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My experience using a Mac mini 2012 with a 750ti


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Hi all,

 

Been using an EVGA GTX 750ti SC with a mac mini 2012 and an Akitio thunder 2 for around 7 months now and I thought I'd share my experiences to help anyone else out who might be thinking of taking the plunge.

 

In short: For me it's definitely worth it and gives a huge increase in performance in games. The 750ti is great because you don't have to have any bulky power supplies given that it does not have an external power connector. It makes the whole setup process very simple. It also easily fits within the Akitio.

 

Long story:

It wasn't too easy to get going and it took me about a month of investigating and persisting to get it right. I encountered 3 main problems.

 

1. At first I tried to manually edit the Nvidia OS X kext files to make the driver compatible but I just couldn't get it to work. Thankfully community member Goalque has made an incredible installer for the drivers that has worked like a charm every time I have used it. Huge thanks to him for making it, you're a credit to the community.

 

2. My next problem was that it was delivering vastly lower performance than I would have expected from the card. Yes it's not a fantastic card but it was really not a huge amount better than the HD 4000. I played around with a lot of drivers and settings but in the end I installed bootcamp and man is there a difference. The OSX drivers are dogs**t. It easily doubled my performance going from OSX to windows 10 in all games. I'm really happy with how it runs now.

 

3. My final problem was stability. It crashed a lot under both OSs due to kernel panics when I first got it and I could not work out what was causing it. First I got a 120W power supply as recommended by Nando4, but this doesn't make any difference. I've tested it extensively in a manor I will describe next and the uprated power supply does not help at all. I've reverted to using the stock power supply now. Anyway, still having not fixed it I decided to install MSI afterburner (on windows of course) to see if I could detect any trends in the GPU's vitals close to crash. It took a while but finally I found out what was causing the crashes. The power limit. It's a binary statistic recorded by afterburner which is either 1 or 0. If it hits 1 too many times in a short space of time it will crash. I replicated this result again and again in game until I was absolutely certain this was the cause. The solution, unsurprisingly is to under clock the card by about 100hz all the time with an overclocking utility (ironic eh). Once I did this I hardly get crashes at all. Problem almost solved. My only problem is that I sometimes (a couple of times a week) experience kernel panics on OSX which I use as my work OS because it has no overclocking utility that I know of. If anyone knows of one I'd be grateful for it. I thought about flashing the GPU bios but it's just too much work for me right now.

 

Oh and I tested both power supplies and they both crash the system within about 2 minutes of starting a game without under clocking the card.

 

Why the uprated power supply doesn't deliver enough to the card I don't know. I've seen some users who've also got a 750ti suggest that it's because the thunderbolt circuitry rejects the extra power and I suspect that this is the case but I don't have the expertise to test it.

 

Anyway thanks a lot for all the help and encouragement I've got from the community. I hope this might help someone out who is considering getting an eGPU.

 

One more interesting thing about my setup:

I attached 2 AOC 144hz monitors to the 750ti and the work like a charm. If you can get a game to churn out 144 frames (I can do it with oldies like HL2) then it will display it, the thunderbolt 1 doesn't limit the data transfer.

 

 

Here's a picture of my setup for reference

IMG_0186.jpg

Edited by lucas979797
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Yeah all of the 120W PSUs are tempting, but it seems like they can't hold up under high loads. Maybe consider a Dell DA-2 220W with a custom adapter. It's big and bulky but ca even power a GTX970.

Edited by Dschijn
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I am going to move onto the DA-2 when the Pascal line is released. But with respect I don't think that you're right in saying that the PSU is not holding up under high loads. The 750ti doesn't even draw 70W at peak. See pic. I think it's to do with some sort of limitation of the Akitio circuitry.

Screen Shot 2016-04-22 at 13.55.55.png

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Well...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-750-ti-review,3750-20.html

 

Edit: Plus I am very sure that EVGA is NOT using a stock BIOS on the card. They always increase clock speeds and mostly the power target as well. No GPU on the market is running with Nvidias stock settings. Increasing the power target is mainly done to allow the card to boost higher.

Edited by Dschijn
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Another thing. If your theory is right the Dell DA-2 at 220W should cause the same issues with a 970 considering that it was rated by TH to hit 250W frequently.

 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-970-maxwell,review-33038-12.html

 

I've not heard of people having such issues as me with that though. I'm sure you could vouch for that.

