Connecting an external video card to a notebook | Hacker News Reader

Connecting an external video card to a notebook

lab501.net

83 pointsnkurz27 comments

If some manufacturer made a laptop docking station with a full length PCI slot and a fat power supply I'd just throw money at them. It would completely remove my desire to keep building big powerful gaming/development rigs. Laptop CPU:s are already powerful enough for gaming these days, but video cards will stay at several hundred watts.

I'm not exactly sure why thunderbolt has to be involved if it has licensing issues? Couldn't a laptop maker make their own interface for transmitting PCIe to through a docking connector?

EDIT: spelling

It's been done. The most high profile one was the 2011 Vaio Z, which came with an external GPU that connected to the laptop over Light Peak but with a non-Thunderbolt connector. They killed the Z series a year later.

The problem with proprietary solutions for this is that you're not getting the efficiency of scale. Vendor-specific solutions are going to be expensive, there will be a lot of uncertainty about whether you'll be able to upgrade to better GPUs later, and if you want to keep the external GPU but upgrade the laptop you're locked to the same vendor. A widely supported standard solution would be vastly preferable.

Yes of course, I don't want some proprietary external VGA brick, I want a docking station with a normal full length PCIe slot and enough power to feed it. That is, the fat AMD or Nvidia graphics card I slot into my PCIe docking station should have no idea it's not sitting in a regular desktop.

A non-proprietary solution...like Thunderbolt / Thunderbolt II, which has double the bandwidth through channel aggregation, or thunderbolt 3 which doubles what 2 was capable of: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29#T...

Really don't know why they don't want to license external enclosures with ~300w power supplies, space for 3x width cards, and 16x PCI-E (physically) slots that would let you run whatever GPUs you want. It definitely seems like all the pieces are there, and if you could add $50 to the cost of a mid-range laptop to add a Thunderbolt port which would let you connect whatever GPU box to it, it seems like Intel would sell more Thunderbolt licenses and chipsets. Consumers would love the choice of upgradable optional notebook graphics, and you wouldn't need to drop an extra $1000 on a laptop with beefy internal GPUs just to play games that a $600 laptop's CPU could easily handle.

I can only assume that they don't do this because it would kill the gaming laptop market and possibly some of the desktop PC market.

As long as Thunderbolt is involved there seems there is both the licensing issue and the issue with graphics cards needing Thunderbolt drivers to work in the enclosures. If it was done perfectly, the card would be just like any card in a normal desktop slot, so the normal driver would work. Not sure what would be required for that to work. Also not sure what it would take to just physically run the "on board" PCIe directly to the docking rather than use a cable. It should be much better for latency to just have the card sit in a docking box right under the laptop, within the same distance from the cpu as a normal PCIe card is on a desktop motherboard.

non-proprietary solution...like Thunderbolt

don't want to license external enclosures

These two statements are incompatible.

You can purchase external PCI-E enclosures with a PSU that plugs in to Thunderbolt and you can put pretty much any GPU or any other PCI-E card in there. Some enclosures permit you to put two or even three cards inside, though the PSU can be quickly overwhelmed. Plug that in to a modern MBP running Windows 7 or Windows 8 and you suddenly have a Windows laptop with a top of the line NVidia card.

I was considering going this route for the past two months but was waiting to see what Razer and Alienware announced at CES and sure enough Alienware updated their entire line of laptops to support eGPU, though the Alienware enclosures AFAICS are primarily for GPUs rather than a general-purpose PCI enclosure.

Do you have any links to those? Those I have found only support a few graphics cards and only with special thunderbolt-enabled drivers. I'm looking for something that will run a (any) standard graphics card at full speed with a standard driver, but pretty sure that doesn't exist.

EDIT: Found it! http://www.kitguru.net/laptops/anton-shilov/msi-introduces-g...

I've been running this kind of setup with a lenovo X220 and a 660 GTX using the cheapo express card adapter from Taiwan. It runs quite well. AMA

Can you send a link to that adaptor? Also, did you have to fiddle with the BIOS PCI settings as mentioned in the article? Any idea how this works on Linux?

Can I format links nicely here? It's a PE4L by hwtools.net [1]. And no, no BIOS fiddling was neccessary. Actually I just hot-plugged the thing first time, right into a running Windows 7. Windows Update went and downloaded the NVidia driver, required a reboot, an has run mostly flawless since then. I even see the NVidia logo in Lenovo's Energy Manager, suppose it thinks it's on an Optimus setup. Hotplug in rarely works, hot-plug out does work. I get a the usual eject icon in the systray, just the way you'd safe-eject USB devices.

