Let's figure out how to make a DIY eGPU (previously DIY ViDock)

XP should be fine. You do need external power, the miniPCIe slot can't power a GPU.

 

This is I was afraid of.. Considering all the costs (vga,pm3n+pe4l,psu, another wifi card) and all the hassle and discomfort this is no go for me. The price matches up with a game console.

Thank you for all the help and effort.

regards

 

you forgot you'll also need a monitor

 

Just wondering nobody here has attempted/got the x2 1.0 working? was it of no success or didnt meet the requirements?

Thought it would've been a very popular choice. My laptop i believe 'could' work in x2 1.0 but with the price and amount of troubleshooting (usually) i dont think i can make it.

Also planning to use a Dell PA12 charger if possible to run my card if i get the setup (it's rated either 65w or 90w - doesn't say on the charger). Is a 4670 the only suited card?

 

Any card theoretically should work, just make sure your power supply can power it.

x2 1.0 functionality depends on your chipset/laptop. Be warned though, the HWTools products have no guarantee whatsoever (try at your own risk, basically). I learned this the hard way. Got a faulty PE4H (everything was on ESD safe mat when working with and testing). HWTools return support is terrible.

That's not to say don't get one, just a word of advice.

 

Yeah. It would be nice to try but once you hit the requirements of using a mpcie port and getting a powerful card which won't be working to its max potential it may be worth getting a budget pc build.

Regarding those who want this solution for possible future graphic card failures what do you think would theoretically happen? As my own laptop is placed under the nvidia defective gpu tree.

I'm hoping it would still be usable once this happens and just bypasses the internal gpu. As the system itself still works and boots into the O/S you just can't see anything with the defected unit.

cheers

 

@nerdyfred i looked to see if i could use the 2x 1.0 but i only have 1 PCIe slot, which is taken up by my wifi and is mounted under my hard drive.
shame cos the performace increase would have been nice.

 

hey roosta.

True that. x1 is around 60% perf loss isn't it. and x2 is around 35%? it would be real nice. In actual fact i think mine would work x2. port 1 and 2 seem to fit nicely.

expressport and mpcie, furthermore it is just beneath laptop, so much easier access than urs.

However will hopefully be able to get a hold of a pe4l and test to see if it works on my system in the first place. Especially with a dying gpu my laptop might be rendered unusable.

 

if your gonna use 2x 1.0 i think you have to use the PE4H. no point in trebelling your costs just to test before buying the PE4H. id say go for the PE4H if you want to try 2x 1.0. im thinking of going from that too just so i get round the problem of what graphics cards will fit in the PE4L, aka ones that are enclosed in a box thing.

what cards you looking at? im looking at 4870, 4890 and 5770. im leaning towards the 5770cos apparently the drivers arent optimised for the 5770 yet, but once they are i guess performace would increase beyond the 4890. bit of a gamble, but the 4890 is only about 2-5fps above the 4890 in modern warfare 2, and the 4890 costs £30 more in the uk.

 

yeah i know what you mean. Just a bit low on money now. Plus might be able to get my hands on one from nando as i think he has a spare. So looking to see how it goes. Plus the thing is at first i thought it was fantastic idea. But it doesn't quite fit my needs.

If it was simply an external graphics card that the system would run from to go into our laptop screen then it would be different. But needing a monitor doesn't make it much different from a budget pc.
I don't often use my laptop in one place so might be getting another 'gameable' laptop in the future would be much more feasible.

the small size of the pe4L doesn't really bother me. i probably won't go much higher than a 4670/5670 performance card. especially losing up to 40% on x2

anyway thats enough of my negativity. don't anyone stop getting thes.

I dunno, how come y'all getting this setup instead of a budget pc?

 

fraps on my laptop with pcie 1x:

at 1920x1080 with fraps recording @30fps the on-screen framerate drops from 60fps to ~13-15 fps - i don't know if that's my cpu or not enough bandwidth

at 1280x800 the fps drops from 60 to 25, so you could play on your internal lcd with a software that would do the same thing as fraps, but instead of writing it to hdd it'll copy the video to laptop's videocard framebuffer

....now i don't know if fraps really recorded 30fps (it could've made duplicate frames), but both videos don't look choppy

 

Sorry to just jump into the conversation like this, but I was curious about the possibility of Hybrid Crossfire with certain integrated GPUs.

My current laptop comes with an integrated Radeon HD 3200. On a desktop motherboard, it would be capable of Hybrid Crossfire with another 3450 or 3470 card. Therefore, wouldn't it possible to do hybrid crossfire on a laptop using a DIY ViDock equipped with such a card?

