11" MacBook Air Owner Connects High-End Graphics Card With Complex Thunderbolt Setup

Michael CM1 said:
This may be all #science neat and stuff, but it has got to be the biggest waste of time on the planet. If you want an ultraportable notebook, get a MacBook Air. If you want to play games on a portable Mac, get a MacBook Pro. If you want a portable computer to plan tons of games, you're best off finding a computer built to those specs in the first place.
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Why carry around all that gaming equipment in your MBP everywhere you go if you are a person who only needs it at home? Besides, you can upgrade this, and you can't upgrade a MBP's GPU.
 
elppa said:
Apple could make a polished solution, something like Sony did with the Vaio Z.

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The Vaio Z was thinner and half a pound lighter than an MacBook Air, but had full voltage processors (up to quad core i7) like a Pro. The external case isn't just for the Blu-Ray reader/writer – it also housed a AMD graphics card.
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 is missing a trick here.
 
Quu said:
Considering that the new Mac Pro has the fastest graphics that Apple has ever shipped not just in todays performance but in the class of performance.. I don't think they will ever ship an external graphics card or a display with a graphics card built in.

I mean lets just be realistic here, the current Mac Pro ships with a HD 5770. This is a £50 card. When the Mac Pro first launched in 2006 they shipped it with a GeForce 7300GT. Even back then that was a £35 card. These are both low-end cards.

The Mac Pro has always been sold with a stock low-end card. Now look at the new Mac Pro, it doesn't have just one high end card, it has two. And that appears to be the stock configuration. This shows that Apple is serious about putting high end graphics inside their desktop chassis. This says to me the chances of them ever shipping an external GPU at this point are dead.
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I don't think you read / understood my post. I specifically said that the external graphic card solution wouldn't make sense for the new MacPro and that what we needed was a modular solution that could accept different types of cards (Video/Sound/Storage/etc...).

I also said that I believed Apple could do it better than anyone else but that I didn't think they would ever do it.

But, in my point of view, they'll never do it not because they're committed with putting powerful graphic cards inside their desktops, but because they feel that internal PCIe expandability (in the form of internal cards) is on its way out and that thunderbolt will be sufficient for most needs (Video/Sound/Storage/etc...) in the short/medium-term.

That said, I still think they have to come up with an eGPU / Docking Station solution to turn the laptops into more powerful 'desktops' when you're not needing the portability.
But I'm increasingly more convinced they'll never do it, let's hope that I'm wrong and that they're just (very very) late... :D

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear with the first post, I hope this one doesn't add even more to the confusion ;)
 
Will any of the older macbooks with thunderbolt also support sending back the image to the internal display? Or is that only a intel HD 5000 feature?

Nvm, Intel HD3000 is supported but I'm not sure if there's a way to get Windows to boot using Intel HD instead of the ATi graphics.
 
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elppa said:
Apple could make a polished solution, something like Sony did with the Vaio Z.

Image

The Vaio Z was thinner and half a pound lighter than an MacBook Air, but had full voltage processors (up to quad core i7) like a Pro. The external case isn't just for the Blu-Ray reader/writer – it also housed a AMD graphics card.
Click to expand...

That would a pretty distinct shift for Apple. Much of the time they just look for good enough on performance specs, not so much bleeding edge. I don't expect to see gpu peripherals from Apple. Another company might put something out if thunderbolt's bandwidth outpaces the demands of mid range cards, but I wouldn't expect that to be tailored for Apple. There wouldn't be any money in it without thunderbolt on Windows notebooks where most of the work can be reused for a Mac version, which will still cost $200 more.

Unggoy Murderer said:
Wowza, nice work! Hopefully this will become more mainstream if OEM's see it.

Couldn't help but think of this:

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+1 for young frankenstein reference

TEG said:
OWC has enclosures with PCIe slots in them that connect to Thunderbolt, and are a decent price.
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That is not enough information to tell whether this would work with one. It would require the appropriate number of mechanical lanes, an adequate power supply for one of these gpus, many of which are over 150W, dimensions that are capable of housing a full sized graphics card, and of course add $50 to the price for a thunderbolt cable. It's not possible to just say they have a PCIe enclosure and assume that is a solution, not that I would buy anything there anyway with their disingenuous marketing.

DVNIEL said:
High-end graphics card? GTX 570?


HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
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Take a look at the mac pro forum. That card is still popular for CUDA performance, especially for what they cost today. Outside of that it is a slightly dated reference.
 
swarmster said:
I'm surprised by how many people are completely missing the point of a setup like this. If you hadn't noticed, Thunderbolt is not a permanent physical connection. When you're at home at your desk, plug in the video card and do some gaming. Then when you're done, unplug, pick up your ultrabook in one hand, walk around, and feel free to plop it in an airplane or lecture hall seat tray for your productivity.

Can you do that with an old Mac Pro?
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if you can read a signature, you'd see that i don't need to do that second part with a mac pro.
 
