new Mac models, I have seen indications of restricting Nvidia’s regular GPUs that can be used externally:

http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/8619-tb2-macbooks-allow-monitors-used-nvidia-egpus-osx.html#post120086

Thunderbolt 1 connection should not be limitation as long as you do OpenCL/CUDA processing. I would choose OpenCL because it is not a proprietary platform as CUDA is. Nvidia cards support OpenCL as well and I think that the new Maxwell architecture has catched up AMD’s lead in performance.

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Because you have a dGPU, it may reduce the amount.

That is true, though a nice thing about OpenCL is that it's able to utilize the internal dGPU along with the eGPU. Sure, it doesn't do much in comparison, but I'll probably not use more than 2 or max 3 external GPU's in the near future anyway, so the +15% push from the 6750m is just a nice little bonus. :)

Please let me know if you try a dual chip GPU!

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That is true, though a nice thing about OpenCL is that it's able to utilize the internal dGPU along with the eGPU. Sure, it doesn't do much in comparison, but I'll probably not use more than 2 or max 3 external GPU's in the near future anyway, so the +15% push from the 6750m is just a nice little bonus. :)

Please let me know if you try a dual chip GPU!

Yes, I will let you know. The link to the discount is not working at the moment, maybe too much traffic :D Let’s hope that the new version of Indigo will be released soon!

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I have several Amities here. I have one that I have soldered 12V leads to the PCIE power pins.

But for the life of me I can not recreate any of the "instability" issues that others have reported.

Case in point, I have a 2014 Mini with Win 8 on it. I have a GTX980 from EVGA (SC model) with display connected Asus 4K @ 60 Hz.

I recently installed Far Cry 4 and can play it for HOURS straight, it never crashes. I can run 3D Mark without crashes. (Have had it derail once or twice but I think due to 60 Hz MST losing sync, left half of screen vanished but it didn't crash) And this is on an Akitio that doesn't have the power mod.

I have a riser here but it isn't powered and the one time I tried it the additional resistance form extra wire length DID cause trouble.

The 980 is powered by a PC PSU with SWEX switch, always left on. I have TB cable into Mini and hit "power".

Sometimes the Mini goes into a boot loop, but if it gets to Windows desktop, I have no problems. I have also used a GTX780 & GTX680 with an eGPU EFI and they also work.

The 980 is using an EFI for cMP, won't give me display output in OS X but has no troubles in Windows.

In short, I don't think that the reported power issues are what they seem like. Or that maybe people have assumed another issue is a power issue. There may be cards that try to grab too much power from slot, but of the ones I have tested here, the Akitio is 100% stable for 2-3-4 hours of Far Cry 4, graphics maxed out on 4K 60Hz.

I think we get a lot of black screen boots and Windows errors but these may have more to do with the things Tech Inferno Fan fixes then with power issues.

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I have several Amities here. I have one that I have soldered 12V leads to the PCIE power pins.

But for the life of me I can not recreate any of the "instability" issues that others have reported.

Case in point, I have a 2014 Mini with Win 8 on it. I have a GTX980 from EVGA (SC model) with display connected Asus 4K @ 60 Hz.

I recently installed Far Cry 4 and can play it for HOURS straight, it never crashes. I can run 3D Mark without crashes. (Have had it derail once or twice but I think due to 60 Hz MST losing sync, left half of screen vanished but it didn't crash) And this is on an Akitio that doesn't have the power mod.

I have a riser here but it isn't powered and the one time I tried it the additional resistance form extra wire length DID cause trouble.

The 980 is powered by a PC PSU with SWEX switch, always left on. I have TB cable into Mini and hit "power".

Sometimes the Mini goes into a boot loop, but if it gets to Windows desktop, I have no problems. I have also used a GTX780 & GTX680 with an eGPU EFI and they also work.

The 980 is using an EFI for cMP, won't give me display output in OS X but has no troubles in Windows.