The total performance would probably come close to, if not exceed, that of a single 4670 (especially with the reduction due to 1x bandwidth). The cost of the card would be significantly less, and a much weaker power supply could be used. Futhermore, most are also fanless, making the external setup easier.

Is there anyone out there who has tried this with a HD 3200 or similar integrated GPU?


(I personally don't own any of the boards. I have been following the various threads, but for various reasons cannot afford one of my own at the moment.)

 

does your 3200 have a crossfire connector on it?

 

Perhaps I missed this somewhere, but what are the dimensions for the DC-in plug on the PE4L?

 

Hi guys having some problems.

Ive got the PE4H and EC2C with a nvidia geforce 8800 gts and a 300w psu with a dell xps 1330 and samsung 28 inch monitor.

I Use the paperclip trick and I can hear the PSU working.
Everything is connected - the green light goes on the PE4H.

I used an adapter for the two 4 pin connectors from the PSU to get to the geforce card.

However there is no power to the geforce card. No fans moving.

Any suggestions? Please help.

Alexander

 

I also wanted to make a comment that Hwtool have been very supportive of an overcharge for import fees from fed ex. Hwtools accepted this payment invoice charged by fed ex, they accepted responsibility and offered 5 star customer support - recommended.

 

If there in no 12V power to drive the pci-e slot, your fans will not geforce fans will not spin. Have you connected the PSU's 12V via the 4-pin floppy molex connector on the PE4L/PE4H?

 

I've been following this thread for some time, and I just set up my system which is pretty much the same as nando's.

HP Pavilion dv2000 Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.20 GHz

Without DIY ViDock: 3DMark06 - 578
With DIY ViDock set up with Radeon HD5770: 3DMark06 - 7528

This is set up using the expresscard slot, but is there any way of setting up an x2 connection in a dv2000? I can see there's an open port using Everest, but where is it?

 

DV2000 has ports as shown here:

Expresscard slot=port1
wifi mPCIe slot=port4

If you remove the HDD cover, near the real-time-clock battery are pads for another mPCIe slot labelled MINI2 as discussed here. If connect that up, then based on the ports enabled it would be port3. So using port3+port4, setting port1 to be a x4 port, lane reversed, dumbed down to x2 would do the trick.

 

Question, how do i set it to <=2.5GB RAM? i cant figure out how to do this, i thought it was done using the USB boot disk (or is it?)

Thanks

 

>=2.5GB of RAM will work with XP drivers (even in Win7) if you disable the onboard graphics to allow the external graphics to use it's 256MB window instead. This is shown in the 2510P/DV2000 config scripts in the DIY ViDock Repository.

Modifying TOLUD value

Created a new script limitram.bat which will only work if you vendor hasn't locked down D_LCK.

 

There is still the matter of drivers to be resolved, best to use win 7 or xp since vista doesn't allow more than 1 video driver.

Thanks.

 

Any updates on getting the laptop to display to it's screen with the RS780M chipset? I finally received my money back from Newegg and ordered a Saphire 5770 Vapor-X from ewiz. I will have by the end of the week.

 

Hi All,

I've been reading these threads for awhile and I'm planning on giving it try in the not too distant future. I have a few question which I haven't been able to find answered in the forums (sorry if they have already been addressed.)

1. Has any one been able to get 4GB working using Windows 7 64-bit? I noticed someone got it with the 32-bit version. Is this something that depends on which version you are using?

2. Is there any risk of serious damage to the computer, particularly when adjusting things in the bios?

3. Does the boot disk only temporarily change the BIOS settings (so if I have to use <4GB with the build, my computer will default back to 4GB when it's not in use)?

4. Has any one got hot-swapping working?

Thanks a lot all.



My System:

Asus X83VB-X2
Core 2 Duo, T6400 @ 2 Ghz
4 GB Ram
Nvidia 9300M GS
Windows 7 64-bit

 

Thanks for the tip nando, unfortunitely this didnt work for me (limitram). Ive looked through the 2 threads quite a bit although some things i havnt understood. Im guessing you meant less than 2.5gb there otherwise that would be really useful.

It seems im getting the exact same results as Scott1620 where its my onboard card thats getting error 12 instead of my external. Then ofcourse all the fancy win7 visuals are gone, reduced resolution and most importantly (or the only important thing here) the ability to detect other displays. Ive looked for ways to set the primary video adapter through the BIOS but in all honesty its beyond my knowledge.

