DIY eGPU experiences

I enjoyed reading your commentary on real-life gaming performance of a HD5750 versus a GTX460/GTX470. +rep.

Yes.. port1 must be active for all the other ports to work. Your mPCIe ports are being selectively enabled by the bios when it detects something in them. The expresscard slot is different. It must be enabled by the bios to have it's hotplug type functionality so check in the bios to ensure it hasn't got an option to disable it.

In your case mPCIe=port2, mPCIe=port4, LAN=port6. Your system has a maximum of 6 pci-e ports leaving then only 1, 3 or 5 to be the expresscard slot. If it is 1 or 3 then you can do x2.

If there is no option to disable the expresscard slot in the bios then I believe your system's expresscard slot is port1. Plugging something in would give 100% validation as ithildin recommends.

 

I have been thinking about this solution for a while now but only really started investigating this today.

Current equippement

HD4850 512mb < in my current desktop
550 watt psu (antec, very decent) < in my current desktop
2x 19" lcd < again, desktop

Laptop == Acer 6930g

PM45 + ICH9M
9600M GS
4gb ddr2 ram
expansion slots

port 1 => Expressslot
port 2 => Internal slot (available)
Port 4 => Intel wifi adapter


If i understand all the information correct i should be able to do a x1E connection with the expressslot and even a x2 connection if i install a mpcie-adapter inside my laptop.

But the question remains, how will this perform and will my laptop still be portable?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...e-out-how-make-diy-vidock-16.html#post5122549 Suggests i'd lose only 15-20% performance so that seems alright, are there any more recent results with a 4850/4870?

And mobility? If everything is working will i be able to unplug the expresscard/mini hdmi cable, but my laptop in my backpack and use it at school without any trouble? Or will i have problems?

I could get a 8800GTS 320 mb if it would work better, i've had troubles with ati vs nvidia drivers before. Or even another card which would suffer less from the reduced bandwith but my budget isn't endless

 

I have a laptop Hase q540s mPCIE connector and as I plugged the adapter PE4L-PM3N and put the graphics card is that everything worked?

 

Hi all,
After solving my previous driver incompatibility issues with the Intel drivers, my X201+PE4L+HD5670 setup worked great again, until today, when I am seeing a strange symptom. After I plug in my card, the 5670's fan starts to spin very loudly (much higher than I've ever seen it go even while gaming), and Windows doesn't detect the video card. I have tried rebooting and safe mode, the card does the same thing every time. What can I do to pinpoint the issue?

 

Im actually watching all this and thinking, why i cant do the x1E setup..

Port #1 => Intel/Pro Wireless
Port #2 => Empty
Port #6 => Realtek Gigabit Ethnernet

Or i still cant do it?
And if i get the mPCI adapter for PE4L, and plug out the Pro/Wireless card, i can do it right?

 

here is the thing
I tried for three days and succeeded two times, which is really sad
The time that worked for me was when I turned off the internal graphics and installed the optimus driver and plugged the gtx460
Another time was when the computer suddenly did a driver update for gtx460, I rebooted and plugged the gtx460
After that it's just all failures

 

If anyone needs PE4H-EC2C PCIe passive adapter ver1.0, let me know; I've put mine with a 350 W PSU on eBay.

PE4H-EC2C PCIe passive adapter ver1.0 - eBay (item 110578671883 end time Aug-29-10 19:20:12 PDT)

 

You are selling a PE4H 2.0a. I can tell since it has 4 mini HDMI connectors and 2 fuses. It's the same kit hwtools and HIT are selling for US$85 PLUS adding a basic 350W PSU. Looks like it's this 12V/13A PSU which is fine to drive a HD57xx. A GTX460 uses about 150W under load so that PSU is a bit touch-and go there. It could not reliably drive the more power hungry GTX465/470. Perhaps offloading to make way for a more compact 12V/80W PE4L setup?

Yes, as previously explained here.

I experiences the same frustration with a faulty mini HDMI cable. Worth trying another.

