DIY eGPU experiences

Hey nando4, how do you overclock the hp 2510p? I have the 2710p with the same processor. Do they have the same PLL? Also, since the connectors are the same as the 2730p, do you think it is worth a shot to get the sata drive adaptor and just try and sata drive in the 2710p for giggles?
thx

 

Sweet! Newegg just put an Asus 4670 on sale for $38 after rebate. I am going to order the stuff and give it a try.

 

Here are my experiences so far with a Dell Xps 1530m (originally with 4 gigs of ram I cant get it to work with 4 gigs of ram yet)

Working laptop hardware/software:
Dell XPS 1530, 2 gigs Ram, Core 2 duo T9300 @ 2.5 ghz, Nvidea 8600m GT onboard graphics, Windows 7

Graphics card: ATI Radeon HD 5770, 1 gb gddr5 memory

DIY hardware used from hwtools: PE4H with EC2C expresscard adapter.

3DMark06 score at default settings and 1x PCIe: 10058

I could not get this to work at 2x speeds, because my ethernet port is hard wired into port 1 (see everest screenshot).

As you can see from the picture of my setup included, I just built somthing out of scrap wood that is a little better than having the thing sit on my desk waiting to fall over... The power supply that I used, I pulled from an ancient 200 mhz pentium computer I had sitting around, it actually has a push button to turn it on instead of the normal paper clip trick used on modern psus...

Now I need to get back to playing maxed out dragon age with this thing

 

where are z benchmarks???

 

i was wondering when someone was going to start building something to hold it..lol..
yes..benchmarks would be nice! :] :]

 

Just ran the Resident Evil 5 benchmark, attached is a screenshot. It was the variable benchmark with direct X 9 at 1280x720.

Result: 53.2 FPS average

Any other benchmarks requested?

 

crysis, lost planet anything else but resident evil. oh dmc4 would be nice.

 

Considering Resident Evil 5, Lost Planet, Street Fighter 4, and Devil May Cry 4 use the same MT Framework Engine to power the games, I'd imagine the benchmark score would be similar across the games. It's really a nice engine, works very well on lower end hardware.

 

Lost planet is supposedly not very optimized out of the bunch and also my favorite game and I would say dvmc4 is the most optimized out of the bunch.

 

anyone tried linking the PCI-E x16 mxm connecter out?


it'll be cool to see one.

 

There is a thread on that very subject!

Performance will be awesome if they can get it to work, but it is of course only useful for laptops with MXM (it won't work with chipset integrated graphics solutions like Intel's)

 

Having a sort of hit-miss with my PE4H, with 8800GT and T8100 in my lappy. Borderlands runs maxed out 1080p 30+fps but Bioshock and COD4 have issues whenever there are characters on screen (like sub 15 FPS even on low 800x600) it seems like my processor isnt even being used that much...
EDIT: I'm still convinced there is something wrong with the processor using the PE4H, with my onboard 8600m GS disabled in deice manager I can't get full screen hulu to be smooth on regular or HD...not sure how this is happening but it is...

EDIT2: Runs better on my onboard 8600m GS than my 8800GT through PE4H something must be going on with the processor?

 

Thats because Nvidia doesnt perform that good* at X1 speeds thats why villagetronic uses ATI cards they even explain why.

This demonstrates that Nvidia designs their gpus to give "better" 3dmark results... What a shame...

My HD4850 performs like a champ with all games I play .

 

That doesn't fully make sense...and does not explain why Hulu has problems since that is just the CPU??? Or why some games play fine and some games aren't playable at all...I feel like there is something wrong with the CPU and the PE4H but that doesn't make sense either, is there something I could do to troubleshoot the problem and narrow it down a little better....I'm probably going to pick up an ATI card anyways so I don't have to keep pulling this one out of my desktop

 

I just tryed full screen hulu on mine as well and it is laggy. But on my laptop screen/vcard its fine... Games for me are great though, ive been playing Dragon age maxed out at 1680x1050 and I haven't had any slow downs.