I haven't even tried this in Linux. The EGPU is one reason why I chose to keep Windows native, and Linux in VMware Player, not the other way round. (The other reasons are Steam and some obscure CAD and PCB layout software, so I'm not going to try any time soon.)

[1] http://www.hwtools.net/Adapter/PE4L%20V2.1.html

What thinkpad model do you use? What card? Is there a performance hit because of the ExpressCard limitations?

As stated above, X220 + 660GTX.

If I recall correctly, am missing out on about 30% of the 3dmark points I should be getting by combining the GPU with a CPU of that speed level. As far as I know though, It's still faster than any laptop graphics chip available even today.

I sometimes seem to get a minor stutter in games, e.g. I'll lose about a frame or two every couple seconds, which might be due to the low ExpressCard bandwidth. This is game-dependent, and most games run flawlessly.

Intel refusal to license thunderbolt external GPU is infuriating, and the sole rationalization I can see is that they are blocking it to protect premium price on their high end integrated GPUs. It really feels like a big let down.

(edit: bit->big)

Apple should grab that opportunity. They probably have enough power to pressurize Intel into allowing this (at least on their computers).

Imagine an apple-manufactured external graphics card that you can carry around and plug into your MacBook Air/Pro.

It could boost sales pretty significantly. I know quite a few people who did not buy a MacBook just because games don't run well enough, and went for another brand that fits their needs in this area (the bigger MacBooks are more expensive, and their advantage to competitors disappears).

They could do this, but their market isn't typically gamers (even though plenty of games run well on OSX these days), and it'd probably be a viable alternative to having a Mac Pro and a quad-core rMBP.

So, their reasoning is probably similar to why Intel doesn't do it in the first place: it would eat into the sales of other more niche products. Lame.

That said, Apple has demonstrated they're not averse to new product lines eating into other existing ones, as with the iPhone 6 taking some sales away from the iPad family, and in turn, the iPad mini away from the full-size iPads.

I doubt anyone expects them to actually come through with an external GPU option, of course, but it'd certainly be of interest to me, given Second Life's stiff requirements for long draw distances with all the lighting options enabled.

I doubt a gamer would buy a Mac Pro for a gaming rig.

Yeah, it is super frustrating that you can't get a reasonably priced TB»PCI adapter to get your son's MacMini to play Minecraft without lag.

Crazy limitation of a good interface.

Since recently you can also get notebooks that have already built-in support for external GPUs: new Alienware line with "Graphics Amplifier" (Alienware 13, 15, 17) and MSI GS30 Shadow with "GamingDock":

http://www.alienware.com/landings/laptops.aspx

http://www.msi.com/product/nb/GS30-2M-Shadow.html

Both use proprietary connectors based on PCI-Express.

That "Graphics Amplifier" is a pretty cool idea, I've been looking for something like this. But it uses an proprietary connector which means it can only be used with an Alienware laptop :(

Both these require a reboot (are not hot-pluggable). I wonder if this is a limitation of the hardware, or just some windows thing?

As a large amount of what I do at home is games and Lightroom, what I'd really like (as an incredibly niche product) is a pure terminal laptop that is just a fast wireless screen/keyboard/mouse for the beefy desktop elsewhere in the house.

Today you can kludge it together with a regular laptop and Steam Streaming (latency is impressive, but not perfect), or by using a low-latency/long-range wireless HDMI system like the Nyrius Aries Pro/Paralinx with a lap-sized monitor and wireless keyboard/trackpad.

The second method works (and also works with consoles), but is hampered by the same-room-only short ranges of wireless keyboard/mice, and is a mess of wires and USB batteries.

Amazing work. But the fact that it takes _this_ to get something done that should be as easy as connection any other peripheral... it hurts.

If all the major notebook manufacturers could just drop their niche proprietary BS solutions and agree on _something_, maybe, just maybe, we could have some sort of standard for this that actually works (in 3-4years). Thanks.

Back when GPU bitcoin mining was still profitable, I really wanted something like this. Unfortunately it does not exist.

If GPU bitcoin mining was profitable for longer, I bet something like this would have been invented.

this idea was in my mind two month ago , I really need this for my cuda development.

Maybe someone could do a Kickstarter to make an elegant solution to do this with no soldering or PCI-E adapters. The hard part would seem to be getting the Thunderbolt chipset and making the board to allow a 16X card powered by an ATX supply. Seems like a product with BYO ATX PSU + GPU would be pretty popular if it could ship within a year. The decline of ExpressCard is sad, since that seemed to be a better solution than Thunderbolt here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com