Ill experiment with drivers for now to see what happens such as the XP drivers. That or physically removing RAM. Im not sure how to message Scott1620 otherwise id ask him what he did for this setup. Its just a pain that the onboard card is required to be working properly to detect the external card.. meh.

 

Hi there.

Managed to get the power to my GPU and the fans are spinning.

I connect it to the laptop and.. nothing happens. Is there some software I need? Why is windows 7 not picking it up through the express card slot?

Alex

 

I plugged a mouse into the EC2C adapters USB port and the laptop picks this up. However the 8800 gts remains no where to be picked up. I have disabled the 8800 onboard card on the laptop.

There is no reason for me to suspect the 8800 gts card is damaged. I can check it in another computer if need be.

What are the other areas I should look at?

 

I hear you. Before trying the XP drivers, try to switch XPModel on.. this didn't work for me, but you have different video cards so maybe??

Code:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers]
"UseXPModel"=dword:00000001

The 8800GTS should be picked up by a device manager scan. If not, then it's a hardware/connectivity issue. Yes.. USB pins of the expresscard may work, but the expresscard's pci-e pins may not. We've had a few ppl report their expresscards are faulty. If using a PE4L, may need to short TP1 too. Worth testing the gear on another notebook/desktop if at hand.

 

WOOT! Recieved 5770 and did a quick check to make sure everything is working. Here is Everest confirming PCI Express 2.0 x1!

I also have full 4GB of RAM! No special setup needed. This is to an external monitor. I will be working on setting up the Crossdisplay to get the display on the laptop itself. From what I am gathering this should just take an edit of an .inf file and deleting the current .pnf to get to work? Do I need the DID of the chipset or Video Card?

I will be posting benchmarks soon!

OH, and OS is W7 64-bit. I also have all usb ports working fine. I ran Dragon Age with all options on highest settings. Worked fine, no problems, FPS a little below what I like but very playable.

 

wow nice, i dont think im too far behind you (hopefully) managed to resolve a lot of problems with hotplugging the card which gave me a permanent bsod (had to reinstall windows).. forgot to install the manufacturer chipset driver or whatever DOH!

anyway, i hotplugged and i dont have any memory/resource issues showing up on both cards with 4gb ram, however i did try to extend the monitor and got another bsod, error message was different and windows did not consume itself.

damn ive been waiting so long to play dragonage and with Mass Effect 2 in the horizon this little project should pay off if all goes well.

 

Nvidia 40nm-based Fermi release - March 2010

Guru3d got to do some hands on with a fermi-based Nvidia GF100 here. Eg: Far Cry 2@1920x1200 has GTX285/GF100 FPS of 50/84. Ie: GF100 is 68% faster!! Fermi also adds DX11 support. Impressive.

So we'll soon see some Nvidia performance offerings to challenge the ATI HD5xxx series.

 

Hey guys, first of all apologies for the cries for help to get this working.

progress from my a few posts ago, i have gotten rid of error 12 for both cards with 4GB RAM. I can hotplug the card now by hibernating/suspending the system, plug then resume without any major problems. The laptop screen flashes somewhat and the new hardware sound bleeps a few times (first with the good sound, then a few disconnection sounds). My desktop background wallpaper then turns black. both devices then appear in device manager and Everest as shown in the first picture.

Then when i try to extend the display through the screen resolution window, i try either extend displays or display only on 2. The laptop screen then flashes off and on. the 2nd image is from my laptop screen although it should be from my monitor. There is no output on my monitor however.

Upon clicking keep changes, the screen resolution options revert back to display 1 active where as display 2 is not in use.

Could symptoms like these be the cause of driver issues? the nVidia card is wddm 1.1 although im not sure about the Radeon HD 5000 series. I read that the catalyst has 1.1 support for HD 4000,3000,2000 series cards although no mention of 5000 (cant check it in dxdiag). I know you said (nando) to add support in atiilhag.inf for this card which i will try again failing this. I did read somewhere that 1.0 and 1.1 drivers dont cooperate.

Any help on what the issue could be here, if >2.5gb could still be causing the problem or driver issues or whatever, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks

 

Vista/Win7 ATI driver

I found the Vista/Win7 ATI Catalyst driver was a WDM 1.0 driver and did not work at all with my X3100+HD4670 setup in Win7. So instead I used the HD46xx driver that comes with Win7, found automatically upon installation. Does Windows Update find a driver for your HD5770? If not, try applying this workaround.