On another note, Ive been working on a permanent enclosure for my setup. I had an old xbox 360 sitting in my closet that died (RROD), so I thought I could use that as an enclosure and use the xbox power supply to power it. Well I was right, Ive been working on this for a few days and just finished. Attached are some pictures...

I used a dremel a lot and took apart a niko intercooler to use its power connector and switch to turn the xbox power supply on. This setup is def a lot better than the piece of wood I had

More info on the xbox 360 case mod.

I am downloading the crysis demo to do a benchmark on that also, I plan on OCing this GPU and maybe my processor if possible to see if I can squeeze some more performance out of this thing...

 

Wondering if anyone else has a 2nd opinion on my problem with some games and flash video...also I am in a bit of a pickle. I originally thought I would use my 8800GT on my laptop and upgrade my desktop GPU but if I need to get a new GPU for the PE4H what is the best for the money and works well x1? Here are what I think my options are
1.) Find some way to make the 8800GT perform better (I still think it is very weird it works fine with borderlands but struggles so much with some other games) with games and flash
2.) Keep 8800GT in desktop and get a new GFX card for PE4H
3.) Sell 8800GT, Hard Drives, Q6600, RAM etc and use that to buy better processor and GFX (Best Penryn socket P and ATI 5 series)
4.) ???

I wouldn't have a problem parting out my desktop except for the fact that flash video does not work well at all so far with the PE4H and I use Hulu, Youtube, etc very often...ideas/questions/comments suggestions?

P.S. like your case Scott, is anything mounted in there or is it free floating?

 

Not sure, my card does the same thing as yours with hulu, it works fine not full screen but laggy otherwise... Theres a pre-release of the new flash player here:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

You can also hit the pop-out button on the right while your watching the video and scale it up manually, it seemed to work better for me that way at almost full screen.

Its mounted in there, I have 3 screws holding the PE4H in, and 2 screws holding the card in, the card is removable without taking the pe4H out... (see pics below) I used the screws that came with the pe4h to mount it to the frame. Ebay has plenty of broken xboxes for anybody willing to try this, id be glad to help...


**EDIT** If your curious as to how I powered the rig, I used the 175 Watt xbox 360 power supply. To turn the psu on you need to connect pins 7 and 8 together (I did this with a switch in the front). Below are some pictures.


More benchmarks for the benchmark happy, here we go:
I did these benchmarks with an oc of 930/1380 on the GPU and 2.5 gigs of RAM.

RE5 @ 1680x1050 DX10: average of 32.3fps in the variable benchmark shown here:


3DMark vantage Score: P5438 on the performance setting as shown in the below screen.


Crysis Benchmarks
(This was done with the Crysis benchmark tool from guru3d.com)

DX9 1280x720 AA=No AA, 64 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 32.885

DX9 1680x1050 AA=No AA, 64 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 27.885

DX10 1680x1050 AA=No AA, 64 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 17.705

It seems DX10 is either bottlenecking at my cpu/memory or it is filling the pcie 1x bandwidth. Playing this at 1680x1050 dx9 is perfectly playable and works great though.

Updated 3Dmark06 score with the overclock and 2 gigs of ram is 10357.

 

can you by chance try the dvmc4 benchmark?
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1111/Devil_May_Cry_4_Benchmark.html

 

Here is the DVMC4 benchmark at DirectX9 1280x720, 900/1430 OC on the GPU,


For some reason in the last scene the fps dropped, maybe its my cpu/memory or the pcie bandwidth filled up...

 

what settings did you use?

 

Good Evening.

I have a PE4H with a PM3N and i'm using windows 7 x64.
I bought a 4670 1gb graphic board.
I tried the 2510P.bat file but after the "windows is loading files" it turns yellow and then the screen (both screens) turn black and it apears to stop working.
Without using the 2510P.bat it result in code 12 error.

