

Connecting an external video card to a notebook - nkurz
http://lab501.net/egpu-connecting-external-video-card-notebook-diy-implementation/all/1/

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alkonaut
If some manufacturer made a laptop docking station with a full length PCI slot
and a fat power supply I'd just throw money at them. It would completely
remove my desire to keep building big powerful gaming/development rigs. Laptop
CPU:s are already powerful enough for gaming these days, but video cards will
stay at several hundred watts.

I'm not exactly sure why thunderbolt has to be involved if it has licensing
issues? Couldn't a laptop maker make their own interface for transmitting PCIe
to through a docking connector?

EDIT: spelling

~~~
jsnell
It's been done. The most high profile one was the 2011 Vaio Z, which came with
an external GPU that connected to the laptop over Light Peak but with a non-
Thunderbolt connector. They killed the Z series a year later.

The problem with proprietary solutions for this is that you're not getting the
efficiency of scale. Vendor-specific solutions are going to be expensive,
there will be a lot of uncertainty about whether you'll be able to upgrade to
better GPUs later, and if you want to keep the external GPU but upgrade the
laptop you're locked to the same vendor. A widely supported standard solution
would be vastly preferable.

~~~
alkonaut
Yes of course, I don't want some proprietary external VGA brick, I want a
docking station with a normal full length PCIe slot and enough power to feed
it. That is, the fat AMD or Nvidia graphics card I slot into my PCIe docking
station should have no idea it's not sitting in a regular desktop.

~~~
seanp2k2
A non-proprietary solution...like Thunderbolt / Thunderbolt II, which has
double the bandwidth through channel aggregation, or thunderbolt 3 which
doubles what 2 was capable of:
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29#T...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29#Thunderbolt_2)

Really don't know why they don't want to license external enclosures with
~300w power supplies, space for 3x width cards, and 16x PCI-E (physically)
slots that would let you run whatever GPUs you want. It definitely seems like
all the pieces are there, and if you could add $50 to the cost of a mid-range
laptop to add a Thunderbolt port which would let you connect whatever GPU box
to it, it seems like Intel would sell more Thunderbolt licenses and chipsets.
Consumers would love the choice of upgradable optional notebook graphics, and
you wouldn't need to drop an extra $1000 on a laptop with beefy internal GPUs
just to play games that a $600 laptop's CPU could easily handle.

I can only assume that they don't do this because it would kill the gaming
laptop market and possibly some of the desktop PC market.

~~~
alkonaut
As long as Thunderbolt is involved there seems there is both the licensing
issue _and_ the issue with graphics cards needing Thunderbolt drivers to work
in the enclosures. If it was done perfectly, the card would be just like any
card in a normal desktop slot, so the normal driver would work. Not sure what
would be required for that to work. Also not sure what it would take to just
physically run the "on board" PCIe directly to the docking rather than use a
cable. It should be much better for latency to just have the card sit in a
docking box right under the laptop, within the same distance from the cpu as a
normal PCIe card is on a desktop motherboard.

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hengheng
I've been running this kind of setup with a lenovo X220 and a 660 GTX using
the cheapo express card adapter from Taiwan. It runs quite well. AMA

~~~
jessedhillon
Can you send a link to that adaptor? Also, did you have to fiddle with the
BIOS PCI settings as mentioned in the article? Any idea how this works on
Linux?

~~~
hengheng
Can I format links nicely here? It's a PE4L by hwtools.net [1]. And no, no
BIOS fiddling was neccessary. Actually I just hot-plugged the thing first
time, right into a running Windows 7. Windows Update went and downloaded the
NVidia driver, required a reboot, an has run mostly flawless since then. I
even see the NVidia logo in Lenovo's Energy Manager, suppose it thinks it's on
an Optimus setup. Hotplug in rarely works, hot-plug out does work. I get a the
usual eject icon in the systray, just the way you'd safe-eject USB devices.

I haven't even tried this in Linux. The EGPU is one reason why I chose to keep
Windows native, and Linux in VMware Player, not the other way round. (The
other reasons are Steam and some obscure CAD and PCB layout software, so I'm
not going to try any time soon.)

[1]
[http://www.hwtools.net/Adapter/PE4L%20V2.1.html](http://www.hwtools.net/Adapter/PE4L%20V2.1.html)

~~~
geoka9
What thinkpad model do you use? What card? Is there a performance hit because
of the ExpressCard limitations?

