Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Is your sound through the laptop or display? That's odd the sound is bugging out; my sound runs off the monitor and is fine. Have you downloaded the newest 306 nvidia drivers? Those and the ones before (I think the 304) have been working fine for me and my setup. And did you have any error 12 issues?
-
UPDATED
This is a loose guide for installing Windows 8 64-bit in EFI mode (e.g. not via bootcamp), dual-booting with MacOSX on a 2012 Macbook Air. The purpose of this exercise is to set up a windows-based game rig on the mac using a dual-channel thunderbolt-based eGPU, that will co-exist nicely with OSX.
My experiences so far:
There are two roads to install Windows on a mac.
The road of BIOS and the road of EFI.
Older PC's only have BIOS. Windows on those PCs talks to hardware directly through the BIOS.
Macs come with EFI as the primary interface to the hardware. OSX talks to hardware directly through EFI.
Macs also come with a BIOS emulation, because through BIOS, Windows works flawlessly (with the exception of thunderbolt...). This is how bootcamp makes your windows work.
The newest Windows (Win7/64 and Win8/64 ONLY) can interface with hardware directly through EFI as well. Not all windows drivers are tested to work this way.
What happens with eGPU's - the new eGPU thunderbolt device tells EFI/BIOS it exists. On a BIOS-based PC, the BIOS would enumerate it and tell the OS the device is ready. Tomshardware review of the Sonnet suggests this works flawlessly on a thunderbolt-equipped desktop motherboard.
On an EFI-based mac, things are a bit different. The thunderbolt device tells the EFI it exists. The EFI enumerates it as a PCI device and tells the OS the device is ready. That's what happens in OSX (which runs in straight EFI mode), and what happens in Win7/x64 or Win8/x64 if you installed them in straight EFI mode.
If, however, you run windows in regular BIOS mode (if you installed Windows via bootcamp, this is the case), Apple's BIOS emulation does not pass the thunderbolt enumeration event back to windows, and your thunderbolt eGPU doesn't work.
There's a way to make it work using a rain dance, where you connect the eGPU to the mac but not the AUX power plug to the GPU, turn mac on, get past the boot loader, immediately turn the GPU power on before windows completes booting, jump on one foot holding your left ear, bend over backwards twice, scream in agony, and on occasion your thunderbolt device gets recognized and appears in device manager. Even then, twice it disappeared on me while installing nVidia drivers. I gave up on trying to get thunderbolt eGPUs work it through Apple's BIOS emulation.
I decided to install windows in EFI mode. I tried windows7/64bit/EFI, ran into a pile of weirdness installing and gave up. I'm using Win8/64/EFI instead.
Setting up a dual-boot EFI on a macbook is easy:
a. NO BOOTCAMP.
b. when in OSX, fire up terminal, sudo to root and shrink your EFI OSX partition:
# diskutil resizevolume /dev/disk0s2 250G
(in this case, I have a 512GB SSD, I shrunk the partition to 250G).
c. DO NOT create windows partitions under OSX. DEFINITELY do not let boot camp do this for you - it creates MBR partitions, EFI windows won't install on that.
d. On some windows PC (or if you're like me, in your Windows7 parallels VM), Create a USB bootdrive of windows 8:
insert 4GB or larger USB disk. Note: below steps will wipe it. Proceed at own risk.
run command prompt as administrator
> diskpart
> list disk
(check which disk number your USB disk appears as, use it in the next commands)
> select your-usb-disk-number-from-previous-step
> clean
> convert gpt
> create partition primary
> select partition 1
> format quick fs=fat32
> assign
> exit
Now copy the guts of the windows 8 DVD or ISO onto this new drive.
Congrats, you now have an install drive.
e. Back on our macbook, I recommend installing rEFIt - install it, then open a shell, cd to /efi/refit and run:
sudo ./enable.sh
f. Reboot with the USB disk in. in the rEFIt menu, you should see two ways to boot from the USB disk - EFI and BIOS. Choose EFI.
g. Installing windows:
1. First boot: windows installation. When you get to the partitioning stage, you should have a block of empty space on your macbook SSD. Let windows create its EFI partitions on them and tell windows to format the last big one of these. Then proceed with the install.
It will copy files and reboot.
2. Seocnd boot: you don't need to do anything. It will go into a black screen (this is because the GMA4000 driver breaks in EFI mode), reboot on its own after a few minutes.
3. Third boot: Again, it'll go into a black screen again. LEAVE FOR 15 MINUTES for the installer to do its thing, then, after it presumably finished doing all the things it isn't showing you, HARD POWER-OFF.
4. Fourth boot: In the refit menu, choose to boot off the USB drive again. This time go into the recovery menu and fire up a command prompt. Delete the broken intel GMA4000 driver file (causing the default VGA driver to take over). Once in the shell, run:
C:\> del c:\windows\system32\drivers\igdkmd64.sys
Exit the shell and let the machine reboot.