Yes. x1E can be done which is useful for HD4xxx/HD5xxx cards. Not necessary for Fermi GTX4xx cards.

Confirm port2 is a mPCie slot by swapping over the wifi card. If so, then could do a port1+port2 x2 link.

Portable? Yes. Doing a x2 link would just require you to plugging one mini HDMI cable into the PM3N and another in your EC2C. Access to the PM3N would be via a plastic door that covers it. If vendor provided no door then consider making a cutout in the bottom plastic cover with a velco detachable cover to protect your systems internals when undocked and on-the-go.

 

May I ask why you are selling?

 

I'm not trading it for some nicer setup. The reason is, currently, I need money
But I hope I could make a nicer setup sooner or later.

 

I'm certain port2 is will allow a PM3N and it seems very possible to diy some kind of hdmi connector to the bottom of my laptop.

Only thing remains, 9600M + HD4850? Will i be okay driverwise, or should i get a Nvidia card?

 

Hello to everyone

this topic allow me to understand cuple of things

one of them it is possible to connect a powerful video card
to a latop .


so after i explore here i decided to give it a try .

this is my laptop model Toshiba Qosmio X505-Q890
My GPU inside is 1GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® 360M


so.. if i understand correct i need to buy

1 - PE4H-EC2C PCIe passive adapter ver2.0a

2 - Power supply

3 - and the video card / i have already GTX470.

can it be possible? to get it to work

thanks

 

@nando4: ah, too bad, btw, i got a GTX460 afterall..

 

I have a laptop Hase q540s mPCIE connector and as I plugged the adapter PE4L-PM3N and put the graphics card is that everything worked?

 

This is for anyone who is having issues with "blackscreening" or freezing during graphical-intense or heavy load gameplay/stress testing.

I have the P34H 2.0, utilizing the GTX470. Since setitng up the card, I've had numerous issues with "blackscreening". Thanks to Nando, who's came up with a simple yet ingenious solution to this troubling issue. It's quite simple to perform and I've included a pic to display what the PE4H will look like after the soldering is completed. Apparently, there are two fuses located at the top of the circuitboard of the PE4H, which serve to control or limit the amount of power or bandwidth traveling thru the circuitboard. Once it reaches it's overload amount, apparently it will "cut out", thus ending with the infamous "black screen of death".

After doing numerous tests with FurMark, stress tests with moderate settings would not pass 2:30 mark, or as soon as the GPU core temp hit 64-65C, the black screen would immediately appear.

To remedy this issue, two small wires must be placed across the two black fuses on each silver pad. Keep in mind that the wires must go across the fuse, rather than up and down. Otherwise you may fry your system, a mistake I damn near made See picture below.



After soldering two wires, you'll end up with it looking something like this: (Notice arrows)




After soldering these wires, (took to local TV repair shop, nice guy did it for free...) I got home and hooked everything back up, then fired up FurMark Stability test, running at 1920x1200, Fullscreen, 0xAA. I let the test run for a full 17:32 before ending it. Unfortunately, I neglected to take a screen shot, which I wish I had. Temps peaked at 65C and flatlined there for the duration of the test.

Then I ran a few benchmarks with various settings, for 60000ms each. (standard testing time). They all ran perfectly, without error.

After I felt safe about proceeding with OCing, considering everything was running stable up till then. I set clocks at 720/1750. Again, every test ran performed flawlessly and at 1920x1200 with 32xAA Fullscreen FurMark bench which averaged 50-60 FPS. Relatively exceptional. With AA off, averaged almost 80-90 FPS, average.

Once again, after fuses bypassed GTX470 performed flawlessly.. But it still gets considerably hot, unless you crank of the fan speed. I use MSI Afterburner's user defined fan speed option to have my fan run on a pre-set scale, and it runs quite well. Then I don't need to leave it at 100% constantly, or if the temp doesn't require.

