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


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Hi again

I will try Windows UEFI installation but I think something is wrong with hardware since the Akitio is being recognized but the 970 is not.

The SWEX works. When I flip the switch on the SWEX, the fans for both the PSU and the Akitio turn on. However, the Akitio green/blue lights do not turn on + is not recognized when I boot into OS X or Windows. The GTX 970 does not turn on either. The Akitio green/blue lights only seem to turn on when I have the DC jack plugged in to Akitio, which I'm told is not needed with the riser. Do I have the riser plugged in correctly?

I have the Akitio board sitting in it's chassis and but the 970 is sitting on top of an old metal hard drive. Is that ok? Right now I'm just trying to get this to work. Shouldn't the card have some kind of response when powered on?

I'm wondering if I have a faulty 970 card? I've seen the fans spin once but haven't been able to repeat the process. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Is it not getting enough power? I have the 2x 6+2 pins plugged in and the molex riser plugged into the female molex splitter provided by PSU.

Please help! Thank you.

The GPU fans are powered by the PCI slot, that's not an indication that the ATX is working. My rutine is the following:

1. Connect PCIe power from ATX + connect power from AKitio PSU

2. Power on the ATX via SWEX

3. Plug the thunderbolt cable to the system = fans spinning up and then settles a little

4. Safely remove hardware, ejecting eGPU from the list (if detected)

5. Unplug TB cable, wait 2 seconds

6. Re-plug TB cable = fans spinning up again and then settles

7. Check device manager for your eGPU under display adapters (right-click and scan for hardware changes)

Any improvements?

PS: I'd absolutely not have the PCB side of the GPU resting against metal, that's not good at all and will eventually cause damage to the GPU (shortage etc.).

Use an old CD plastic case/cover or something non conducting to support the GPU.

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Thanks for the great reply! I've placed the GPU on a plastic CD case but unfortunately I think there's some damage somehow. The fans of the GPU do not spin at all. Is there any way to test this out without needing another PC?

OK that's a bad sign. The fans should start spinning when:

1. the Akitio PSU is plugged in and SWEX is turned on

2. Thunderbolt cable is plugged in to the system = this is when the fans should spin up

If thunderbolt cable isn't plugged in you wont get power to the PCI slot.

I can't really think of any idea to check the GPU w/o another computer. Your riser, does it look intact? No loose pins or so?

Please share a photo of your setup.

PS. If you happen to have an older PCIe card or GPU, test that one to see if it seems to react.

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Yeah unfortunately I'm wondering if I should exchange the card for a new one. The riser looks intact but the fans on the 970 are not spinning at all.

Here's new photos of the setup with everything turned on:

970 placed on plastic CD cover - https://www.dropbox.com/s/mhbyd1em5zfom66/IMG_2387.JPG?dl=0

Akitio - https://www.dropbox.com/s/twa6dhebmw3lk55/IMG_2388.JPG?dl=0

970 plugged into riser + molex connector + HDMI to monitor - https://www.dropbox.com/s/sg8zjx90g18tpqc/IMG_2389.JPG?dl=0

PSU - https://www.dropbox.com/s/pt0dvrkoeke969j/IMG_2390.JPG?dl=0

SWEX - https://www.dropbox.com/s/u7e99e5gh064i1o/IMG_2391.JPG?dl=0

Any thoughts? Am I doing something wrong or did I break the card somehow?

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When I only use the riser + don't plug in the DC jack for Akitio, the green/blue lights do not turn on. The Akitio is not recognized and the 970 fans do not start. The 970 doesn't seem to start at all. Is this a power issue or is this 970 broken?

I don't use power to the riser for GTX 970, just Akitio PSU + PCIe 2x 6pin from ATX. Have you tested w/o power to the riser?

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Do you have the opportunity to test the GPU in a real PC? Maybe a friends one? Just to make sure.

If nothing happens at all if you only use the riser, I would guess that no power is transfered to the riser. Maybe the riser is broken or the power connecting to it.

Can you try to start without the riser but with the AKiTiO PSU?

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Hello to all, and let me take my turn and say thank you to everybody for spending all the time and effort to make things plug & play for the rest of us ;-)

My very painless experience has been the following - following @Tech Inferno Fan's suggestion for the recommended setup, I used:

- Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.1 + nVidia WebDriver-343.01.02f01 (+ cudadriver-6.5.25-macos)

- Akitio2 + Zotac GTX970 (ZT-90101-10P), i.e. the short one which fits like a glove to the chassis after taking out the card's shroud and the small fan in the from of the akitio box

- Corsair RM450 to power everything using the "paperclip" trick - so 2x 6pin PCIe + an extra 12V/GND lead from the psu into a 5.5mm x 2.5mm barrel plug that I ordered online @ kenable.co.uk

(1 x 5.5 x 2.5mm Right Angle DC Power Solder Plug End For Power Cables (PSG01952) = £0.55 for anyone interested)