My laptop is a PackardBell BG46 with 2GB of ram and a x3100 onboard graphic card.

http://img526.imageshack.us/i/everest.png/
http://img689.imageshack.us/i/everest2.png/



I have replaced the wireless adapter for the PM3N adapter.
Can any one help me?

 

It did not work.
After the "windows is loading" (the usual windows intro in the external lcd) the external screen turns black with a "_" flashing in the left top corner and in the laptop screen vertical bar apear with different colors.

The address C0000000 to CFFFFFFF apears in my computer like reserve to "motherboard resources".

I will put a video on youtube and post it were.
Part1
Part2

Can you help me?

 

Moved answer to here.
FYI: OBF has followed up saying it works now.

 

The settings were on the default which was everything on High, no msaa, no vsync...

 

hmm well then the dvmc 4 benchmark is rather depressing. Especially compared to when I ran it back when I did my review of my laptop.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=346530

 

Got 31.7 fps average in RE5 benchmark, dx9, variable bench,1920x1080, 0xAA, vsync off, everything else high/on

1920x1080 same as above with 8xAA, vsync on 29.9 fps

1920x1080 everything off/low 43.9 fps

1280x800 default settings, variable benchmark - 38.0 fps

---------------
3dmark06 1.10 - 6716
-------------

stalker cop - see attachment
------------

crysis pre-release demo http://downloads.guru3d.com/Crysis-Single-player-Demo-download-1770.html
crysis bench tool 1.05 http://downloads.guru3d.com/Crysis-Benchmark-Tool-1.05-Final-download-1791.html

Beginning Run #1 on Map-island, Demo-benchmark_gpu
DX9 1920x1080, AA=No AA, Vsync=Disabled, 32 bit test, FullScreen
Demo Loops=1, Time Of Day= 9
Global Game Quality: High
Play Time: 104.64s, Average FPS: 19.11
Min FPS: 6.20 at frame 145, Max FPS: 26.15 at frame 1636
Average Tri/Sec: -16644514, Tri/Frame: -870867
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -1.05


Beginning Run #1 on Map-island, Demo-benchmark_gpu
DX9 1280x720, AA=No AA, Vsync=Disabled, 32 bit test, FullScreen
Demo Loops=1, Time Of Day= 9
Global Game Quality: Low
Play Time: 62.32s, Average FPS: 32.09
Min FPS: 29.02 at frame 1931, Max FPS: 58.92 at frame 842
Average Tri/Sec: 16022343, Tri/Frame: 499278
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 1.84

---------------------

9.11 catalyst, catalyst settings: AA filter: box, AA mode: multisample AF: app settings, catalyst ai: standard, mipmap: quality

inspiron 1505, 1.66 dual core cpu, 5750, 2 gb ram, win xp sp3

 

Hi there. I also have a a PE4H but with an expresscard adapter and i'm using windows xp 32 bits.I also bought a HD4670 1gb graphic board. My laptop as a Geforce GO 7600 with nvidia 6100 chipset. How can I disable this card so I can try to use only the external graphic card?

 

would it be possible to use crossfireX or SLI? or not at all?

 

Why would you use 2 "expensive" cards?
You better buy an HD5850 or even an HD5970 that would be cheaper (in some cases) and the OWNAGE!!.

 

how easy was it to get yours to work as i want to try this with my sony laptop. and you say you have 4gb ram does it work with all 4gb or did you have to use 2gb

 

Okay guys, i dont have any time to read through 105 pages, i have windows 7 64 bit installed just bought it, how can i make my own diy graphic card. What do i need, are there any like kits for this besides vidock which is too much money. And would it be compatiable with my dell studio 1537?
Thanks guys
__________________

 

I want to try it through my expresscard slot.

 

>.> instead of reading 105 pages you should just read page #1.

 

Can someone help me out? I am try to do the DIY VIDCOK for my friend's inspiron 1525. I connected everything, the power supply, the PE4L-EC2C, the 5770, and to the laptop. When i suspended and resume, it only shows a code 28 that it cannot identify the driver. he has windows 7 64 bit. The diy vidock has all the green light on...