In short, I don't think that the reported power issues are what they seem like. Or that maybe people have assumed another issue is a power issue. There may be cards that try to grab too much power from slot, but of the ones I have tested here, the Akitio is 100% stable for 2-3-4 hours of Far Cry 4, graphics maxed out on 4K 60Hz.

I think we get a lot of black screen boots and Windows errors but these may have more to do with the things Tech Inferno Fan fixes then with power issues.

Have you tested any AMD card and if so, what manufacturer? All the Nvidia cards that I have tested are very stable with the AKiTiO. The instability we are discussing here concerns mostly AMD cards, and for me only Asus AMDs in low power conditions such as 3DMark11 physics or moving/opening UI elements. With those Asus AMDs, I haven’t seen a single crash when gaming, running the other 3DMark11 tests (also the last combined test if it pass through the physics), or running Valley benchmark over an hour. Grabbing too much slot power isn’t the problem - it’s almost opposite because Asus R9 280X consumes only 36W from the x16 slot + TB 4-pin power connector. However, MSI HD 7970 consumes the same 36W but is stable on OS X and Win8.1.

Maybe we should gather a list of cards that people have had problems. I remember someone saying about instability with a GTX 780, but I don’t know the exact model. My EVGA GTX 780 OC (6GB) is rock stable with the AKiTiO. @ithildin is one of the first people here who had instability problems with EVGA GTX 670 and Sapphire R9 290X:

http://forum.techinferno.com/implementation-guides/7604-%5Bguide%5D-2013-13-macbook-air-gtx670%4010gbps-tb1-akitio-thunder2-win8-1-a.html

I also think that these issues are due to impedance mismatch or something to do with x16 slot powering, and I mean whole system crashes.

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I have several Amities here. I have one that I have soldered 12V leads to the PCIE power pins.

But for the life of me I can not recreate any of the "instability" issues that others have reported.



That's good news but perhaps not surprising since you're using a GTX 980 - there have been no reports of stability issues with any of the 900 series GPUs. Like @goalque already mentioned, the AKiTiO Thunder2 stability issues have been reported with only a subset of GPUs such as Nvidia GTX 670, GTX 760, GTX 770, GTX 780(?) and most AMD cards. Not all cards are problematic to the same extent/nature - issues vary from occasional booting to black screen (like you mentioned), to occasional crashes mid-game (GTX 760), to frequent crashes (GTX 670 FTW, GTX 770, AMD cards) or to fail to boot at all (my experience with an AMD R9 290X). Thus far, I've tested 4 different GPUs with my AKiTiO + Macbook Air 2013 running Windows 8.1 in UEFI. Here's a summary of what I found out:

GPU Stable? Notes
Gainward Nvidia GTX 460 GS 1GB Yes No issues, apart from occasional sluggish menu
EVGA Nvidia GTX 670 FTW 2GB No Performance is initially good but system stutters and crashes occur when GPU is stressed
Sapphire AMD R9 290X 4GB No GPU doesn't boot when connected to Macbook Air (black screen). Boots successfully with Intel NUC but crashes when GPU is stressed
EVGA Nvidia GTX 970 SC 4GB Yes No issues, GPU is completely stable


The only variable in these tests was the GPU - the AKiTiO is perfectly stable with a GTX 460 or 970 so this is not an issue with the Macbook Air, PSU, TB cable or Thunder2 unit.

It's likely that these issues are GPU model-specific, (i.e. not a series-wide issue) especially when dealing with non-reference cards. For instance, my GTX 670 FTW was non-reference and problematic yet @juniordiscart hasn't had experienced issues to the same extent with his GTX 760 which is essentially a rebranded GTX 670.

Quote

Maybe we should gather a list of cards that people have had problems. I remember someone saying about instability with a GTX 780, but I don’t know the exact model. My EVGA GTX 780 OC (6GB) is rock stable with the AKiTiO. @ithildin is one of the first people here who had instability problems with EVGA GTX 670 and Sapphire R9 290X.