- No risers, m/b soldering or other ugliness beyond that - seems the 970 with the 2 6pin connectors is not hitting any wattage constraints stemming from the akitio PCIe slot 25W limit

After assembling the hardware in the chassis and soldering the barrel plug, all I had to do was patch the latest nvidia drivers for Yosemite 10.10.1 (very easy - as described elsewhere in this thread), plug in, re-start and presto! (ok I had to restart a couple of times as my monitor is a bit funny - 4K Samsung U28D590 now working smoothly @ 60Hz using DP1.2)

Comments: a) the chassis is really well made so for all the form-factor sensitive people out there, it is definitely worth the cost+effort. B) the zotac card with the stock vbios is literally silent, the fans are turning but completely inaudible at idle, there is no coil whine at all and the only sound under load is the usual low frequency clicking electric sounds cards usually make as the fans remain relatively quiet c) combined with the RM450 which doesn't turn on the fan (except under sustained heavy load) the whole setup is very silent! d) I run the usual benchmarks, unigine heaven as well as a bitcoin miner to "heat" things up, nothing crashed after 30+ mins. e) The only thing that bugs me is that as soon as the laptop enters power saving mode and tries to shut off, the machine locks up with the screens blank and the laptop fans working 100% as it must enter some infinite loop - surely a driver bug ... any ideas welcome but in the meantime I have ticked the box in settings to prevent the laptop from sleeping

I haven't subjected the whole thing to 10+ hours of overclocked 100% utilisation so could be I hit some bumps later on but so far all good .. will keep everyone posted if I get any instabilities..

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Hello to all, and let me take my turn and say thank you to everybody for spending all the time and effort to make things plug & play for the rest of us ;-)

My very painless experience has been the following - following @Tech Inferno Fan's suggestion for the recommended setup, I used:

- Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.1 + nVidia WebDriver-343.01.02f01 (+ cudadriver-6.5.25-macos)

- Akitio2 + Zotac GTX970 (ZT-90101-10P), i.e. the short one which fits like a glove to the chassis after taking out the card's shroud and the small fan in the from of the akitio box

- Corsair RM450 to power everything using the "paperclip" trick - so 2x 6pin PCIe + an extra 12V/GND lead from the psu into a 5.5mm x 2.5mm barrel plug that I ordered online @ kenable.co.uk

(1 x 5.5 x 2.5mm Right Angle DC Power Solder Plug End For Power Cables (PSG01952) = £0.55 for anyone interested)

- No risers, m/b soldering or other ugliness beyond that - seems the 970 with the 2 6pin connectors is not hitting any wattage constraints stemming from the akitio PCIe slot 25W limit

After assembling the hardware in the chassis and soldering the barrel plug, all I had to do was patch the latest nvidia drivers for Yosemite 10.10.1 (very easy - as described elsewhere in this thread), plug in, re-start and presto! (ok I had to restart a couple of times as my monitor is a bit funny - 4K Samsung U28D590 now working smoothly @ 60Hz using DP1.2)

Comments: a) the chassis is really well made so for all the form-factor sensitive people out there, it is definitely worth the cost+effort. B) the zotac card with the stock vbios is literally silent, the fans are turning but completely inaudible at idle, there is no coil whine at all and the only sound under load is the usual low frequency clicking electric sounds cards usually make as the fans remain relatively quiet c) combined with the RM450 which doesn't turn on the fan (except under sustained heavy load) the whole setup is very silent! d) I run the usual benchmarks, unigine heaven as well as a bitcoin miner to "heat" things up, nothing crashed after 30+ mins. e) The only thing that bugs me is that as soon as the laptop enters power saving mode and tries to shut off, the machine locks up with the screens blank and the laptop fans working 100% as it must enter some infinite loop - surely a driver bug ... any ideas welcome but in the meantime I have ticked the box in settings to prevent the laptop from sleeping

I haven't subjected the whole thing to 10+ hours of overclocked 100% utilisation so could be I hit some bumps later on but so far all good .. will keep everyone posted if I get any instabilities..

Great to hear. Your configuration is one I've personally earmarked since it's about as plug-and-play as we can get.

Would you mind doing a complete guide for it? Most important being the pics of the fan deshrouded GTX970 eGPU in the AKiTio box, the creation of the barrel adapter and the RM450 PSU powering it all. Pics bringing the whole thing to life.

Worth noting that should you bootcamp your Macbook to tun Windows, that you could potentially extract more performance from your Zotac GTX970 by flashing the modified Zotac GTX970 VBIOS from Extract and Flash GTX 970 and 980 Firmware - NOLIMITS and GameStable. Consider the stock 1266Mhz boost clock might be overclocked up to 1500Mhz (+23.4%) depending on how good of an ASIC that comes on your Zotac card.