 

It is strange that my graphic card won't even start. Is it possible that the PE4L is faulty?

 

Full instructions of adding HD5xxx Win7 WDM 1.1 driver

Use Device Manager to identify your HD5xxx's DID like shown for the HD4670 above. Add a HD5000 entry to \windows\inf\atiilhag.inf. Do this by replace the YYYY with your DID. HD4670 example shown. ATI's VID will always be 1002. \windows\inf\atiilhag.inf Code: "ATI Radeon HD 4670 (Microsoft Corporation WDDM 1.1)" = ati2mtag_R7X, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9490 "ATI Radeon HD 5000 (Microsoft Corporation WDDM 1.1)" = ati2mtag_R7X, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_YYYY Delete \windows\inf\atiilhag.PNF if it exists Uninstall the existing ATI device in Device Manager Remove ATI's Catalyst 9.xx [it's a Vista/Win7 WDM 1.0 driver ] Restart, allow Win7 to automatically find the HD5xxxx . Report in this thread if have any success with > 2.5GB of RAM using the WDM 1.1 driver + Win7 64-bit.

 

did you solder TP1 on PE4L? is the card's fan spinning at full power? it will slow down to 35% and will be quiet if it's detected/it senses that it's connected to expressport

 

Thank you nando and key. It finally works. Hurahh! I can use it with full 4GB of RAM with no problem.

 

Nando, how do you find this VID and DID that your talking about? I dont have experience modding infs, so I have no idea what that means...

 

Updated the instructions to add Win7 WDM 1.1 HD5xxx driver support, showing how to find VID/DID.

 

So it is confirmed that the hd 4670 can run on the notebook powersupply without ANY PSU.

Can someone post a video of how they connected and set it up and also testing it on a game, it would be very helpful. Thanks

EDIT: btw do we have to solder anything?
Mike

 

I found an issue regarding the PE4L. In order for it to work, it needs to connect the molex connector to the power supply. However the 5770 that my friend ordered has a big cooling fan that will block the molex connector. So my friend exchange his 5770 to a 4850 with me that has a smaller fan. My friends thinks that the molex connector will some how break apart. So he had to do it. Now he is enjoying his 21.5'' monitor to play games

 

I tryed the steps you posted to mod the inf and it did the same thing that it did before with 4 gigs (error 12 on onboard nvidea card, ati card non functional)... So maybe its a dell bios issue, no idea... Maybe others will have better luck like hanming...

 

Weird, even the compatibility list in vidock said that my friend's inspiron 1525 will work fine using 4GB of RAM. Now i encountered a problem. Do i need to use ATI mobility driver for the diyvidock or the normal desktop driver? I installed the desktop driver for my friend which is ATI 9.11. However, it shows that most of the information in the information center is unknown even the clock speed is unknown. Is this normal?

 

Ok.. i finally convinced my friend to do the 3dmark06 for me. He has a T5850 2.16ghz cpu and the 4850 asus graphic card. The total score he got was 7281. SM 2.0 3378. SM3.0 3134 CPU 1824. Looks like his cpu bottleneck the gpu but it is much better than the intel one.

 

Wondering if there has been progress on these:
-4GB of RAM on any system with PE4H
-Powering PE4H on notebook LCD w/ drivers for AMD chipset
-If there is a way to get a x2 connection (or x1 2.0) on the new AMD chipset
-Can anyone post results on Unreal Engine (UT3, Bioshock, Assassins Creed), COD4/6, Fallout 3, or similar. (Don't care for Crysis, DMC4, RES5)

I have an 8800GT and may buy a new card but I would like to know that people are getting good performance on their cards with the games above, and I might get a tablet for school (HP) and if I could, use more than 2GB RAM, power LCD with PE4H, at x2 (or x1 2.0) , and get good performance on sed games, then I'm sold. It seems like a few people have the ability to test most of my questions (my PE4H is at home, finals till 12/17 and I don't have new AMD chipset on my laptop)
thanks guy!

