{"id":880,"date":"2016-02-20T04:55:50","date_gmt":"2016-02-20T11:55:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/?p=880"},"modified":"2019-12-07T17:15:57","modified_gmt":"2019-12-08T00:15:57","slug":"egpu-intrigue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/archives\/880","title":{"rendered":"eGPU intrigue"},"content":{"rendered":"

As we consider a mac user’s renewed\u00a0quest for GPU performance – this time for an ‘external’ GPU in a tbolt2 PCI chassis\u00a0– we find similarities to other timeless\u00a0quests. For instance, in our quest,\u00a0the\u00a0path is not clear\u00a0in the beginning, and there is\u00a0conflicting advice about\u00a0how to proceed. The establishment is against us<\/a>, and success may be temporary<\/a> due to an ever-shifting and occasionally\u00a0hostile landscape. The journey is fraught with peril<\/a>, and you fully expect\u00a0impasses surmountable only\u00a0through deep soul searching<\/a> and great courage<\/a>. Also we\u00a0have to assemble items from the marketplace and maybe perform a heroic deed.<\/p>\n

My first thought\u00a0was that tbolt2 wouldn’t have the bandwidth\u00a0to let a\u00a0fast GPU to shine. While it is true that a fast card would be limited by tb2, it’s still totally fast enough to outperform the MacPro6,1 d700s for many workloads. From the barefeats post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Even when ‘hobbled’ by the limited bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2, the eGPU TITAN X ‘buries’ the AMD FirePro D700 on this OpenGL test<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Diablo III results in that\u00a0same post are even crazier. The new mac pro gets 78 fps with the internal d700 and 124 fps with a geforce titan x in an external tb2 chassis. Pretty not bad. Here’s the kicker: a six year old\u00a02010 Mac Pro scores 167 fps\u00a0<\/strong>(with the card installed in a legacy PCI slot. I mean a PCI slot. Heyo.)<\/p>\n

My\u00a0task is to pick a\u00a0set of tradeoffs, optimizing in order for: performance, build simplicity and cleanliness, [ergo | cost]. The most commonly used thunderbolt2 chassis for hosting GPUs seems to be the Akitio<\/a> unit, even though\u00a0it’s a bit too small for many cards (but you can bend it and \/ or not close the back hatch), and<\/strong>\u00a0the power supply is too weak to push a decent card. On the up side, the $200 – $300 price is comparatively low. The Akitio case doesn’t seem well equipped to power\u00a0a fast GPU, and many of\u00a0the builds\u00a0I can find just have the components splayed out on the desk…<\/p>\n<\/a> eGPUs all splayed out. credit: nesone from techinferno forums.\n

Others decide to transplant the Akitio board into a larger case<\/a>\u00a0with enough room for\u00a0an ATX power supply and\u00a0a full size card or two, and without leaving the back door open.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I once was told a very short story about how GPU drivers are all dens\u00a0of mutual patent infringement, where everyone is guilty and they all just\u00a0keep it ‘secret’ and carry on. Doing unsupported things with GPUs tends to require some negotiating with and gentle coercion of your computer system. Learning the secret handshakes in the first place is a mysterious business, and it’s easy to imagine all manner of\u00a0unsavory behavior and sundry cut-throat affairs in this trade.<\/p>\n

Our quest has produced one such tale already. There’s a person called netkas who did a lot of the groundwork in bootstrapping\u00a0the “eGPU” scene… operated a forum<\/a>, was responsive to people, helped them build their rigs, etc. Netkas then offers a service<\/a> where if you provide diagnostic details from your system while your eGPU stuff is plugged in, you will be told whether your rig is viable. If it is viable, for the price of $20 you will\u00a0be taught to sing the haunting melody that\u00a0subdues OS X and brings your GPU to life. This paid service seems like a reasonable way for customers to support\u00a0the ongoing\u00a0work of playing cat and mouse with the vendors.\u00a0People were grateful.<\/p>\n

Very shortly after\u00a0this service started\u00a0and began yielding\u00a0happy customers, it is said\u00a0that a rival\u00a0player known as\u00a0goalque\u00a0(seemingly well regarded by his side of the internet) inspected the work of netkas and generalized it\u00a0into a rather burly shell script<\/a> that now sits in goalque’s\u00a0github repo. It may be executed by anyone for no fee, much to the continued frustration<\/a> of the netkas camp. The feud lives on, with the scene’s two popular forums (netkas and techinfernal<\/a>) appearing to come down on opposing\u00a0sides, all of which is completely inconsequential to the users, who are all either stoked to pay $20 to netkas to light up their rig, or stoked to run a shell script from github to light up their rig.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we consider a mac user’s renewed\u00a0quest for GPU performance – this time for an ‘external’ GPU in a tbolt2 PCI chassis\u00a0– we find similarities to other timeless\u00a0quests. For instance, in our quest,\u00a0the\u00a0path is not clear\u00a0in the beginning, and there … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mac-pro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1351,"href":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions\/1351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}