~~~
hengheng
As stated above, X220 + 660GTX.

If I recall correctly, am missing out on about 30% of the 3dmark points I
should be getting by combining the GPU with a CPU of that speed level. As far
as I know though, It's still faster than any laptop graphics chip available
even today.

I sometimes seem to get a minor stutter in games, e.g. I'll lose about a frame
or two every couple seconds, which might be due to the low ExpressCard
bandwidth. This is game-dependent, and most games run flawlessly.

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valisystem
Intel refusal to license thunderbolt external GPU is infuriating, and the sole
rationalization I can see is that they are blocking it to protect premium
price on their high end integrated GPUs. It really feels like a big let down.

 _(edit: bit- >big)_

~~~
aselzer
Apple should grab that opportunity. They probably have enough power to
pressurize Intel into allowing this (at least on their computers).

Imagine an apple-manufactured external graphics card that you can carry around
and plug into your MacBook Air/Pro.

It could boost sales pretty significantly. I know quite a few people who did
not buy a MacBook just because games don't run well enough, and went for
another brand that fits their needs in this area (the bigger MacBooks are more
expensive, and their advantage to competitors disappears).

~~~
seanp2k2
They could do this, but their market isn't typically gamers (even though
plenty of games run well on OSX these days), and it'd probably be a viable
alternative to having a Mac Pro _and_ a quad-core rMBP.

So, their reasoning is probably similar to why Intel doesn't do it in the
first place: it would eat into the sales of other more niche products. Lame.

~~~
porsupah
That said, Apple has demonstrated they're not averse to new product lines
eating into other existing ones, as with the iPhone 6 taking some sales away
from the iPad family, and in turn, the iPad mini away from the full-size
iPads.

I doubt anyone expects them to actually come through with an external GPU
option, of course, but it'd certainly be of interest to me, given Second
Life's stiff requirements for long draw distances with all the lighting
options enabled.

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bd
Since recently you can also get notebooks that have already built-in support
for external GPUs: new Alienware line with "Graphics Amplifier" (Alienware 13,
15, 17) and MSI GS30 Shadow with "GamingDock":

[http://www.alienware.com/landings/laptops.aspx](http://www.alienware.com/landings/laptops.aspx)

[http://www.msi.com/product/nb/GS30-2M-Shadow.html](http://www.msi.com/product/nb/GS30-2M-Shadow.html)

Both use proprietary connectors based on PCI-Express.

~~~
geoka9
That "Graphics Amplifier" is a pretty cool idea, I've been looking for
something like this. But it uses an proprietary connector which means it can
only be used with an Alienware laptop :(

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gmurphy
As a large amount of what I do at home is games and Lightroom, what I'd really
like (as an incredibly niche product) is a pure terminal laptop that is just a
fast wireless screen/keyboard/mouse for the beefy desktop elsewhere in the
house.

Today you can kludge it together with a regular laptop and Steam Streaming
(latency is impressive, but not perfect), or by using a low-latency/long-range
wireless HDMI system like the Nyrius Aries Pro/Paralinx with a lap-sized
monitor and wireless keyboard/trackpad.

The second method works (and also works with consoles), but is hampered by the
same-room-only short ranges of wireless keyboard/mice, and is a mess of wires
and USB batteries.

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sauere
Amazing work. But the fact that it takes _this_ to get something done that
should be as easy as connection any other peripheral... it hurts.

If all the major notebook manufacturers could just drop their niche
proprietary BS solutions and agree on _something_, maybe, just maybe, we could
have some sort of standard for this that actually works (in 3-4years). Thanks.

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vinhboy
Back when GPU bitcoin mining was still profitable, I really wanted something
like this. Unfortunately it does not exist.

If GPU bitcoin mining was profitable for longer, I bet something like this
would have been invented.

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0xFFC
this idea was in my mind two month ago , I really need this for my cuda
development.

~~~
seanp2k2
Maybe someone could do a Kickstarter to make an elegant solution to do this
with no soldering or PCI-E adapters. The hard part would seem to be getting
the Thunderbolt chipset and making the board to allow a 16X card powered by an
ATX supply. Seems like a product with BYO ATX PSU + GPU would be pretty
popular if it could ship within a year. The decline of ExpressCard is sad,
since that seemed to be a better solution than Thunderbolt here.

