DIY eGPU experiences

[Fardavid]

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[nowai]

hey all,

I'm pretty bent on doing an x2 link on the t500 using the turbo mem slot. Do you guys think I'll be able to route the cable from the PM3N to the PMCIA slot within the laptop? Any info on the thickness or length of the cable?

Here's some pictures to help describe what i want to do:




I want the cable to route like this:


and end up outside of the lower pcmcia slot on the right (expresscard slot is right above it)


I am guesstimating the required cable length will be 12 inches to let the cable stick 1 inch out of the machine

Is there a maximum length for these types of cables? The easier option of course is to just go through the ultrabay (i.e remove the cd drive), or possibly remove the modem jack on the right side, but then I'll be stuck with a cable always sticking out with no easy way to remove it. Connecting will also be hard as the cables will be on different sides of the laptop.

[key001]

the round cable from hwtools is roughly 0.25 inches thick. thera are flat hdmi cables, but i only found HDMI to miniHDMI like this http://www.advancedlamps.com/images/FS081.jpg so you'll nedd to find a miniHDMI to miniHDMI or use a HDMI tominiHDMI adapter.

[hallucinate]

nice nowai, I want to do the same with my X200. Having the cable come out the open space between the expresscard and chassis is probably the simplest, but pretty ugly, how to hide it when portable? I also like your idea of utilizing the modem port, I sure don't use that thing. Definitely more work though.

Wouldn't worry about hdmi length, shouldn't be any potential signal degradation under 10'. coupling a few of hdmi cables might degrade signal if the adapters aren't HQ... and we'll likely need at least one to make the cable disappear when away from desk / vidock.

Anyway, good luck, looking forward to your progress

[User Retired 2]

nice nowai, I want to do the same with my X200.

@nowai, @hallucinate. Lenovo whitelist their mPCIe slots. With the turbo memory card removed, can you boot Win7, standby the system, attach the wifi card into the turbo memory slot, resume and it detects it? If not, can you try the whitelst.bat workaround on the first post to see can get the wifi card detected?

If either of these tests works then port3 is electrically connected and can be combined with port4 (expresscard slot) to give a x2 link. If not, then Lenovo are doing hardware based whitelisting. Not likely, but possible.

[nowai]

nando4, i can try this assuming i can easily reroute my wifi card inthe turbomem slot. would hibernate mode suffice?

UPDATE: I put my computer into hibernate, plugging in the wifi card into the turbomem slot, and tried starting up.

I ended up with this error message after the bios screen:


I did not try going back into the bios to disable wireless usb, but I may be able to try that later.

That said, do you think getting this thing to work may require a modified BIOS? I'll try to use whitelist.bat later to see if it helps

Question: does anyone have a link to the lenovo version of whitelst.bat?

[User Retired 2]

nando4, i can try this assuming i can easily reroute my wifi card inthe turbomem slot. would hibernate mode suffice?

UPDATE: I put my computer into hibernate, plugging in the wifi card into the turbomem slot, and tried starting up.
..
I did not try going back into the bios to disable wireless usb, but I may be able to try that later.

That said, do you think getting this thing to work may require a modified BIOS? I'll try to use whitelist.bat later to see if it helps

Question: does anyone have a link to the lenovo version of whitelst.bat?

The bios error error message will not appear if you set the jumper on the PM3N to provide a 6.5s reset delay. The bios will never see the video card so will not halt the process. Only problem then is if the bios still disables the mPCIe slot, which would require whitelst.bat to enable.

The way to test that condition is to remove the turbo memory card, start Win7, standby (not hibernate), put wifi card into the turbo memory slot, resume. See if Win7 detects the card wifi card. If not, then need to customise whitelst.bat for your system. That will become the Lenovo version

[nowai]

OK, I will try this in standby then. NOTE: I do not have a turbo memory card, so I am trying this with just swapping the wifi and an empty slot. I think this actually makes more sense, unless your PM3N can fake a turbomem or wireless usb card for 6.5seconds :P

I think I understand your idea now, if the standby method works no modified bios is needed, otherwise I'll have to make a whilelst.bat / do something like this: Do-It-Yourself and remove the "White list" in Lenovo's S10 Netbook

[nowai]

Tried moving wifi card while in standby instead. No port3 was shown, and wifi card was not detected.

Guess we'll be whitelisting or modding the bios then, eh?

In case you're curious: the everest screenshot with the wifi card put into the turbo mem slot looked like this - http://imgur.com/fxgsQ.png

In other news, I think it's possible to route a wire to the PC-card/Expresscard slot area. It may require cutting into the receptacle that holds the cards, but would make for a very clean x2 install. This said, is there any technical explanation of how x2 works? do graphics cards support dual pci slots, or is this some special hack only for the PE4H?

[User Retired 2]

Tried moving wifi card while in standby instead. No port3 was shown, and wifi card was not detected.

Guess we'll be whitelisting or modding the bios then, eh?

In case you're curious: the everest screenshot with the wifi card put into the turbo mem slot looked like this - http://imgur.com/fxgsQ.png
..
This said, is there any technical explanation of how x2 works? do graphics cards support dual pci slots, or is this some special hack only for the PE4?

Appears Lenovo use the same sort of whitelisting as on the 2510P. To be absolutely certain x2 works using port3, you need to get port3 to detect a wifi card.

To do that modify whitelst.bat, bootup DIY ViDock bootdisk, hotplug wifi card, run whitelst.bat, see if 'lspci -tv' output shows the wifi card under the 0:1c.2 (port3) branch. If you don't like hotplugging, proceed to boot win7 instead, standby, attach wifi, resume and see if wifi appears.

FYI: I had the 2510P bios modded to have the HD4670 (at the time) added to the whitelist. That then resulted in the halt message on bootup as it appears that upon finding a whitelisted device, the bios tries to access wifi specific features which would fail since the HD4670 is not a wifi card. So modding the bios was not the solution. whitelst.bat was the solution.

x2 is just connecting lane1 and lane2 of the video card to lane1 and lane2 of the port. In your case lane1 would be port3's electrical connections, lane4 would be port4's electrical connections.