If anyone is interested in running this standardized stress & benchmark test on their DIY ViDock setup, it can be downloaded from here. There's also a PhysX Fluid tester, but I think Expresscard is too much of a bottleneck to achieve decent results. My tests, even OC'd, wouldnt exceed the Teens in FPS, even at 1024x768.

Again, thank Nando for his brilliance in solving this issue, as it was he who instructed me the entire time on performing this easy soldering task. I sincerely hope this post helps someone else out there experiencing these troubles.

 

@PanzerHauptmann, hm, how about PE4L? Will it have the same issues and how do you bypass them?

 

Great post. Thank you for taking the time to write the detail of the fuse bypass with the DIY ViDock community. It's been linked from the first post.

The fuse bypass is only needed on the PE4H when driving a GTX465+ and *maybe* a heavily overclocked GTX460. The simpler PE4L doesn't have the same fuse 'feature' so requires no bypass.

It will work. Though I'd get a GTX4xx for it's better real-life gaming performance.

Yes it can work, though questionable value as you don't have Intel HD graphics so can't get the Optimus drivers to work. Meaning then your 360M will perform better than the GTX470.

If you had Intel HD graphics so the Optimus-enhancements work then the GTX470 would benchmark higher in 3dmark06 and 3dmarkvantage than the 360M. See Optimus versus non-Optimus results here.

 

Yes it can work, though questionable value as you don't have Intel HD graphics so can't get the Optimus drivers to work. Meaning then your 360M will perform better than the GTX470.

If you had Intel HD graphics so the Optimus-enhancements work then the GTX470 would benchmark higher in 3dmark06 and 3dmarkvantage than the 360M. See Optimus versus non-Optimus results here.[/QUOTE]


but how can it be ? GTX470 ..VS M360 ? and the 360 will be powerful ?

its a terrible news for me , i already have the gtx 470 and i order today the PE4H-EC2C ver2.0a.

there is no way that i get extra ? performance /:

 

I'm getting a PE4H and a gtx 460 shipped to me.

I just had a couple more questions:

The card has 2 pcie power inputs on it. Does the PE4H board itself require additional power to it?

And what is the chance that I just plug this thing in and it works, either on a 1x or 2x?

 

Hey folks,

I've been using DIY VoDock for a while with xp32bit, 3GB and an external 5770 using XPS m1530.

I'm interested in doing a clean install of Win7 64bit and possibly adding 1GB (=4 total) a few weeks after the installation.

Is there a chance that I'll have problems using the DIY ViDock with W7 using 3gb or with 4gb?
Has anyone with a similar setup tried this before and can share his findings with me?

I did a search and spent time reading posts but there is just too much information in this thread (which I guess is a good thing in a way).

Thanks a bunch!

 

@lazyboy there should not be any problem if it worked with 3gb. I did have some problem when using 4gb but it was due to a problem with my internal card so i think you should be fine.

 

Hi,
I successfully managed to implement the DIY ViDock on a Dell 1320 with a sapphire 5750. thanks to the nando and everyone else who has shared on this forum.

I also tried replicating the same on an old laptop of mine. It has an 82801FBM (ICH6). i cannot get setpci/lspci to run on it (hence allocation fails and i keep getting code 12 error). Can someone please tell me if it's even possible to setup the DIY ViDock on ICH6 based laptops. Everest shows 2 empty pci 1.0 ports .. one for cardbus and other for expresscard

Thanks

PS: setpci says cannot find any working access method

 

As of 1.0e2 I've updated the lspci/setpci from 2.2.3 to 3.1.7. The 2.2.3 was compiled with Watcomm and the 3.1.7 was compiled with Delore's djgpp which might be your issue.

So I suggest replace the 3.1.7 \core\lspci and \core\setpci binaries on your USB stick or disk image with the 2.2.3 versions from pciutils_2.2.3_os2_dos.zip and report your results.

I don't see why a ICH6M system shouldn't work other than till now we've only tested or had confirmations on ICH7M or newer systems.