I've always wondered if the bandwidth of cards being GB/s is necessary, or if gbps of I/O would work. Seems so.

That being said, I wonder if they could take either the laptop GFX cards, to make a mini external enclosure, or the desktop cards, to make a bigger external enclosure, and use both the external and internal cards simultaneously to render games.

Anyone have ideas?



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LordVic said:
The fact that its' taken years to come to fruition is a bit sad, and I feel Apple has completely missed the boat with leveraging thunderbolt. Right now, it's effectively just a interconnect being used for drive arrays, but it's capable of so so so much more.
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Didn't I read in an article here (but was a quote of someone else) that people treat Thunderbolt as just another I/O, when they should be treating it as a direct route to the high speed brains of the computers. More an expansion, like PCIe.
 
Apple has been pushing Intel further and while the Iris Pro 5200 is no slouch, it will be interesting to see what they will do with Broadwell and the extra GPU space it will have.

There still has to be a more simplified way to do this, but Intel, now firmly turning into a GPU company, will never open up thunderbolt to this... They may consider it if their biggest customer demands it, but Apple will likely never care for that either. :(

Kick starter anyone?
 
I bought the Sonnet Echo ExpressCard Pro in order to use pro audio external devices and it's really great! A little bit expensive though :(
 
MWPULSE said:
so, correct me if im wrong, but this kinda thing could also be used on the audio side of things?

Avid, among others have Protools HD cards which (if memory serves) are PCIe? (I haven't read into it properly, but remember lil bits :p)

So we could get our IO cards into an enclosure like this, and use it with?... well anything that tickled our fancy? A macbook pro, mac mini etc etc?

That would be pretty dope!

Pete
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Avid already moved their DSP based Pro Tools systems to Thunderbolt native. They were testing the existing PCIe systems with the Minirack Thunderbolt enclosure last year, the videos are on YouTube.

The problem with Apple's laptops is that you may be able to hook up to an audio system but without a second internal drive or Firewire 800, you've only got the option of using an SD card for recording to. USB (ANY USB) is no substitute and buspowered Firewire drives can't be used with Thunderbolt adapters. It may be that a fast SD card would work, but reliability could depend on if the internal interface is PCIe based or USB based.

I'm particularly interested in where this is going because with MacBooks that spank the current entry level Mac Pro for CPU performance, someone could potentially replace a desktop with a laptop and not have to carry anything but headphones and a copy protection dongle, then hook up to a DSP system and multiple displays via Thunderbolt.
 
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I guess the reason so many people are missing the point is that this is not the kind of thing Macrumors typically posts. Over on hackaday.com, nobody would whine that the project would have worked better with a bigger computer or a more expensive graphics card. The point of messing around in your garage is that you start with what's lying around and sure as whatsit don't invest massive $ into something that won't further your experiment. Anyone thought he didn't want/couldn't afford an iMac?

Lady Gaga is not presenting a commercially viable solution (throwing away all those Cons to get the shoe boxes would be expensive to start with...), or a spy shot from within Apple R+D, this is proof of concept. The only possible response is "Well done" and "thank you"

So "Thank you, and well done" :)
 
Imagine, Apple would have their next cinema display have a built-in graphics card. That way you have a portable machine, and when at home/office/school you can plug it into a larger screen that would give you more 3D performance.

Keep in mind that the 2013 MacBook Air is VERY capable! I know graphic designers that solely use the new MacBook Air (even the 2012 version) for work. :apple:
 
That's make me think why cannot Apple or others put away the graphics card and make it together with each screen. Basically for each screen you would like to plug at you computer has its own build in graphics card. That would make it very simple for the users and you dont need to carry extra graphics card power anywhere.
 
THIS !!!

is what i want from thunderbolt, not "a.n.other" way of attaching a harddisk (at vastly inflated prices).

A thunderbolt caddy for a PCIE graphics card (with its own PSU) that would let me upgrade my 21" iMacs 6770 to an Nvidia 770 for gaming under windows would be superbly useful.

i can only assume that there is some cartel led reason that any kind of external PCI caddy for graphics wasn't the first thing released when thunderbolt "went live",

USB 3, E-sata and even network devices can do everything else thunderbolt does, usually at a fraction the cost, but THIS, would be the "killer app" so to speak.
 
Have fun! I can't even run Mail, Safari, iTunes and do some iPhoto work in the summer month at the same time on my 2010 Air. After ten minutes or so the back side is hot as hell and the fans are going crazy.
 
I was actually about to do something similar for gaming on my 27" iMac, except I was planning a full PC Rig (approx £500 all-in). Because the iMac only accepts Thunderbolt video input, you have to purchase one of the motherboards with a Thunderbolt port (very few and far between!). As with this guy's setup, you need to use Lucidlogix Virtu in order to get the dedicated graphics card output to the iMac.
 
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