13" mbp with external graphics card?

[applefanboy4739]

I've heard some things about TB allowing use of some really good external graphics cards, and was wondering if there are already some out there? And if so what's a good one to get in terms of reliability and performance? Price no option. I'm looking to do some heavy gaming and video editing.

 

[zeemeerman2]

Not yet as far as I know.
But to not disappoint you; Village Instruments is working on their ViDock, which can act as a thunderbolt hub where you can plug in your external graphical card via PCIe.
A link to their products as of today:
http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock

A confirmation that they're working on the thunderbolt product:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10150251502244135&id=89321949134

Just wait, have patience. As far as I know, MacRumors is following the product; if it's released, it's high likely that you'll find it on the front page news - if not, on the Mac Rumors page!

 

[applefanboy4739]

OK, thank you

 

[Quinoky]

If this is eventually going to work with any TB PCIe enclosure whatsoever, you have only limited choice in terms of graphics cards that you can get to work. As I have learned from the hackintosh community, by far the most compatible current generation graphics card is the AMD Radeon HD 6870. This mostly works right out of the box. I have also seen reports of the NVidia GTX 570 and even the GTX 580 working on hackintosh machines with the help of some kext editing. The AMD HD 69xx, however, does not work whatsoever. Also, - provided that this external PCIe thing all works of course (which counts for all of the above) - you could get the AMD HD 5870 from Apple which works in the current gen Mac Pro, so it should work in any other Macintosh machine as well.

Do keep in mind that TB has only limited bandwidth compared to PCIe 16x. Not sure whether it is very noticeable, but for heavy gaming I think it might very well be.