DIY eGPU experiences

I'm hopelessly lost. I have a toshiba laptop with an onboard (igp) 1250x. I have expressport with pe4l and hd4350 winxp 64 and xp 32 ( same prob in both). code 12. this system has 2 gb ram exactly, and the vidock setup shows initally that 512 mb are already free. The problems are that A: the setup won't detect the 4350. B: any form of compact hangs the os on start up. I have read nearly all pages of this thread and most of this is extremely confusing. any help for a hopeless newb will be very much appreciated.

windows sees the card, by vidock setup won't.

What now?

 

Hi. I didm but the game didn`t started. Reasons unknown for me. I am doing further tests in other games. I hope only that game release was wrong.

Thanks

Legu

 

I hope they release a sweet laptop with EC2.0 and just onboard intel hd graphics...with a vidock it'll be like a gaming laptop for cheap.

Does anyone know why sometimes my power supply won't turn on? Like, maybe I wiggled loose the power plug then it won't turn off. Like I can hear quietly the capacitors releasing noise very quietly. I have to wait till it stops making that noise around 5 minutes then I can power it up again......explanation?

 

Hi,

I`m not sure, but did you try to save dump with r-w everything in win and load the dump in the Vidock 1.x setup?

After than it supposed to recognize your card. Otherwise i have no idea for that.

Legu

 

could you explain rw everything? I'm not familiar with that process.

 

Seached though the whole thread but it seems nobody is using a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 14/15 intel models. Its my next laptop so does anybody have any experiences with the ViDock in this model? About to commit to purchasing the PE4L

 

Nando
vgn-ns110e
t3200 dual core 2ghz
2gb ram
4500mhd
win 7 32bit

evga 460 gtx se 648mhz OC to 786mhz core and 1800mhz memory

3dmark 06 8111pts default settings

RE5 dx9 everything default except motion blur was left on
41.4 fps variable benchmark after all the scenes.

Is it just me or does the dx10 re5 benchmark get higher framerates?

 

Nando4, or anyone, Please Help! Thanks!

Did a little reading and found this from Nando to someone else.

I think too, it is now 2.0? Not 3.0?


EDIT: I've done a little research. My laptop has PCIe 2.0. I don't know what that really means, I'm still pretty new to all this stuff.

So, what do I do now? what's the best setup I can do?
I got the GTX460, but if I can benefit from something better, what should I get?

*Attached is a screenshot of the chipset with Everest.

 

You have PCIe 2.0, but not expresscard 2.0 that only comes on the new Intel cougar point chipset for Sandy Bridge CPU. You will be able to have a x1 1.0 or maybe x2 1.0.

 

What parts do I need to make a x2 connection?

All I have is:
# x16 PCIe board
# Mini HDMI (Type C) to Mini HDMI (Type C) 1ft cable
# External 5V/12V power supply cable
# ATX Power Supply Power-On Switch
# ExpressCard Adapter
# ATX Psu

 

I updated my previous post to include RE5 benchmarks.

Thanks Nando4 for referencing my post. You may add my RE5 benchmarks to the 'Performance Matrix' as well.

 

You have a G310M so yes, a GTX460 DIY ViDock will perform better. Your Series-5 chipset is pci-e 2.0 spec only for power management. It's link speed is still fonly 2.5GT/s. You'll need the Series-6 chipset (HM6x, QM6x) to get pci-e 2.0's 5GT/s link speed.

If you post the variable 1280x800 DX9 results with HDMI audio off then I can include it.

There's no reason why it shouldn't work. If it has a 4500MHD or Intel HD onboard graphics then recommend a x1.Opt NVidia Fermi GTS450/GTX460 solution for best performance.

 

Hey Nando,

Really appreciate all the help you've dedicated to everyone here!

My results:

13" Sony_VPC-Z13
i7-640M 2.80
8.0GB

Used Setup on Win7/64

GTX460 @1.Opt 15867
Stock 330M 5507


For anyone else who has gotten this working on a Z13, has anyone gotten both the viDock working with setup, and the original hybrid working when not docked?

I can't for the life of me get any combination of driver versions to leave my hybrid setup working when not in viDock. IGP + viDock is perfect, but then my 330M fails to load.

I fix the hybrid, and then the GTX460 loads correctly, but the IGP fails.



I was hoping to get the best of both worlds, but it seems I'm limited to IGP only on the go, and viDock at home. No 330M at all.

Thanks!

 

Which power supply should I use? The Corsair 430w, or 500w?

I have a GTX460 using the PE4H kit on my Sony i7.

 

430w is fine since you are only powering a single video card. Plenty of room for overclock too since its a single rail.