 

UT3 + this http://downloads.guru3d.com/Unreal-Tournament-3-Benchmark-Tool-download-1816.html

texture detail 5, level detail 5,1920x1080, 16 AF set in CCC, AA set in CCC too

vCTF-suspense flyby, 90 sec
8x SS AA - 22.54 avg fps - 0.61% over 30 FPS
4x SS AA - 31.58 avg fps - 63.99% over 30 FPS
2x SS AA - 45.59 avg fps - 92.09% over 30 FPS - now that's weird, it's almost the same as 0xAA
8x MS AA - 39.18 avg fps - 87.95% over 30 FPS
0xAA - 45.97 avg fps - 93.51% over 30 FPS

vCTF-suspense bots, 90 sec
32 bots, 8x MS AA - 24.54 avg fps - 36.59% over 30 FPS
16 bots, 0xAA - 40.63 avg fps - 77.64% over 30 FPS

 

I have a Gateway MD2614u (RS780m chipset), Windows 7 x64. My setup is a PE4L + HD 3870. Everything powers on and both LEDs light up on the PE4L. The fan on the HD 3870 seems to randomly run either fast or slow when I power on the PSU.

The issue is Win7 is not detecting anything. Everest says I have PCI-E 2.0 x1 port #1, and port #3 in use by the Ethernet and Wifi adapters, but port #247 (???) empty. I am able to get USB drive working when I have that plugged into the PE4L.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Replied with troubleshooting suggestions here.

 

Complete failure

Here's the setup I tried -

HP Pavilion dv6654eg laptop
AMD 64x2 CPU
2 gigs RAM
Nvidia Geforce 8400mGS (built in)
Broadcom wireless adapter in miniPCIe slot (internal)
Expresscard slot
AOC 22" external screen

PE4H + EC2C (expresscard adapter)
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 PCIe 16x v2 896megs DDR3
440watt power supply


I tried it under 3 different OSs -

Windows Vista - Card is detected, but it hates having the card inserted at boot time. If you do, then it keeps doing the "badump badump" sounds, as if a device is being inserted/removed rapidly. Once I figured that out, I rebooted without the Expresscard plugged in and it asked for the videocard driver. I installed the driver, and it now recognises the GTX260. Sadly the external screen still stays black and in power-off mode. The USB thumb drive IS detected, and I believe it's accessible.

Windows 7 - Detected the card as a standard VGA adapter but said it was disabled.

EDIT - I tried to install the Nvidia driver but it aborted on an error saying that the device could not be started. Win7 then hung on shutdown and after 10 minutes of waiting I powered off. This completely hosed Win7.

openSUSE 11.2 (Linux) - The card is detected through lspci, but I could NOT get it to work by adding a second device/screen/display section in xorg.conf. I'm using nvidia driver version 190.42.

Code:

lspci | grep VGA                                                   
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G86 [GeForce 8400M GS] (rev a1) 
09:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT200 [GeForce GTX 260] (rev a1)

In all cases both lights on the PE4H light up (the front one comes on to indicate that the PE4H has power, the second rearmost light comes on when the video card is powered on by the power supply).

The fans on the card start up, and when the Expresscard is plugged in, spin up to full balst (really annoying!!).

I can also access a USB thumb drive when I plug it into the USB slot on the PE4H, so I guess at least the Expresscard and PE4H adapter are working.

The video card is brand new, and I do NOT have a desktop system to try it out in, so it could be DOA, I have no idea.

If anyone has any suggestions, I am all ears.

EDIT - I decided to give Windows XP a try (seeing as Win7 was destroyed), it detected the card and allowed me to install the driver. All the time the internal screen was flashing on and off. After some fiddling, I managed to see the message in device manager "This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use, Code 12". I believe this refers to the memory hole. My next step is to try to understand all the stuff about configuring PCI resources from a boot image.