5. Timekeeping: Windows likes to think that the machine's SAVED time (what time your machine thinks it is if you boot it completely offline) reflects the local time in your timezone. OSX likes to think SAVED time reflects time in Greenwich. They'll keep fighting between them over what time it is.
Solution:
In Windows, using regedit, navigate-to and add the following DWORD, and set it to 1:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\RealTimeIsUniversal
Then reboot. Now let either OS set the time, and it will remain good across both.
6. Windows works!.
h. DO NOT TRY TO UPDATE THE DRIVER FOR THE GMA4000 onboard graphics. It will just reinstall a new (still broken, as of the time I'm writing this post) igdkmxd64.sys file, and force you to go through step 4 above again.
i. I installed Forceware 306.97 nVidia driver for Win8/64. It installed fine.
j. Go back to OSX. Fire up boot camp assistant and select "Download the latest Windows support software from Apple". Untick everything else. Save it on your USB or somewhere where windows can see it. It will create a WindowsSupport directory with drivers for all the Apple bits and an installer that installs all of them.
Boot into windows, go to the WindowsSupport folder on this USB stick and run setup.exe. This will properly install drivers for a few more things, including bluetooth. GMA4000, screen brightness controls & onboard audio will still not work.
The boot camp control panel in windows won't work - its start screen shows bootable partitions and it expects a hybrid MBR which we've very deliberately avoided setting up in our non-1980's shiny GPT partition structure (you can manually install a hybrid MBR and experiment using gdisk and the 'h' option in the recovery submenu, but that confuses the hell out of windows).
l. Things that don't work for me:
1. Screen brightness controls in Windows.
2. Sound driver. I just plugged in an external USB sound card I had lying around.
3. The GMA driver. There are four drivers you can use:
a. The GMA driver bundled with windows (or an updated WHQL one from windowsupdate).
b. The driver supplied in Apple's bootcamp driver pack.
c. The latest GMA driver downloadable from intel's website.
d. The default VGA driver in Windows.
As of 26/11/2012, (a-c) do NOT work in EFI. This has nothing to do with the eGPU and whether it is connected or not. It has everything to do with the driver not yet being written to be compatible with windows working in straight EFI. I'm sure Intel will fix this at some point, I'm just not sure when this will happen. (a) and (b) will give you a yellow triangle in device manager, (c) will not (but still not work).
(d) works FINE (it's snappy and not laggy or anything, it doesn't feel like the good'ol "video card without a driver" in windows). It'll be 100% good for everything except optimus/gaming.
4. Boot camp control panel (to tweak behavior of apple hardware, trackpad options, what the button on your apple display does, etc). It opens up on the "partitions" tab, which it can't figure out because we have no hybrid MBR, so it bombs out.
The system tray icon still runs, and you can tweak some of the behavior via registry if you're thus inclined.
At the end of the day:
Steam works. So do all games I tried to date (Metro 2033, Borderlands, Portal 2...)
3DMark 2011 works gave me a score of:
Score: P5802 3DMarks
Graphics Score: 7147
Physics Score: 3703
Combined Score: 3719
By contrast:
A retina Macbook Pro 15 with a Kepler dGPU does P2275, and an alienware M18x does P5602.
Mu-ha-ha.
I would REALLY love to compare this rig in a benchmark that is HIGHLY influenced by PCIe constraints (such as the Dirt3min test Anand ran here: AnandTech.com - The Radeon HD 7970 Reprise: PCIe Bandwidth, Overclocking, & The State Of Anti-Aliasing) using [a] a 660Ti with 2GB, a 660Ti with 3GB, [c] a 680/690 (at, say, 1080p and 2560x1600 res)
This would show:
1. Whether having more GPU RAM results in meaningfully more on-card caching, less need to shuttle textures over limited thunerbolt bandwidth and ultimately a meaningful performance increase.
2. Whether there's any point in putting a high-end GPU on this rig.
I don't have the required GPU's, but if anyone is in the Melbourne, Australia area and has one he can lend for the sake of this experiment, shoot me a private message and we'll try.
My kit:
Macbook Air 2012:
Dual-channel thunderbolt (Intel DSL3510L Cactus Ridge controller, details here), 20Gbit/direction, four PCIe 2.0 lanes, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, CPU: Intel Core i7-3667U @ 2.00GHz/3.2GHz turbo'd (...always wanted to run a gamebox on a ULV 14Watt part
)
Thunderbolt to PCIe: Sonnet Echo Express Pro (dual-channel thunderbolt, 20Gbit/direction, four PCIe 2.0 lanes)
GPU: Galaxy GTX660ti 3GB
Power supply: FSP X5, external to the Sonnet enclosure. (It's a 5.25'' 450Watt booster PSU).
I'm too lazy to pull enough 12V rails from the Sonnet's built-in 150W PSU to drive the card (and I don't want to accidentally fry it, it is an $800 part), so I'm feeding the GPU's power from an external $80 source. -
That was the original plan. However, because it doesn't any auxillary power cables for PCIe GPUs, has a proprietary power board and it costs 800$.