Same point applies about your Nvidia driver - ensure it's WDM 1.1. When I have the HD4xxx driver installed it clearly says WDM1.1 in Device Manager against the device. Would also suggest remove RAM and do initial testing with <=2.5GB. Removes an extra variable in the equation.

 

hey, i managed to get it working with 2gb like you said. works like a charm, although ill still try for 4gb at a later date, and most likely x2.

thanks

 

OK, I am currently suffering from premature WOOTage. So, I have no problems when booting with the unit plugged in, but this only works to external monitor. If I try to hotplug, I get the infamous Code 12.

Luckily, I actually dual-boot Linux Mint and W7 Ult. 64, so implementing the pcie scripts shouldn't be a problem (yay GRUB2!). My only issue is what exactly do I need to put in. I have looked at Nando's explanation of the MCFG thing and it totally confused me (granted it was 3 AM and I was wicked tired). So, any help with that would be greatly appreciated.

I am currently working on a traceback on the Northbridge Filter Driver and USB Filter Driver to find out which one actually controls the XGP indentification. The reason for this is because whatever identifies the XGP capability is NOT in the atiilhag INF.

Much Mahalo in advance, and lets keep plugging along people!

 

Great. Was the solution to just removing RAM or did you need to massage in WDM 1.1 MS driver support for your HD5770? I'm wondering too if the bios is not being frugal with it's allocation of resources - whether the PCI resources [above TOLUD] could be manually re-allocated prior to OS boot to provide 2x256MB windows for both cards to work with > 2.5GB?

Benchmarks please. Especially if Everest is reporting x1 2.0.

The behaviour your noting indicates that the bios does an extra step in allocating bridge resources when it detects your HD5770 connected on bootup. When you hotplug, those resources had not been pre-allocated by bios since the HD5770 wasn't detected, therefore the error 12.

So idea is to force that allocation regardless of whether the HD5770 is detected on bootup or not to allow hotplug on demand in Win7. Two ways could do this, both requiring the DIY ViDOck USB Bootdisk from the DIY ViDock Repository.

1. setup PCI bridge parameters and test. I would expect the requirement to be like shown below but with the Intel Port1 is 0/1C/00 replaced by your AMD chipset's port1 PCI device. Once confirmed working, convert to grub2.cfg mem writes. grub2 developers have a recent patch to do 'setpci' command writes instead, making it easier.

Code:

:: Intel ICHxM port1=0/1C/00
:: 0/1C/00 - Bridge 4KB I/O Window
setpci -s 00:1c.01 1c.w=2020        
:: 0/1c/00 - Bridge 256MB Memory Window
setpci -s 00:1c.00 24.l=CFF1C001

2. compare PCI Config when HD5770 is bios detected and when not. Ie boot the DIY VIDock USB Bootdisk, run 'pcitool /DB:HP' to save a PCI Config binary dump, then download PCIScope Trial, load the two dump files and use it's compare feature to quickly identify what the differences are in PCI Config.

In any case, you are the pioneer here for the RS780M chipset

 

I have already done some quick Benchmarks and it fits exactly where you put it in the chart...which disappoints me greatly (8848/46.5). I think that once I get the XGP figured out it will work, I also have done ZERO game tweaking for W7.

FYI hotplug works fine with 2GB of RAM, as stated I just need to figure out the XGP thing.

 

Those benchmark results would indicate your HD5770 is running x1 1.0, regardless of what Everest is telling us. At x16 2.0, a HD5770 gets 3dmark06=16509. x2 1.0 is about 80% of that, so would get 13k-14k. 8848/46.5 is quite a respectable result

If you can get the AMD filter driver to display using the internal LCD, it would make the AMD chipset quite desirable for DIY ViDock purposes.

 

An FYI for 5770 Vapor-X owners. Run gpu-z to make sure your are getting all 800 shaders. Mine and many others shipped with only 720 turned on. There is a firmware update on Sapphire's site that turns the other 80 back on. Also make sure you DL the instructions, which are right above the firmware itself.

 

This may have been mentioned earlier in this thread; the doubled data rate usually associated with PCIe 2.0 ("Gen2 speed", 5 GT/s) is actually an optional feature. The motherboard chipset may very well implement PCIe 2.0 with only Gen1 speed (2.5 GT/s) in order to save power. You would still have a PCIe 2.0 link to the graphics card, as indicated by Everest, but running at Gen1 speed.

 

Ok, I booted to the stick with and without the 5770, and did a dump and then used pciscope for a compare, now please interpret this tool if possible, or least point out which number I need to pay attention to.





Any help is appreciated.

