DIY eGPU experiences

[mal3x]

What steps are required to set up a x2 or x4 connection? I have all the parts and cables, but I can only get x1 to work.

I get the activity led to turn on only on the PM3N attached to port 1.

Thanks.

[Khenglish]

I have been bitten!!!... by the DIY ViDock bug

It makes me do all sorts of crazy things like build a sweet [albeit not quite finished] steel enclosure that was designed perfectly if I don't say so myself (well, I am saying so )
I 'blame' Nando4 for my catching this bug thanks to you Nando!

netting in at 4 Lbs 12 Oz (as it was in the last picture there); The enclosure itself is made of some sheet steel (I think stainless steel) that was folded into a box at 5.25" x 4.5" x 10.5" (at the long end) and 7" (at the short end); it has the pci section of a desktop case. It has a Corsair 430W PSU that I stripped to [mostly] the basics, and then spliced the remaining cabling to be only just long enough; and a full EVGA GTX460 1GB SuperClocked video card. The whole thing is currently quietly whirring next to me

Internals of the dock ATM:


To see more of my DIY ViDock setup, please check my Flickr account (Agent--9) and my thread over on TPCR DIY ViDock on Tablet PC's: experiences, benchmarks, setup, ect...

Nice enclosure. My 460 is still basking in the fresh air of my room, sucking some of the laptop's heat exhaust due to the short cables I needed to do high pci-e overclocks. Luckily the laptop's internal cooling sucks (combination of poor/cheap design and a nick in the heatsink where it makes contact with the CPU die), so it isn't much heat (most gets blown out by a fan on a P1 heatsink that's stuck directly onto the laptop's internal heatsink).

How do you get the card out of there if you wanna replace it BTW?

[Agent 9]

Nice enclosure. My 460 is still basking in the fresh air of my room, sucking some of the laptop's heat exhaust due to the short cables I needed to do high pci-e overclocks. Luckily the laptop's internal cooling sucks (combination of poor/cheap design and a nick in the heatsink where it makes contact with the CPU die), so it isn't much heat (most gets blown out by a fan on a P1 heatsink that's stuck directly onto the laptop's internal heatsink).

How do you get the card out of there if you wanna replace it BTW?

That sucks that your laptop overheats like that, have you considered getting a replacement heat sink from ebay or some such online retailer? though with it running at 3.51Ghz I guess it is prone to running hot no matter what heatsink it has.



I sadly, cannot OC my PCI lanes because my PLL chip is a piece of junk that is totally locked down but then again I'm not stuck using shorter cables, so maybe its not so bad

Thanks!
I designed the case so that I unscrew the 4 screws on the 'side', and the one on the 'bottom', that will allow me to pull one side out slightly [the side that has the 4 screws on it] which releases pressure from the PCI stack [the metal stack which is cut out of a old desktop tower -it is held in there mostly by pressure, well, a LOT of pressure thanks to the way the sides are leveraging it] thus allowing me to slide the entire PCI stack out [with GFX card screwed down, and the PSU 'attached' to it; all as one piece]. Though I think I might have to unsolder the AC power lines to remove it all the way, but that just adds 10 seconds to the process, and I am not planning on removing the card anytime soon.

The PCI stack acts like a sled, holding the gfx card and psu in place [like this pic, but with the PSU shifted over into place -it sorta wedges onto the pci stack, and like this it holds on without anything wiggling]


you can see how the pci stack fits inside the sheet metal housing, and how the housing would squeeze it as to hold it in place once that bottom end is secured


It isn't nearly 'user friendly' when servicing it, but that also means it isn't very 'thief friendly' either, which is a huge plus for me.

[pbareges]

first of all thanks very much to all The ones involved in this great project.

