[advice] Plugging in a graphics card

[Darkjenso]

So long story short, I won one of these at CCP's fanfest and it just showed up in the post today.

I just really want to know if there is any way to hook it up to my MBP, either with bootcamp or not (prefferably not) or even to hook it up as a bitcoin miner at the very least. any advice on this would be appreciated

 

[Ricanlegend]

LoL no

 

[Darkjenso]

LoL no

well thanks for the informative answer.

So there is no way to use it externally or something?

 

[thundersteele]

I believe your best option for making money is selling it. Mining bit-coins with a GPU these days doesn't even recover the cost of electricity that is burned in this process.

There were supposed to be some external enclosures for graphics cards connecting via thunderbolt... I don't think any of them made it to the market.

Finally you could buy some used desktop or build a new desktop around that GPU.

 

[Laco]

So long story short, I won one of these at CCP's fanfest and it just showed up in the post today.

I just really want to know if there is any way to hook it up to my MBP, either with bootcamp or not (prefferably not) or even to hook it up as a bitcoin miner at the very least. any advice on this would be appreciated

Yes, you can use it with your laptop but only with windows (in bootcamp/parallels). I believe that it should work with a Vidock but check to make sure that it is compatible.

http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock

 

[laurihoefs]

There are Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures, but they are very expensive and often can't power a higher end graphics card. Sonnet is one of the companies making those, but even the top of the line enclosure only supports up to 150W cards, and is a whopping $500 piece of equipment. You might find one that is cheaper and has a better power supply, but so far I haven't seen any.

Then there is the DIY option, like the one reported on MR a little while ago: 11" MacBook Air Owner Connects High-End Graphics Card With Complex Thunderbolt Setup

Neither option is going to let you use the full potential of the card though, the current version of Thunderbolt is a bit too limited in bandwith.

 

[saturnotaku]

For all practical purposes, an eGPU should only be used on a machine that has Intel HD graphics, so that limits you to the MacBook Air or 13-inch MacBook Pro (classic or Retina). In the grand scheme, this is not a project that's worth the time, effort, or expense.

 

[Darkjenso]

thanks for the informative information everyone,

Im considering cannibalising the case of an old Powermac G4 and make a hackintosh or something

 

[Zeov]

LoL no

you're wrong.

 

[quasar~]

Magma has a thousand dollar pcie 2.0 three slot thunderbolt external enclosure. Bad thing though the gpu is pcie 3.0 which I think is about 15 gbits/s whilst thunderbolt is 10 gbits/s. I looked into this and it's very expensive; you wouldn't even get to use the gpu to its full potential.

I would either wait for thunderbolt 2 and see if they will release a product that would support pcie 3.0, or build a pc with the gpu.

If you do wait, you'd have to buy a computer that supports thunderbolt 2 ( when it comes out ) and you'd also have to buy a very expensive external enclosure.

 

[Tanax]

Magma has a thousand dollar pcie 2.0 three slot thunderbolt external enclosure. Bad thing though the gpu is pcie 3.0 which I think is about 15 gbits/s whilst thunderbolt is 10 gbits/s. I looked into this and it's very expensive; you wouldn't even get to use the gpu to its full potential.

I would either wait for thunderbolt 2 and see if they will release a product that would support pcie 3.0, or build a pc with the gpu.

If you do wait, you'd have to buy a computer that supports thunderbolt 2 ( when it comes out ) and you'd also have to buy a very expensive external enclosure.

Thunderbolt is indeed 10 Gb/s but PCIe 3.0 is 15 GB/s (~120 Gb/s). So Thunderbolt is _really_ slow compared to x16 PCIe 3.0.

Granted, GPUs don't fully use PCIe 3.0 but still..

 

[quasar~]

Thunderbolt is indeed 10 Gb/s but PCIe 3.0 is 15 GB/s (~120 Gb/s). So Thunderbolt is _really_ slow compared to x16 PCIe 3.0.

Granted, GPUs don't fully use PCIe 3.0 but still..

It's still nice to have the full bandwidth though. Like if there came a day when you can actually use the external gpus to their full potential.

 

[Tanax]

It's still nice to have the full bandwidth though. Like if there came a day when you can actually use the external gpus to their full potential.

Hence the "but still..". And Thunderbolt reaching the capabilities of PCIe 3.0 is far far far away. But yes, it would be nice.

 

[nickandre21]

flash the card to a mac efi. Buy a current mac pro and enjoy it.