I have the 430w and I will say that when do something like a benchmark the PSU will make coil whine noise. It might not be noticable if u had this in a case but since our vidocks have our psu's outside. It's more noticable. Though, don't let that discourage you from getting a corsair psu. Just go with what is the cheapest. My lcd monitor coil whine overpowers it so its not an issue for me.

 

...any advantages of using the 500w over the 430?

 

Hello,

I have a problem, my system (vistax64) cant detect my graphic card (gigabite 460x). I cant see it in device manager, cannot install the nVidia drivers. My internal graphic card is intel 4500 mhd. I tried also vidock hot-plugging , but without success. Thanks for any help!

 

Double post, sorry

 

Hi Again Nando4. Sorry for the delay, I haven't had the time to perform any further testing during the last months.

So far, here is my situation :
- With 2GB of RAM, the system just works fine I don't need to use the DIY ViDock Setup 1.x program or the standby-plug-resume method.
- With 3GB of RAM, it's a nightmare. I get successful compaction through several methods with the DIY ViDock Setup 1.x program, but then either windows crashes when loading (if I leave the PE4H on) or it won't be able to use my external 460 GTX because of an error 12 or 39 (if I turn PE4H off after applying startup.bat then turn it back on with the standby-plug-resume method).

I am a bit confused with this, because I honestly don't really understand how memory compaction works. So I basically tried every combination that was possible, and didn't manage to find one that would allow the DIY ViDock to work with 3GB of RAM (which I need when working).

I have tried to force enable 36-bit allocation by creating the registry key that you indicated in the front page, but it didn't change anything.

I have tried to uninstall both video cards through the device manager, then reinstall them. Many times. No success

I am using driver 266.58 from nvidia - mobile version for the 8600M GT and desktop version for the 460 GTX.

Could you help me by providing instructions on what to do / try ? A step-by-step guide would be fantastic but I can take the time to do some research if you don't have the time. Please also tell me what to report, I can take screenshots or whatever you require. Or maybe some systems just CANNOT make the DIY ViDock to work with 3 GB of RAM ?

I will provide benchmarks of RE5 as soon as the 3rd gig of RAM works, to make a fair comparison before / after.

On another topic, have Sandy Bridge laptops (with expresscard 2.0) been released yet ?

Thanks in advance

 

Look at that and discuss...

Are we in front of a USB3.0 external graphic card solution??

EC03 (ExpressCard 2.0 to USB 3.0)

 

It uses USB3 pins only.

 

Just buy the cheaper one. With a vidock you are only powering a video card, not an entire computer. You are also limited to the bandwidth of expresscard x1 so that's why a 460gtx is recommended for best price/performance.

 

For anyone who has purchased from Harmonic Inversion Tech (HIT), how long did it take for them to send you the item?

I ordered the PE4H on monday Feb 7 with 3 day shipping, and my order status still says "Confirmed", and not shipped yet. Tried calling and all I get is the voice mail regardless of which option I choose.

 

Wowowow, so I can connect a 5870 to my laptop, and have almost the same performance?! My laptop has USB 3.0, so that might be handy!

 

Like said avlan, it only uses USB pins..so only USB expresscard, no PCIe.

 

Arghhh... I had my hopes up

But there is still a little bit of hope...

 

Hi all

I'd like to start my experimental experience with the PE4H kit and a GTX 580.
For that, I need an inexpensive and very silent PSU ATX with:

-one 8-pin connector to supply GTX 580
-one 6-pin connector to supply GTX 580
-one connector to supply PE4H

Do you know an ATX to recommend me?

Bye and thank you

 

I'm interested to see what kind of performance you will get with that card; Can your computer do x1 optimus or a X2 link?I am thinking about doing a DIY Vidock setup with (at least) a gtx560, but not many people here have used anything higher than a gtx 470, and few have even done that

 

Aargh, I thought "RE5 1280x800-variable" meant RE5 with the variable/setting 1280x800... And now I packed my ViDock setup & monitor away (for transport/moving), and it will take some time before I will have it up and running again. So, no result to include, then.

Thanks, nando4, I succesfully enabled dualIDA on both cores now. I get a 9% cpu performance increase according to wPrime (2 threads). That makes my 3DMark06 benchmarks outdated as well. Mhhh, I may try again when I have my ViDock running again...

 

I can do a X2 (I'll try to do), because I've express card and a mpcie free on my laptop.

Please some one that know that PSU ATX ?

 

Got it to work without using setup 1.x Luckily I stumbled upon Vidock's website and checked their compatability chart. Turns out my laptop was tested with vista. I had been using xp 64 and windows 7 64, neither of which worked. Loaded vista, found a unified driver from ati, restarted, got a bsod, restarted a second time, voila. Three days of frustration with a happy end.

