Starting a thread for general discussion of eGPUs, for those interested in the technology to share thoughts, knowledge, and to ask questions. Will update this post as the discussion progresses. Opening question: Who here has used an eGPU, or would like to use an eGPU?
I would consider it, I do have a card I could use I think its a 760GTX, You're modular case idea would work well with this, I would use it as a dock and build a small tablet around it, docked it would connect to a larger monitor
Nice @Aaron B! I'm excited about the modular case It's very experimental @Reremaker, as no eGPU can even provide a quarter of the bandwidth that an internal GPU uses. Some people do use it so they can play games on their low end laptops, but it's not that common due to the adhoc nature of it all. Here's an interesting video of someone using a dock -
I've got mine working, GTX 670 on M.2 slot under ubuntu I'll do some testing to see what performance is.. any suggestions how and what to check?
@Floris oooo, nice! What M.2 module did you use to route the PCIe bus to a eGPU? Rending something on Blender might be a good benchmark, as it does not have to be real-time, but should be accelerated somewhat by the CUDA cores on the eGPU. http://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/blender
I bought some M.2 adapter from AliExpress unfortunately it only had the M key.. so with a bit of creativity and a saw I made the B key myself.. This adapter might be 4x but cutting the B key in and only using the 2 provided lanes looks to be working fine. I'll try GeekBench GPU first and then also hook up my GTX1080 to check if the drivers are there. and I'll try to play some game. Have to see if I have space for Blender Projects, will look into it.. maybe I'll just install windows for ease
@Floris I must say your ingenuity is impressive If you have any spare time, I would love to see a write up on Hackster for this! UDOO have an official profile there, and projects created on the UDOO X86 are searchable - https://www.hackster.io/udoo/products/udoo-x86 (no projects listed yet, so yours could even be the first!)
Floris, Would you mind take a look at my thread here http://www.udoo.org/forum/threads/m-2-key-b-to-pci-express-adapter.6840/ I have not actually connected my PCIe card to my "modified M board" for one major reason: Not sure if "M-"-key's pin 5,11 (PCI3-Tx- and PCI3-Rx-) can be grounded for a PCI x4 card occupying all PCIe 4 lanes. (Shorting Tx pin in general, is not a good idea.) I suspect it's the odd Intel pushed x2 standard but I have never seen such pinout documented anywhere. ccs_hello
Laura, My original use case is to use a quad FastEthernbet or Dual gigE on such adapter. I am aware of graphics card use cases. However, I thought it's a bit unuisual to full power a typically 30 - 60W graphics card with a computer which only consumes 3 - 6W. (Kind like putting a V8 6000cc engine into a Pinto.) ccs_hello
I did search for an PinOut put I didn't really want to spend time on it.. I was sure it would just work. the adapter you are listing there is the same as I have here, cutting the B key should be fine? I didn't bother checking the only thing I noticed so far is that I can't acces the BIOS when the card is inserted..
So far the non real time performance is great! http://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/compute/689629 Non real time sucks a lot.. Playing CS:GO will result in about 10FPS does not really matter what resolution or quality (tried 4k all high and 1080p all low, both give similar results).. I might need to check if windows makes a big change to the results.. also not sure if scores are so low because of the CPU or the PCIe Bottleneck.
The card is likely only using a single PCIe lane, as two lanes is not a common configuration (it's only just started appearing due to M.2 sockets). There is a utility called gpuz that can provide some information on your GPU setup - https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/
I've posted mine here http://www.udoo.org/forum/threads/m-2-key-b-to-pci-express-adapter.6840/#post-26138 ccs_hello
