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I am starting my egpu build and thus far have ordered a Corsair CX500W psu. The graphics card will probably end up being a 560ti or 570. My laptop is an X220T with i7-2620m and 8GB ram.
My main concern is which expresscard interface to order. If i understand correctly the PE4L 2.1b supports expresscard 2.0 (as does my laptop) and the PE4H 2.4a does not. This would make the PE4L the obvious choice because of the faster transfer rate, but it only has a 4x card slot and the card is x16.
Does the fact that only 1/4 of the graphics card is connected to the board not affect performance enough to make dropping from expresscard 2.0 to 1.0 with the PE4H a better choice?
P.S. sorry if this has been answered before. I'm new here.
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Ok. I thought I read somewhere that since the bandwidth between the card and pe4l is restricted that in-game load times took a lot longer.
One more thing. Is there any kind of performance ceiling that makes buying a higher end card like a 570 a waste? I read through the scaling figures and I understood that you can get 60-80% of the cards potential. But does that have a limit so that a $500 card will only perform like a $300 card because of the x1 expresscard link? The 560ti seems to be the most popular, but I want Skyrim to look its best.
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Indeed, there can be an in-game loading time issue, like for rage if you select detailed texture, the game sucks.
You will get 60-85% (even nearly 100% like on unigine, but that's just a bench.) with a high end card too.
If you want skyrim to look at its best, I can help you since I play skyrim most of the time I play and that I have about 50 mods loaded
Well well well, forget the GTX 560 Ti, you will need much more vram, As you want it to look best, you will probably replace most of the textures, with 2K or 4K textures, but it's not vram friendly.
For example my GTX 480 is having its vram always fully loaded up to 1532Mb/1536Mb
The 570 is only having 1280Mb, but should perform well.
But really if you want a good fps range + greatest effects (very nice textures + ENB preset for more and better graphic effects) I can only advice you a GTX 580 or better.
My GTX 480 is pushed so high in overclocking that it's quite better than a standard GTX 580. Most of the time, outside, I get more than 40 fps but still lagging with texture load, which results in stuttering of 1 sec (sometimes 2...) but I never saw ugly textures before the HD ones replace them. This is either due to the limited bandwidth or limited by the amount of vram, I do not know exactly, but I remember desktop computer lagging similarly sometimes on skyrim.
But I never encountered any other game with such a problem. There might be though. (Crysis 2 with HD textures was fine even in X1.Opt setup, which is twice as less than X1.2Opt).
Overall it's still very playable even maxed out with HD textures mods.
Most of the time, you do not need such an amount of VRAM but skyrim is an exception.
I guess a GTX 670 2Gb will be very nice, or even a GTX 660 Ti 2Gb
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Well, nope, I didn't do anything to my CPU, actually most of games still doesn't much benefits of more than 2 cores and optimus compression seemed to be more efficient on fast clocked dual cores CPU than slower quad cores cpu.
doing a x1.2opt link, is now very easy.
Just plug the PE4L to the laptop, let windows install your GPU, then reboot and then install the latest nvidia desktop driver. No need to edit nvam.inf anymore.
The if you can run your eGPU on the internal screen it means, you have successfully managed to do a x1.2opt setup.
2.5 Gb of vram should be quite enough for a modded skyrim, though, it may not remove the few in-game stuttering that seemes to be caused by textures load. (well it only happened when using a lot of new custom and beautiful HD textures.)
PE4H vs PE4L
Discussion in 'e-GPU (External Graphics) Discussion' started by VT_Hokie, Aug 1, 2012.