 

Alright, I'll give it a shot.
Thanks

 

I am getting a X210t and AgentYura can you post exactly what you bought? My plan is to buy a small micro ATX case with a inbuild 150W PSU and then buy whatever is necesary for my HD5770 card to work.

Is PE4L-EC2C all I need when I get the case with inbuild 150w PSU?

Also I can see that some updated versions of the docks are going into production in sep/2010 should I wait until these get in stock?

 

question, why is all the benchmarking done at 1280x800? I thought this was being done on external monitors do they even make monitors with that low of a resolution anymore? Been kicking around the idea of trying this out, but at that low of a resolution, seems like it would just be better to buy a decent 15 inch laptop for the cost some of these people are paying.

 

because of the cost of a diy vidock we can only afford old CRT monitors that only go up to 1280x800

 

Next month's release of NVidia GT4xx and GTS4xx will see lower prices & power requirements and more portability. Their 75W TDP part means we'll see a ~US$200-$230 kit. A lot of bang-per-buck if Optimus-enhancements activate on your system. ie:

US$65-delivered PE4L-EC2C
US$12-delivered 12V/72W 2.5mm adapter, 75W/80W adapters jump in price
US$120-$150 GT4xx (75W)

I started benchmarking at 1280x800 for RE5 and dmcv4 to show performance difference with my internal LCD and the trend just continued from there. I found GTX470's 1920x1080 benchmarks are quite similar to the lower resolution in for example FFXIV. 3dmark06/vantage are at standard 1280x1024 resolution so are comparable across the board.

 

Hi,

thank you for this thread it is great! but I am having a lot of BSOD in win7 issues with my card.

I am using GeForce 8800GTS with PE4H. I think that I managed to get the startup script working properly. When I first booted up, windows recognized the Video Controller and began downloading the driver for it to be used. It then recognized the card and installed the driver as NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS. However, after the installation I was asked to restart, and when I booted up through the DiY startup script windows tried to output to the monitor attached to the external video card which then failed and threw the BSOD.

I've been trying to go through the replies on this post to see if anyone has had similar problems but I was not able to find anyone who would fail at trying to output any video.

If it helps, I have lenovo R500

 

I tried yesterday with the 2.2.3 version tools and still got "Lspci cannot find any working access method". Everest reports 2 empty pci-e ports. Funny thing is, even though the 5750 shows up in device manager (with the error code 12), it does not show up in everest. Will post pics later in the day

 

Have you done a test to see if that's not just a warning message by doing one of the pci writes in the output pci.bat file and then doing a read back to see if the data has changed?

Code:

setpci -s x:x.x yy.b (initial read)
setpci -s x:x.x yy.b=aa (write)
setpci -s x:x.x yy.b (read again -> has it changed?)

If setpci is still having problems try using the 'pt PCI wconf' to do the PCI write instead. You'd just have to convert from the setpci command syntax to the 'pt PCI wconf' syntax. Do a 'help setpci' and 'help pt' if need more assistance or refer to \help\pt.txt and \help\setpci.txt from within Windows.

Code:

list of 'pt PCI' commands:
rconf [bus device function size register] (read config register)
wconf [bus device function size register data] (write config register)
dconf [bus device function size] [start stop] (dump config registers)
lconf [< filename] (load config registers - format same as dconf)

 

I have a laptop Hase q540s mPCIE connector and as I plugged the adapter PE4L-PM3N and put the graphics card is that everything worked?

 

?? Maybe... It's possible that everything will work straight away for a x1 link but it might need some tweaking to get it to work. There's no way of telling right now because we had no previous reports of a DIY Vidock working on your laptop model. You will be the first to try it.

 

Hope I soon hear from AgentYura really looking forward to see if he had any issues with his X201 :/ or if I should just buy the PE4L-EC2C kit, even though Iam going to use a HD5770 while he used a GTX460

 

So far all is well with the T410s that I am testing. I can't imagine there is a vast difference between the setup on this compared to the X201 where it would cause problems.