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Would be awesome to be able to source something like this to power the card:

FSP400-70LQ-FSP GROUP :::PC Power Supply, IPC Power Supply, Open Frame, Adapter :::

With a custom enclosure it would make for a small egpu solution.

Thanks! The problem with these Flex ATX PSUs is the small 4cm fan, which is noisy compared to normal ATX PSUs. Netstor sent me a new modified Flex PSU and I will update the NA211TB implementation within a few days how they succeeded to lower fan speed.

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Thanks! The problem with these Flex ATX PSUs is the small 4cm fan, which is noisy compared to normal ATX PSUs. Netstor sent me a new modified Flex PSU and I will update the NA211TB implementation within a few days how they succeeded to lower fan speed.

Not sure if it's entirely safe, but if you're building a custom enclosure you could add a large fan and make sure that it blows cool air to the PSU, that way maybe the PSU fan won't be needed and you can disable it.

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Not sure if it's entirely safe, but if you're building a custom enclosure you could add a large fan and make sure that it blows cool air to the PSU, that way maybe the PSU fan won't be needed and you can disable it.

Streacom support told that it would be difficult to actively cool their fanless Flex PSU because there are not such air vents. The other problem is that most of them don't have 2x6pin power plugs. Some people have changed the fan of their SFX size PSU, but my limit is there.. I would never take a risk of overheating the PSU, the manufacturer has designed to control fan speeds / air flow safely.

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New ASUS mini ITX 170cm GTX970 with a backplate that would fit nicely into a AKiTiO Thunder2.

ASUS Readies GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini (TechPowerUp) tells us:

In a bid to be the first with a mini-ITX friendly graphics card based on the GeForce GTX 900 series, ASUS is giving final touches to the GeForce GTX 970 DirectCU Mini (model: GTX970-DCMOC-4GD5). At the surface, this card looks identical to the GTX 760 and GTX 670 DirectCU Mini graphics cards from the company, since it uses the same exact cooler. Under the hood is a swanky factory overclocked GeForce GTX 970 chip, with 1088 MHz core, 1228 MHz GPU Boost, and an untouched 7.00 GHz memory. The card features a solid matte back-plate. It draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. Display outputs include two dual-link DVI, and one each of HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.2 connectors. ASUS didn't reveal pricing or availability details.

<div class="imgcontainer"><a class="cboxElement" data-lightbox="g207609" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.techpowerup.com/img/14-11-29/91b.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="//tpucdn.com/img/14-11-29/91b_thm.jpg" alt="" border="0"></a> <a class="cboxElement" data-lightbox="g207609" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.techpowerup.com/img/14-11-29/91c.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="//tpucdn.com/img/14-11-29/91c_thm.jpg" alt="" border="0"></a> <a class="cboxElement" data-lightbox="g207609" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.techpowerup.com/img/14-11-29/91e.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="//tpucdn.com/img/14-11-29/91e_thm.jpg" alt="" border="0"></a> <a class="cboxElement" data-lightbox="g207609" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.techpowerup.com/img/14-11-29/91d.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="//tpucdn.com/img/14-11-29/91d_thm.jpg" alt="" border="0"></a></div>

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Hello Everyone, as I am very interested in External Graphics Cards I have planned to ask all of my family members to give me the money in order to setup a system. I will be using a Akitio Thunder2 PCI-e Box with an Apple Thunderbolt Cable (Cause let's face it they are the only ones that work well) a EVGA GTX 970 Super-Clocked ACX 2.0. I am aware of the size of the Chassis and Card and hopefully plan to remove the internal fan inside the Chassis of the Box. I have a MacBook Pro 13" Mid 2012, 2.9GHz Dual Core i7, 16GB DDR3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000, and a 1 TB SSD. I look forward to sharing/report/asking about any issues I may come across with this. I play to use this with OS X and Boot Camp which is running Windows 8.1 Pro. I look forward to sharing this with you all.

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So do I need to use a SWEX with a Corsair CX 430 Watt? I obviously need it to power my GPU but as I am not running a Motherboard do I need this? Also what is the Paperclip method?

- - - Updated - - -

SWEX = ATX Power Supply Power-On Switch. I also needed to Google this.

If you don't have this you will need to use the paperclip method to power-on your power supply.

So do I need to use a SWEX with a Corsair CX 430 Watt? I obviously need it to power my GPU but as I am not running a Motherboard do I need this? Also what is the Paperclip method?

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Today my videocard finally arrived! Half an hour later I got it working on my TV. It took me 20 min. to realize that I needed the latest NVIDIA drivers (the ones indicated on the different guides don't work anymore). HDMI output to my TV works out of the box including sound but I haven't been able to use only the integrated display (only tried once).

The next steps are building my setup inside my Mini-ITX enclosure en getting Optimus working.

Gratitude to all the members of the eGPU community for helping me build such a great setup! :-)

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