I have a Toshiba A 665-3D laptop with i7-740qm 1.7 GHz quad proc and native nvidia gts-350m. i was hoping to get a significant boost with a gtx 460 x2 setup as the card is about 5 times more powerful than my original according to specs. i play all my games in 3d on my projector at 1024x768 120 hz and, i guess it may be due to the 3D effect, but even @ x2 the pci bandwidth still seems to be a serious limitation to the card potential as i get roughly the same perf as with my discrete gpu. (i checked under gpu-z to confirm the link was really x2)

my setup is expressed card+mpcie on port 3+4 (i had to unplug wireless adapter on port 2). the setup can be an issue because i cannot hotplug my mpci-e pm3n and when plugging mini hdmis after x2 setup the card is only recognized once in tenth...i though pm3n v1.2 might solve this but what is strange is that x1 setup on the mpci-e port always works! i can plug / unplug the m-hdmi as many times as i like and presh f5 under setup and it is there...is it normal ?

looking fwd to optimus supporting x2 and non intel discretes!

[zyrn]

GTX 460 x2 is a definite overkill as it comes to connecting it via expresscard slot. Even in a normal computer at x8 it gets bottlenecked pretty heavily so no wonder really.

[Khenglish]

first of all thanks very much to all The ones involved in this great project.

I have a Toshiba A 665-3D laptop with i7-740qm 1.7 GHz quad proc and native nvidia gts-350m. i was hoping to get a significant boost with a gtx 460 x2 setup as the card is about 5 times more powerful than my original according to specs. i play all my games in 3d on my projector at 1024x768 120 hz and, i guess it may be due to the 3D effect, but even @ x2 the pci bandwidth still seems to be a serious limitation to the card potential as i get roughly the same perf as with my discrete gpu. (i checked under gpu-z to confirm the link was really x2)

my setup is expressed card+mpcie on port 3+4 (i had to unplug wireless adapter on port 2). the setup can be an issue because i cannot hotplug my mpci-e pm3n and when plugging mini hdmis after x2 setup the card is only recognized once in tenth...i though pm3n v1.2 might solve this but what is strange is that x1 setup on the mpci-e port always works! i can plug / unplug the m-hdmi as many times as i like and presh f5 under setup and it is there...is it normal ?

looking fwd to optimus supporting x2 and non intel discretes!

My experience with x2 is that only the 3dmarks show significant limitation from the x2 link. Real games don't have as many sudden camera angle changes, and I think Nvidia's driver optimizations are what cause the bulk of the poor performance at x2. Also your CPU's turbo clock when running in dual core mode is a lot more important than having 4 cores. From my understanding, games have a hard time using more than 2 cores. If your dual core mode isn't much higher than your base of 1.73ghz then your cpu is a big bottleneck. I actually see more performance gain in a lot of situations from increasing my CPU clocks than increasing PCI-E clocks, and my cpu is 3.06ghz stock (6MB Penryn C0, which is roughly equivalent to a 2.7ghz i7 in games).

[bass_99]

hallo,
i have a problem with this system
i already follow the instruction but after i resuming the windows, my laptop didnt detect my VGA at all (i use Asus F3SC plus GTX 460 and W7 32bit Games edition) even in device manager, and fan speed didnt slower when i resume the windows
i tried to attached usb to check and it detected in my laptop

any solution with this?

[Khenglish]

hallo,
i have a problem with this system
i already follow the instruction but after i resuming the windows, my laptop didnt detect my VGA at all (i use Asus F3SC plus GTX 460 and W7 32bit Games edition) even in device manager, and fan speed didnt slower when i resume the windows
i tried to attached usb to check and it detected in my laptop

any solution with this?

1. Make sure everything is connected.
2. If you are using mPCI-E, make sure that the slot you are using is fully wired. Some slots looks like mPCI-E, but in reality only have the USB connections wired and not the PCI-E. Put your wireless card or something in the slot and see if it works.

[Value At Risk]

Are there any progress on x1.opt links and intel series 6 chipset? I know ppl are testing, but does it look promising or not?

[serialk11r]

I think the HDMI cables can't handle the increased data rate or something...I'm waiting until Kepler to do a ViDock though, hopefully it'll be sorted out by then.