 

I am newbie and I am not so good with english,
I am planning to get a vaio Z12, and would like to know if i use a diy vidock + a 57XX video card to run video games, can it play with the internal LCD mon, also is the performance not so good as the original 360M since (There has been no success at Sony Z11 - NVIDIA Optimus) from what I read??
I am planning to play FF XIV...and I would need a Z12 series like notebook

 

You cant use the external video card to run the internal screen as there is no cable going from the back of your video card to the inbuild screen.

The other things Iam clueless about as I havent tried it yet.

 

@ djhkll

I am not very good with English either, but what I know it is that one can, since I it do not remember because there is achieved low FPS, which I know with my 310M can do optimus (according to the last thing that I read in nvidia), this way that her 360M should be able, which one is not on that core bases it 360M and if a sorrow costs the difference of performance

 

i have this laptop hp dv8 with this card nvidia 230m

i will be beter to use with this laptop and not the toshiba x505 it have 360m

today the PE4H-EC2C is ship to me in cuple days it will arive .

 

Can someone give me some suggestions for debugging my DIY Vidock? I purchased the mini-hdmi cable replacement but it didn't resolve my issue. Symptom: when I plug in my 5670 the fan begins to spin louder than normal and nothing is detected in device manager. It has worked fine before for at least a few weeks.

 

If the fan is spinning at 100% real loud there is no "connection" between the card and the laptop.
Did you try turning on the laptop with the card connected (it should get detected as BIOS boots and the fan slows down) or do you plug it in each time in windows?
run atiflash -i in dos and see if it detects the card.

 

I did try booting up with it connected, in which case it would normally error on me, but the fan didn't slow down and I booted into Windows without an issue (card not detected). Normally, though, yes I do just plug it in and I can change my display to be the external. What are the chances the issue is in a faulty PE4L or even my video card?

I haven't used ATIflash before, but I'll give it a try.

Edit: forgot to mention, it doesn't spin loudly when the Expresscard adapter isn't plugged into my laptop (it spins at a normal speed)

 

DIY ViDock on acer 5920 anyone? I am planning to set up the DIY ViDock on my wife's acer 5920 (C2D - T5450, 2GB DDR2, Intel GMA, expresscard, Vista). Would be nice to know if any one has already set up DIY ViDock. Especially if there are any issues related to Vista.

Thanks

 

Yay!
HP DV9690en, ViDock + GTX460 worked like a charm, plugged it in, did a restart, it installed the drivers, another restart, and it works like a char
Thank you nando, and everyone else, greatest thing i ever did to my laptop

 

Gidday

I have an Asus F8-Sg and wish to use the DYI ViDock with an HD 5770, my current video card being a 9300M G.

I know that I have a free ExpressCard slot, but just in case attached is an image showing my free PCI-E slots and memory allocations:





Knowing the above, do you think my laptop supports this modification?

Cheers Anton

 

@ANTALIFE yup you should be able to set up the vidock. By the way what port is your express card, If it is port 1 then you could possibly combine it with port 2 (if you remove the wireless card) to do a x2

 

Oh sweet, as for the express card port i'm not too sure. How would I check this?

 

best way is to plug something in it. By the way how many mini pcie slots do you have?. If you have two then try plugging your current wireless card into the other one to see which slot it takes up. That will eliminate one of the slots so you can guess which one is the express card slot if you do not have anything to test the express card slot with.

 

please help me .
nando4 ( thanks you for all the info )

today i receive the PE4H and the GTX470 , with real 650W PSU.

i connect everything , turn on the computer
Toshiba Qosmio X505, my win7 64bit recognize the gtx470 and setup the driver automatic .
i restart the computer , try to run game like Gta4

and my smile become bent /:

the game run slowly and not smooth like i want .

help my please what can i do ?...there is somthing ? to do
its so desperate.

thank you all .

 

Hi.

I can't really find an expresscard to use.

Can anyone figure out what my ports are from these?