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Hi Lucas, your Mac Mini is the same one I have and I also had the 750ti in mind for an eGPU setup. I have a few questions:

 

1. Since I only want to use it for gaming on Windows, I do not plan on using the GPU on the OS X side at all. What happens if you leave the GPU connected to the Mac Mini while in OS X and you don't have any drivers installed?

 

2. Since the 2012 Mac Mini only has 1 Thunderbolt port which gets taken up by the eGPU, how are you connecting your two displays?

 

3. Can you share some details on how well your setup performs in any games (Dota 2, Witcher 3, Battlefield, anything) with respect to the settings selected?

 

Thanks!

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Hi Corgi,

 

In answer to your questions:

 

1. If you don't install the drivers on the OS X side the mini will boot up but nothing will output on the monitors. The drivers are needed so that the eGPU and the mini understand each other. In my simple understanding of computing, without the drivers the mini will not know what 'language' to talk to the GPU with. If however you have a display connected to the HDMI port on the mini you'll be able to use that one. Sometimes I use a third monitor if I get trouble with the eGPU. I guess it's not too much trouble to switch the cables from the eGPU to the mini via display port and HDMI if you really don't want to install the OS X Nvidia drivers though. Goalque has made it super easy to install them though so I highly recommend you do that.

 

2. I'm able to use two displays because the GPU itself has 3 outputs. I use the dual link DVI and the display port so that I can drive them both at 144hz, but I have used all 3 before and it works no problem. So what happens is that the mini sends the rendering data for both monitors through the single thunderbolt cable which then gets outputted by the GPU to each monitor.

 

3. I don't play any of those games, but I did benchmark it once on unigine so you can compare that to similar scored systems if you like. See attached photo. I mainly play games like Insurgency and L4D2 and it works great on them. Full res and about 100fps. I did try out fallout 4 once and it works ok at about medium settings, managing a good 30fps. But I can't stand playing at that frame rate so i'm gonna leave it till I upgrade.

Screen Shot 2016-04-25 at 14.39.18.png

Edited by lucas979797
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One more thing you have to do with this particular type of eGPU setup (unless you have a monitor connected to the mini's HDMI) is navigate the boot drive selector blind (screens black) because the drivers don't start working until you have entered an OS. So you'll want to memorise how long it takes to get to the boot selector and which drive is selected. For example my mini takes 8 seconds to get to the selector from when I push the power button, and windows is on the right, OS X on the left. I installed rEFInd boot manager so I don't have to hold the option key. 

Edited by lucas979797
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  • 2 weeks later...

I have same configuration: Mac mini (Late 2012), 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3.

Akitio Thunder2 PCIe Box and EVGA GTX 750ti

 

I bought it to play 2 games: Elite Dangerous and Space Engineers. Both without any problems, stock Nvidia drivers and Win8.1 64bit.

 

I love this setup

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On 22.4.2016 at 6:42 AM, lucas979797 said:

It's definitely a possibility! I'd be interested to see if anyone has used a more high quality PSU with their 750ti.

 

I am running a Dell power brick that came with my P4EC. I am using a Gigabyte Low-Profile 750Ti with an increased Power Target Limit of 60W (modded BIOS). I am not seeing any crashes or issues of the sort you are reporting.

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  • 1 month later...

I'm fairly new to eGPU's, but have built a PC in the past. Does this eGPU set up require that the Dell DA-220 be modded to work with the Akitio Box? I'm considering using a 750Ti as well as it'll fit in the case closed and doesn't require a lot of power. I don't really care to play games in Ultra, but I do like to play games with 60fps with variable graphics settings. 

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  • 2 months later...
On 22 April 2016 at 7:14 PM, lucas979797 said:

 

Hi Lucas,

 

Can you confirm my understanding that a 12V-10a with suitable 5.5 x 2.5mm barrel plug can replace Akitio's to provide higher power needed for 750ti?

I intend to have Akitio Thunder2 setup with just a simple 12V-10A PSU to power up my EVGA 750ti (no separate 6pin needed).  All power to be drawn from the PCI-E slot in akitio.

 

Thanks.

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  • 1 month later...

Having similar problems like the OP; my 750Ti becomes unstable after a while on OSX while doing heavy GPU tasks.

 

Question: instead of underclocking the GPU (via custom BIOS), can a powered PCIe riser card solve the power problem?  If so, which riser card do you guys recommend?

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