I found a very neat (organized) way to add an external GPU to the Bolt. I saw other posts with the m.2 to pcie adapters that are right on the 2280 boards, but I wanted to be able to continue to use the Bolt enclosure. I used this adapter to connect this RX 580, which was powered by this power supply. Routing the ribbon cable was a little tricky, but it fits like it was meant to be! I will be using the PSU and GPU in a desktop build, but I wanted to try this out on the Bolt. It works really well and booted right up on both Windows and Linux (Pop!_OS in this case). I might get a sata raid card to use with the pcie adapter next. Images: Adapter Routed Finished
Look good Well Done but why PSU of 850 Watts? I seem think it because you have very powerful graphics. Do you have video of it showing your UDOO with Graphics card and power supply? Would be nice to see running on Video games with your UDOO Bolt with Graphics card that bring very high FPS(Framerate per sec!) The reason why I ask because I always want to do it on my UDOO bolt as my graphics card is Geforce 1050TI which is more than enough for me and I am wondering where did you buy the Adapter for external GPU to the Bolt?
My 2 cents... Don't go crazy on getting the best of the best graphics card. It's going to be a mismatch on the CPU TDP. I.e., one don't put a gigantic engine on a tiny car, nor put a tiny engine on a tow truck.
I just used a 850W PSU because I got it to build a desktop. This was just a test to see how well it would do, for curiosity's sake. It worked well and you would see decent performance, depending on the game and settings of course. As css_hello mentioned, the CPU can be the limiting factor. Additionally, the Bolt's M.2 Key M connector will provide 4 lanes of PCIe. That might also limit performance depending on the task the GPU is working on. I dont really play video games, but i tested it with City Skylines and it did much better than the embedded graphics. Unfourtunately I did not record a video and I've since moved the PSU and GPU to the desktop had planned to build. I bought the adapter from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Z4QZ3K4/ it is also linked in the original post, click on "this adapter".
Thank you for pointing this out. This was a quick test to see if it worked; I was mainly interested in testing the PCIe adapter. It is rather silly because it requires an external power supply for the GPU, going against the low-power and compact benefits of the bolt . But still a fun setup if one is interested in messing around and making custom solutions! It is also important to note that the CPU is not always as relevant. Certain algorithms can spend most of their time on the GPU computational units and rely very little on the CPU. If you're using the GPU for video games, this setup is may not be the best. However, some games and computational loads will do well with a powerful GPU and not-so-great CPU.