 

What's the lowest psu recommended for video cards like the GTS250 & GTX460?

I have a bunch of 300-400w psu's. But if those are too low, I guess I'll have to get a bigger one.

 

Can anyone help with an answer?

 

Hi, new to this forums, but definitely interested in this.

I'm running a < 1 year old Thinkpad T510 with NVS 3100m discrete card. The chipset is an Intel QM57 running i7-620m. I have 4 GB RAM.

I believe I'd need to go with an Nvidia approach, but I'm not exactly sure what EC port this has (I think I can get a 2x going), and so I'm not really sure what to do in this regard. Can someone advise me?

 

Great guide you guys got here, truly amazing.

However, ive gone through it and read it but most of it is gibberish to me, so any help would be much appreciated.

Ive got an Envy 14 without an Express Card slot, however ive heard that theres a Mini PCIE inside for the Wi-Fi.

My question is, would this require me to open up the laptop and disable the Wi-Fi every time I wanted to use the DIY ViDock? Or is there some way to add an Express Card slot or a one time fix?

Also how exactly would I know which slots are empty, ive downloaded Everest but I havent been able to find it.

Thanks a lot in advance.

 

the solution for Code 43 for me is use the RW-Everything 1.4.7 and save the dump
Spoiler :
1. Boot Win7.
2. Download and install R-W Everything from RW - Read & Write
3. Standby system, attach NVidia card, resume system. Ensure the NVidia
card appears in Device Manager, even if it has errors against it. All
that matters is for the card to be on the PCI bus.
4. Run R-W Everything, choose Access-Command.
5. Type 'save c:\10de0e22.bin memory 0xe0600000 0x2000', creating a 8kb file
4kb will be the gpu and 4kb for the hdmi audio controller.
6. Copy c:\10de0e22.bin to your DIY ViDock Setup 1.x USB drive or disk image
\config directory.
7. Select the 'Load PCI dump' option to load that 'configured' dump.
8. Use 'NVidia-nvflash' to check your NVidia card is now 'configured'.
9. Proceed to perform PCI Compaction and test chainloading.


will start with Code 43 cause i think that is the most important issue and some people here is also receiving that error on their devices

the save dump on DiYSetup and the latest version of RW-Everything v1.4.8.5 is broken
now you must be thinking "why did you say that?"

i can say this with certainty cause i done almost all possible way and combinations i can think of and my fingers is not enough to count how many times i did this through trial and error

the solution for Code 43 for me is use the RW-Everything 1.4.7 and save the dump

 

As of Everest...
Motherboard-->South Bridge-->PCI Express Controller
You should see something like this...

 

I'm quite confused on how to make a x2 link, or if it's even possible with my laptop. Or what's the best link I can do? Can someone please take a look at my setup and tell me if and how to do it? And what extra parts I need besides what I already have to make the initial connects (floppy->molex, mini-hd)?

SONY VPCF113FX
Intel Core i7 720QM(1.60GHz)
16.4"
6GB Memory DDR3 1333
NVIDIA GeForce 310M 512mb
PE4H + Expresscard + GTX460 Fermi 1gb
Corsair GS 600w 48A/12v

THanks!

Edit:

I ran 3dmark and got the following on 720p benchmark test. Is this normal? Seems awefully low compared to other people.
What am I doing wrong?

*See attached screenshot.

 

I am also trying to figure this out for my Y460. What port is the expresscard slot usually, and what does it show up as? My first port says "Lenovo sd/mmc host controller" which I assume is the memory card reader.
Port 2 is my wifi card.
There is no listing for anything in Port 3 anywhere.
Port 4 is listed, but with nothing in it.
Port 5 is the past PCI-e port, and seems to have the ethernet card in it.

The thing is, I know for a fact that I have a free mpci-e slot in my computer other than the one that the wifi card is in; there is a completely unused slot right next to my hard drive. My computer also has an expresscard slot, so why is there only one port with nothing in it? Is the missing port 3 the expresscard slot, the free port, or neither?

 

Thanks for the answer Carage.

I checked the PCIE slots and I have 2. One is in use by the ethernet, and the other is for Wi-Fi.

Is it possible to disconnect the Ethernet and fit something in through there?

 

Hi everybody
I'm new in this forum and I'm looking for a modded inf to get the optimus driver work with my DIY Vidock for my GTX 460 SE (Intel HD graphics, chipset series 5, Win7 32 bit).
I tried the 258.96 with this 32 bit modded inf, but get the error that no driver was found.

Das anybody have already a modded inf for GTX 460SE to load Optimus driver?

Thanks!!

 

I have a evga 460 gtx se. Thing is when I first installed the nautis driver I had trouble like you getting it to work. I kept trying to reinstall etc.....eventually the install went through all the way and I got it to work.