I agree, since these issues we've been seeing are likely GPU make/model specific, we should keep track of all GPUs reported to give problems with the AKiTiO Thunder2. Time permitting, I'll try to compile the different reports we've seen here, chase up with the OPs and post the summary.
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To further add to your statement, @ithildin, also tested my GTX460 (Gigabyte 1Gb)and a friend's GTX560Ti (Gainward 1Gb Phantom), and both run extremely stable. I've had them both for about 3 weeks in my Akitio each. So I think you're right in saying that the problem is more a specific type of GPU, and maybe some manufacturer-related card design. I will probably sell my GTX700 series cards and get a 900 series instead, since hardly any problems have been reported with them.

Thanks for the summary btw. :)

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That's good news but perhaps not surprising since you're using a GTX 980 - there have been no reports of stability issues with any of the 900 series GPUs. Like @goalque already mentioned, the AKiTiO Thunder2 stability issues have been reported with only a subset of GPUs such as Nvidia GTX 670, GTX 760, GTX 770, GTX 780(?) and most AMD cards. Not all cards are problematic to the same extent/nature - issues vary from occasional booting to black screen (like you mentioned), to occasional crashes mid-game (GTX 760), to frequent crashes (GTX 670 FTW, GTX 770, AMD cards) or to fail to boot at all (my experience with an AMD R9 290X). Thus far, I've tested 4 different GPUs with my AKiTiO + Macbook Air 2013 running Windows 8.1 in UEFI. Here's a summary of what I found out:

GPU Stable? Notes
Gainward Nvidia GTX 460 GS 1GB Yes No issues, apart from occasional sluggish menu
EVGA Nvidia GTX 670 FTW 2GB No Performance is initially good but system stutters and crashes occur when GPU is stressed
Sapphire AMD R9 290X 4GB No GPU doesn't boot when connected to Macbook Air (black screen). Boots successfully with Intel NUC but crashes when GPU is stressed
EVGA Nvidia GTX 970 SC 4GB Yes No issues, GPU is completely stable


The only variable in these tests was the GPU - the AKiTiO is perfectly stable with a GTX 460 or 970 so this is not an issue with the Macbook Air, PSU, TB cable or Thunder2 unit.

It's likely that these issues are GPU model-specific, (i.e. not a series-wide issue) especially when dealing with non-reference cards. For instance, my GTX 670 FTW was non-reference and problematic yet @juniordiscart hasn't had experienced issues to the same extent with his GTX 760 which is essentially a rebranded GTX 670.



I agree, since these issues we've been seeing are likely GPU make/model specific, we should keep track of all GPUs reported to give problems with the AKiTiO Thunder2. Time permitting, I'll try to compile the different reports we've seen here, chase up with the OPs and post the summary.



Further to your comments, I noted several eGPU users needing to downclock and underclock their GTX6xx and GTX7xx cards to gain stability. Seems they were factory overclocked beyond what the ASIC/memory could handle. Seems GTX9xx cards have better quality control by vendors - their cards operating within ASIC/memory limits.
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Further to your comments, I noted several eGPU users needing to downclock and underclock their GTX6xx and GTX7xx cards to gain stability.

Could you please point me in a direction of posts where this was done? I would like to try that, and see if it works with my GTX770 and GTX760. I'm not too familiar with downclocking or underclocking. But I guess I could look up the official specs of the GPU that nvidia has foreseen to run it on, and set the parameters on my, presumably overclocked 760 and 770.

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My 2 cents:

I tested this 4 cards and all worked in my eGPu setup.

- MSI GTX 970 4G gaming

- EVGA GTX 970 FTW

- EVGA GTX 970 FTW+

- EVGA GTX 670 FTW

All slightly overclocked (+50 to +100MHz on clock speed) and with a raised power target to 110%. I can't achieve really good OCs because my main game (Battlefield 4) is really bitchy about small instabilities caused by OC, even if other games or benchmarks are stable.

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