External GPU (eGPU) Resources

The U.S. price of the Blackmagic Pro is $1200. The August, 2017 retail launch price of the Vega 56 GPU was $400.* On Black Friday weekend, ASRock was selling its version of the Vega 56 for $340, and I believe that the retail price is going to settle in the next few weeks at $400 to $450. This means that you are paying about $750 to $800 for the enclosure.

It's instructive to read through Blackmagic's web page on its RX 580 and Vega 56 products: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicegpu/

Blackmagic's main claim is that its enclosure is "super quiet". However, there does not appear to be any difference in design between its RX 590 and Vega 56 enclosures, the Vega 56 being a more powerful GPU. Also, Blackmagic essentially says, correctly, that noise is a function of fan operation:

Extruded from a single piece of aluminum, the Blackmagic eGPU features a machine anodized finish and a unique thermal grill that’s designed for balanced airflow, convection cooling and efficient heat dissipation. This allows the variable speed fan to run more slowly, resulting in super quiet operation.​

The fact of the matter is that the AMD "partners" that make these AMD GPUs differentiate their products, in part, via heat dissipation and fan operation features. Looking at gaming sites, it's clear that gamers believe, rightly or wrongly, that some partner designs are better at heat dissipation and quiet operation than others. The key point is that there is no difference in principle between what these partners do and what Blackmagic is doing. Indeed, there's a pretty good chance that one of the partners designed the heat dissipation and fan operation features of the GPUs in Blackmagic's enclosure.

For the last three weeks, I've been using Asus's XG Station Pro enclosure with Sapphire's Nitro+ RX 590 GPU, including for gaming with the X-Plane flight simulator. Heat dissipation and noise are absolutely not problems. I have not tested the Blackmagic GPU, but I have a lot of trouble believing that it is somehow "better" when it comes to these issues. Indeed, Blackmagic does not even claim that its enclosure is better; this is just how some people apparently choose to interpret its statements.

Meanwhile, one winds up with an external GPU that can't be upgraded. Forget about AMD's roadmap, which calls for replacement of the Polaris series of GPUs over the next year, and forget about using a Nvidia GPU when, and if, Nvidia and Apple settle their differences.

At US$1200, the Blackmagic Pro strikes me as a very hard sell. Blackmagic's prices might have been understandable when GPUs were selling for crazy money due to demand from cryptocurrency miners, but not now.

* For launch dates and original prices of AMD GPUs, see post #189.

 

@Rockies's post, which is the clearest and most constructive post that I've seen on the FileVault issue, prompted me to try something with my monitor that may be useful to others.

I have been interested in finding an easy way to switch between my mini's internal GPU and my external GPU. There are many things for which I don't need the external GPU and I'd like to minimise power consumption. If you use FileVault, or if your eGPU generates unwelcome noise or heat, an easy way to switch might also be attractive.

On my new monitor, I can summon up an on-screen control panel that lets me select my monitor input port. I have a choice of four HDMI ports, one DisplayPort port and one Thunderbolt port.

As an experiment, I ran an HDMI cable from my mini's HDMI port to one of the monitor's HDMI ports. Then I ran a Thunderbolt 3 cable from one of my mini's Thunderbolt 3 ports to the Thunderbolt port on my Asus external GPU enclosure. Finally, I ran a DisplayPort cable from my external RX 590's DisplayPort port to my monitor's DisplayPort port.

It turns out that I can use the monitor's on-screen control panel to switch between the monitor's HDMI connection to my mini and its DisplayPort connection to my external GPU. The only additional thing that I have to do is turn my external GPU enclosure on or off depending on which connection I want to use.

Coming from an iMac, I don't know whether my monitor is typical. If it is, there would seem to be a simple way to switch between the mini's internal GPU and its external GPU, without the need to mess with cables and port plugs.

P.S. I haven't tested it, but there's no reason why I couldn't do this using two HDMI cables and ports (my RX 590 has two HDMI ports) rather than one HDMI and one DisplayPort.

 

I have a question arising from the test discussed in the post above (#208). Coming from an iMac, my knowledge of current monitor functionality is very limited. Can anyone say whether the monitor function discussed in that post - ability to easily switch between input ports - is now common?

I do realise that this is not the sort of issue that most people are likely to encounter with their monitor day to day, and I'd be surprised if it gets much attention, if any, in user manuals. As far as I know, this idea has not even been raised, let alone tested, in the many discussions about FileVault.

If anyone can test whether their monitor supports this functionality, that would be great. It is highly unlikely that the monitor that I am using is the only one that will support this.

Thanks

 

Ha!

For those, like me, who haven't got a clue what KVMs stands for, it's apparently a Keyboard, Video, Mouse switch.

There's been a lot of ink spilled on external GPUs that could have been more focused, if not saved, if people were thinking in these terms.

 

I have an RX 590 and I've started using it with X-Plane 11. If you use X-Plane, you know that the bottom line is frame rate, and that frame rate depends not just on choice of resolution, but very much on choices in graphics/rendering settings and flight area, some flight areas requiring manipulation of a lot more visual data than others (e.g. NYC vs Nantucket Island). Plus, some of X-Plane's rendering settings are CPU intensive and some are GPU intensive.

There are so many performance variables in X-Plane - one can spend a lot of time tinkering with them - that I think it's a good idea to keep in mind @rmdeluca's caveat in his post: "These are of course just guidelines. Performance in individual titles and vs. different models of GPU cards will vary."

 

Sapphire, one of the AMD "partners", has started selling an eGPU enclosure. MSRP is US$330, but Amazon is selling it for $260. It's also being sold bundled with a Sapphire RX 580.

Overview here: https://egpu.io/forums/thunderbolt-...apphire-gearbox-thunderbolt-3-egfx-enclosure/

The screenshot below is from http://www.sapphirepgs.com/productdetail.asp?IDno=121&tag=spec&lang=eng