 

Hey guys,

I started reading this forum a while ago and decided around new year that modular computing is my future. Hence I ordered the kit and started fiddling around with it.

I am using a Club3D Geforce 8800GT 512 right now but I also tested with an 6850 and an 8800 gts 320. But it's on the 8800gt that I got it working.

It took me a while until I got the setup running. In the beginning my major problem was error 12. On all cards. I had to manually copy the gldr and menu.lst file to c: and I had to find out that it really takes forever until setup finishes the scanning for the current hardware setup during startup.

Well some days ago I finally got into setup and started working. Some days later I found out I needed to allocate all my addresses in 32bit space as my Core Duo only supports 32bits. Then I got it working, at least with windows' standard nvidia drivers. As I installed the current 253 something drivers it still kept functioning but only because I didn't have to reboot. During the session all went fine but after reboot I get BSOD. Found out it might be because of the 'unconfigured' problem and tried to do a pci dump. Didn't work.

I am reading here right now that it's an issue of rw everything so my next step would be to try an older version.

But as of now, rest works great! I get several times the 3d performance of my integrated graphics.

Questions:
#1: Does anybody have a good address to get a proper casing from? at least for the video card, better for PSU and videocard in some kind of mini tower.

#2: How long can the HDMI cable be? Is there any limit? I'm thinking about maybe half a meter? Possible?

#3: Is there anybody else with experience on macbooks? I would like to make the grub4dos boot my first partition with OS x on it for example. Still couldn't find out, how to do that (maybe by using the usb stick setup?)

But anyway: Thanks a lot for this project! It's just great and I'm sure, this is where computing finally leads to. Combining mobility and power by a modular setup. Just great.

Greetings from Germany.

 

I've read many posts and most of the instructions on how to do this, yet I think I've still done something wrong. Is there a step-by-step install instructions anywhere? I got mine going, but it doesn't work everytime. I don't get error codes, but when I power it on then start my laptop, it kills/turns off my laptop right before windows starts to bootup. Is there a certain way to turn things on? I haven't gotten BSOD yet either.

If I do get it working, I don't want to turn off my laptop, because the setup will zap the laptop upon bootup and "no power" on laptop. Ran 3dmark, and got a rather low looking score. (I don't know what it's supposed to be at)

Vaio i7, 6gb ram, nVidia 310m 512mb
GTX460 + PE4H + Expresscard + Corsair GS600w

I mini-hdmi to hdmi out to my Sony LCD TV.
Also want to do x2 link, but can't make head or tails from it...

Any help & guidance is appreciated... thanks!

 

Seeing as I dont have an Express Card Slot in my Envy, how feasible is it to use this to get things working?
Amazon.com: StarTech USB to ExpressCard Adapter Ideal for Wireless Broadband Cards: Electronics

Its a USB 2.0 to Express Card adapter. Im not sure it would work, though...

 

No one knows the answer to my question? People have done x2 setups, how did they know which was the expresscard slot??

 

sorry,
usb to expresscard won't work.

The idea behind expresscard is that it connects directly to a pci-express x1 lane of the mainboards soutbridge.
that means it got 2,5Gbit per second of data rate. up- and downstream.
usb 2.0 only has 480mbit max.

but still you can try to open your laptop and check if there is a mPCIE slot available, e.g. your wifi card uses one of them. that would work, although you might have problems getting the cable out of the laptop case.

My recommendation:
get a new laptop with intel 6 series, intel HD + nvidia grafics and an expresscard slot. that would give you pcie 2.0 over your expresscard PLUS nvidia optimus if you use it with a nvidia gtx460 for example.

but forget usb 2.0 sorry

 

i would guess your expresscard slot is the only free pcie port. 4 in your case. when in doubt, plug something in, then you will see

i think that's all anybody can tell you about your laptop except you find someone who has your exact model.

so find someone who's got an expresscard device and put it in ...

 

No, it isn't the only port. If you had read my post, you would see that I in fact have an internal slot that physically has nothing plugged into it; it is intended for a mini pci-e SSD for lenovo's "rapid drive" system, which my computer doesn't have. Unfortunately I have no expresscard devices, nor does anyone I know, so I can't really plug anything into the slot.

 

To answer #2, half meter is definitely fine. I just got my 1 meter cable and it works no problems. It's mentioned somewhere in the original post but w/e heres the link to the 1 meter cable I got: DealExtreme: $5.61 Gold Plated 1080P HDMI Mini V1.3 M-M Connection Cable - Black (1.5M-Length)
less than $6 with shipping but expect to wait about 4-5 weeks, or at least thats how long mine took.