 

The main point here is identifying the bridge hosting your HD5770, which you'd need to manually allocate resources to. I am not familiar with AMD chipsets so don't know what PCI device to look at. You'd need to do own investigation there.

If ALL else fails, it is possible to use 'pt' to save the *whole* PCI configurations space, to a ramdisk, compress it to file. reboot without HD5770 attached, decompress the file to ramdisk and load it, prior to chainloading the OS. That's how I originally got around the 2510P whitelisting.. I saved the non-whitelisted PCI Config space, booted without wifi card installed, loaded the Config space, chainloaded using grub.

Max_Headroom also raised a good point about your x2 1.0 connection. There is the possibility that there could be a bit that requires flipping to run it at full speed?

NOTE: 31/1/2010: Thread has had 100,000 hits. Great work Moral_Hazard!! I'd give you a rep if I hadn't already.

 

Yea i just removed 2GB ram.
Ok here we go, starting with 4GB. I tried the wdm 1.1 workaround although the 5770 was detected as a standard VGA adapter, unfortunitely this didnt work.

I then installed the ATi drivers for win7/vista 64 without the ccc. Then when i try hotplugging (think i said this before) both have no problems.. apparantly (no errors in device manager, both have resources or so it says) although i cant switch/extend screens; the option is there but it doesnt work.

When i try booting up with the external card plugged in it says it is OK but the onboard has error 12.

After removing 2GB it works either by booting up or suspend/resume. I do get a few glitches however on the external card saying it stopped working but has recovered. Ive recently switched to display only on 2/external screen but i dont know if this will help with that. i think this might be a problem with the difference in the size of the expressport to the card, sometimes it feels and looks like it its not tottaly in properly :/.

Im just confused as to why with 4GB i see both as working properly although i cant switch? Doesnt that mean they both should have a 256mb memory window? What you were saying about the TOLUD values, i will try to understand that a bit better but may need some help.

 

Aidanvii,

Did you have to run the script to get it to work? I have a dell 1555 and every time I try to start from hibernation I get the boot screen on the external monitor, it goes through the BIOS start and then just stops working. Neither the LCD monitor or the External then work. I'm also running 64 bit Win 7 with 2 gigs of RAM.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

 

i dont have to run any scripts no, i can have the external monitor plugged in prior to boot and works the same, have you tried that?

Also have you downloaded your chipset drivers from the Dell site? mine did not work before this. The drivers your using affect it (captain obvious), if either the onboard or external are using the "standard VGA adapter" driver supplied with Windows; well, mines doesnt work. Also if you do manage to get it working, i seem to have less trouble with the nvidia control panel and ccc uninstalled, i just got my individual onboard card driver from the Dell website too; rather than the huge notebook release from nvidia.

Im getting a bit ahead of myself here but are you using an ATI with Nvidia?

im starting to regret that decision, i get random crashes and i fear it could be playing a part in it. If anyone else uses ATi and Nvidia and has problems, Id like to hear back, i could be wrong but im a bit suspicious with the behaviour sometimes. With the notebook release Nvidia drivers and control panel plus the ccc i got much more frequent crashes, with the base drivers it happens much less. Usually the external monitor freezes, the sound jumps for a bit, screen goes a random colour then comes back on again. hmmmm

 

Could try the following incrementally:

- underclock the HD5770 using ATI Catalyst to see if it's more stable
- disable the HDMI sound on the HD5770 in case it's somehow responsible
- the MS HD4xxxx WDM 1.1 driver as described here
- another 12V PSU. A cheap 12V PSU may not provide a clean 12V signal

If no joy, could RMA the card for a HD5830 to be released in a week or two, or a Fermi 40nm based Nvidia card in a month. Fermi offering some monster performance but at what cost?

 

Getting > 2.5GB to work in Win7 by manual reallocation of PCI resources

Moved comment to the experiences thread.

 

totally off the current chatter of things, has anyone tried connecting the motherboard "power on" pins (the pins you use on the paper clip switch trick) to the 5v power of the USB on the PE4L/PE4H?
this would auto power on the card if im right. plus it might be more stable way of doing it since the laptop would only send power to the device when its ready to accept it.

worth a shot maybe?

 

A clever idea, unfortunately I don't think it will work. The PS_ON line on the ATX power connector is active low, which means that the power supply goes on when PS_ON is connected to ground (low) and off when that line is connected to power (high). This is why you connect it to one of the black wires with the paperclip trick; the black wires are ground wires.

 

how does that work on a normal motherboard though? surely theres an "on" signal from teh motherboard?