If I was on a lone island and that's all I have, I'd solder the extra connector to its main 12V power rail.
As it stands, I'm not, and I'd rather.. "manage risk"
-
So.. I'm 100% certain they want to sell this for use with GPUs, and the design hints at this. From what their support explained to me back when, intel has them by the ba@!s on this, and there's politics at play. The power cable may have been dropped for whatever reason.
Note two more things:
1. Toms didn't have one either: Thunderbolt Paves The Way For Discrete Graphics, Externally : Echo Express Pro: Desktop Graphics In A Thunderbolt Chassis
2. And here are the guts of mine:
Of note:
[a] bottom right is the PSU. Note six 12V yellow wires and their respective ground (each wire specced to about 2amps) going under the PSU board, emerging on the left and feeding into . You can tap three of them and feed an AUX connector.
bottom left is the thunderbolt controller board, with a PCIe x4 male connector (not clearly seen in photo) feeding into the bottom of the top-left board
[c] top-left board with two mechanical PCIe x16 connectors.
[d] top-right is the fan-control board feeding the three 60mm fans (two facing card, one in the bottom section facing PSU).
Also note if you're using an nVidia 6xx card like I am, all the power sockets are from the TOP, which means you'll either need to put a hole in the 2.5mm-thick aluminum roof, or hack something on either the plug or card. -
ioreg (osx's version of lspci) shows the card is there, but after not seeing any OSX drivers to download on nVidia's site, I basically said "bugger it".
I work in an osx+windows-vm hybrid environment, so I do need the extra screenspace, which I get by just connecting the 30'' to the thunderbolt/displayport jack directly. The GMA drives 2560x1600 easily.
As for gaming on mac... when you've got windows, why?!
-
I'm curious to how much benefit a 680 will give over a 660 in this case.
On one hand, the tomshardware review showed the high-end card capping out due to bus bandwidth.
You can also see it in their PCIe impact on gaming review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5458/the-radeon-hd-7970-reprise-pcie-bandwidth-overclocking-and-msaa
I am assuming the Sonnet only uses one of the two thunderbolt channels the 2012 macbook is capable of (e.g. 50% of the available bus) so when looking at their graphs, the lowest of which is PCIe 3.0 x2, imagine there's another "PCIe 3.0 x1.25" and that'd be what you'll get.
If Sonnet uses both TB channels, you get something like the x2 graphs (the red ones). Either way, look at the red bars and see in which games and how they get affected by reduction of PCI bandwidth.
On the other hand, I just spent 10 hours playing Metro 2033 at 2560x1600 (native res on the 30'') with every bell and whistle turned on and the frame-rate was fine (I wasn't watching it so I don't have any hard numbers, but it was decent).
That's 4 million pixels. The rig works well
-
Yup. So long as you delete the c:\windpws\system32\drivers\igdkmd64.sys driver that any of the following install:
[a] Windows setup
Apple bootcamp (windows Support installer that installs all the apple drivers) setup
[c] Intel Win8/64 driver from intel's website (the only one that doesn't come up with a yellow exclamtion mark).
ALL the above are broken. However, if the driver file isn't there, you'll get a yellow exclamation mark, the standard VGA driver will kick in, and it will work.
See below:
EDIT: Sorry, I misunderstood the question. I interpreted it as "Does your iGPU work on your internal screen" to which the answer is above.
NO, the eGPU cannot output to the laptop screen.
It would be able to do so feasibly in theory if one thunderbolt channel was used to carry GPU data out, and the other thunderbolt channel was used to carry it back in, while the mac serves as a thunderbolt target.
I've seen one of the review sites - toms or anand - do this thing with 2 thunderbolt ports. One pushing out PCIe to an egpu, the other working as a displayport target or thunderbolt target, and soaking up the signal coming OUT of the eGPU. This was on a desktop pc mobo.
A mac
[a] May have EFI weirdness that may or may not prevent it from doing so.
A macbook air only has one thunderbolt port.
[c] -however- on the 2012 MBA's that port carries two independent thunderbolt channelsl, e.g. with some fancy electronics one may be able to split it out into two single-channel ports, and then somehow do this.
I understand why this is useful - no need to carry a monitor around to a LAN party - but I'm not motivated enough to try and make it work. Maybe you can
-
@Oripash
You can download lucid virtue drivers to let it work on your internal screen. Pls try and share results with us, youre one of the first with this setup i think
Gaming on the internal screen with a mbp retina would be awesome i think, but will be a very expensive setup, and windows isnt high dpi ready yet.
Just sold my desktop, i am checking the options for a laptop with egpu setup now. -
-
-
Sonnet Thunderbolt/Expresscard adapter paired with Vidock and 2011 Macbook Pro
Discussion in 'e-GPU (External Graphics) Discussion' started by EpicBlob, Mar 5, 2012.
