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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

Works fine on macOS. Running a Akitio Thunder 3 with RX570 on a MBP 2015 13" using a TB2-TB3 adapter, and on a MBP 2017 (also 13") without the adapter. On the TB3 model it's plug and play, on the TB2 model you have to patch DisplayWrangler to make it accept the lower bandwidth TB2 as it was patched out by Apple. After that, the older MBP is plug and play too.

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I have problems still with hot disconnecting the eGPU if there are monitors plugged in to the eGPU. I can hit plug in, but can’t get a stable hot disconnect. Is that working for you?

I can hot plug-in & plug-out as well as the normal plugged-in while booting.

I tend to have the MBP in clamshell mode and connect my display to the eGPU (4K LG monitors).

When I not-so-nice hot-unplug without telling the OS, it goes to the login screen on the internal display + internal GPU, and when you log back in the session is restored with a stern warning that hot-unplugging without telling the OS is bad.

Note: by default you get no boot screen from EFI on the eGPU on TB2 models, never did a boot on a TB3 MBP with the eGPU attached in clamshell mode, probably doesn't do it there either. I suspect something with GOP or some other EFI graphics protocol not enjoying TB3-TB2 adapters. Not much of an issue for me; I can either do a FileVaul2 unlock on the internal display (or blind), or do an fdesetup authrestart to bypass FileVault2 login on the next reboot.

hmm. definitely not my experience there. When I say "safe eject eGPU" it's as if my machine tries, then quits all my applications, and then starts disconnecting the displays, and then detects the eGPU and displays and immediately reconnects to everything.

I am using a TB2-3 adaptor and a mid 2015 MacBook pro with the same script you are. I have an Akitio Node with an RX580. Mostly, it's great, but I basically need to shut down to efficiently disconnect.

FWIW, having an eGPU on a laptop makes you really appreciate how few things are really GPU accelerated in day to day life. (cough, cough, Fusion360 and Lightroom).

Is this on High Sierra? I have the same machine and had read that TB2 was not going to be supported/deliberately disabled so I sort of gave up hope of getting eGPU working.

Does it work with the internal display?

Yes, but due to the TB2 bandwidth limitation it's not as good as an external screen directly attached to the eGPU. But it's of course still much faster than whatever GPU came with the MBP when it was designed all those years ago.

Or no GPU, because I buy 13 inchers with integrated graphics for portability :)

TB2-TB3 adapter?

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEL2AM/A/thunderbolt-3-u...

Yep, that's the one. I can recommend it to anyone who needs an adapter (bi-directional) for Thunderbolt, works with the NUCs I have too, as well as an Asus motherboard with TB3 and a Dell laptop I happened to have around the time the adapter came in. Doesn't have DisplayPort, only TB's main transfer mode (basically TB frames with PCIe in it).

I've read it doesn't work if both your eGPU and dGPU are Nvidia. (This is mainly a problem with the 750M Macbook.)

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