Thunderbolt e-gpu setup with Sonnet Echo Express Pro review (Tomshardware)

External Graphics Performance: Gaming : Echo Express Pro: Desktop Graphics In A Thunderbolt Chassis

Seem like a pretty good summary of the capabilities and limits of thunderbolt driving an e-gpu. I only wish Tomshardware actually provide more detail about his software setup, and if he was able to drive the Macbook Pro internal display with the e-gpu or not.

But regardless something to look forward to.

Also one last observation, it seem that the bandwidth limit of the thunderbolt won't be able to feed a high end gpu. So a Nvidia 560ti or a newer model GTX660 (none ti) would be the upper bound for performance.

Still a NVIDIA GTX660 is nothing to sneeze at.

 

Interesting. I've been able to get an ATI card to power on, albeit an really old radeon. I have not had success getting win7 to recognize the 560GTX. The ATI card could only be powered on after the macbook air initialized the sonnet adapter. I had to power on the card manually via the 12V line through a PCIE cable interposer. When I try to do this with the Nvidia card, it doesn't work, and the diy EGPU setup software cannot enumerate it at all.

My next step was to splice the pcie interposer cable and use the 3.3V lines from my external ATX PSU to power both 3.3V and 12V lines. The GTX560 must need the 3.3V lines, whereas the older Radeon might not.

The macbook air, and I think even the macbook pros, won't come up with the thunderbolt graphics plugged in. In both cases with either the expresscard->tbolt adapter or the sonnet echo adapter, this always led my macbook air to freeze.

I wonder how they were able to get the macbook pro to boot up completely and get it to recognize the card without freezing using an nvidia card. or maybe it just works with the ATI card if they power on the external power supply after the win7 boot menu comes up.

If anybody has any other info on this, I'd be interested in duplicating this. Otherwise I'll just forge ahead and create the 3.3V rails on my cable.

 

I'm putting together a more "mobile" config and will post up a review when the last part gets here(Tomorrow or Friday).

Setup:

Macbook Air 2011 11"
Sonnet Echo Express SE(with Fedex!)
Geforce GTX650

You need to use a Palit family(so Gainward etc) 650 with the SE, as they're the only ones that use a single slot bezel.

 

WOOT,

So excited that you are doing this. I am thinking of sonnet echo express SE with Sapphire HD 7750 low profile on the Macbook Air 11" 2012.

 

It's Alive!

Well, mostly... There are still a few things to tweak. Getting to this point was non trivial and (needlessly) more expensive than it needed to be.

It's now the middle of the night, so I'll give a run down tomorrow and start some proper testing.

 

I'm looking forward to the results!

 

Ok, time for an update.

First off, i'm taking a long time to investigate various options around certain elements of functionality.

The main thing that I've spent time on is trying to get optimus working.
That is still a work in progress as there are some issues with the Intel integrated graphics/Apple's EFI implementation.
I consider this whole venture an experiment until I can get this running, as this is the only reason I went down this path in the first place.

What is working:
Internal LCD monitor on integrated graphics(with no driver/HD3000 disabled)
External monitor attached to GTX 650 over thunderbolt
Gaming(no real benchmarks yet, but i have had this running Borderlands 2 on max settings @ 1680x1050, 30 FPS+)

what is not working:
Optimus

**Build pics to come

What had to be done to get this to work:
The PCIe slot of the Expressbox SE only supports an 8x card, so I had to carve out the end of the slot. This was time consuming but not difficult.
The card draws 64 Watts at full load and the chassis will provide 60Watts(and will probably stretch the whole way), however the card needs PCIe 6 pin power.
To this end I used a molex ended power brick and ran a molex to 6 pin power cable into the Expressbox.

You can't bootcamp the machine, as it won't even boot into windows with the card installed.
I thought it might be a memory allocation issue, so I bought a GT210(1GB) and and Ati 5450(512MB)
This turned out to be a dead end and is likely just not supported in the BIOS emulation.
There is a pending line of investigation to be picked up here if I can't make any further progress, which is to configure;
Apple EFI -> BIOS Emulation -> SYSLINUX -> DUET -> EFI Shell -> Windows.
This will allow modification of the appropriate registers to set VGA Enable on the PCIe bus behind thunderbolt, assuming that it is presented to the system as a PCIe Hub.
However, this is a lot of work for possibly no gain and is ugly, so has been relegated to "Last Resort" status.

Instead, I have installed OSX into the first half of the SSD and rEFIt in front of that.
Booting into rEFIt's EFI shell allows you to directly boot the Windows 8 installers in "EFI mode".
From here you can install into the GPT disk behind the partition that OS X is living on.
This stops the Mac from setting up a hybrid MBR and hence using BIOS emulation.

Once you're running windows directly against the EFI, hardware is appropriately presented to the OS and the external card is detected perfectly.

Where to go from here:
If you're just after high speed in a dock at home scenario, then this would be quite usable in this state.
If you want optimus(which I imagine most of us do), then there is still work to be done

Having had a poke at the registers and memory from the EFI shell, it has become fairly clear that the Graphics card is "running fine".
It just can't detect the monitor. This could just be an artifact of the BETA state of Intel's current Windows 8 Drivers.

The reason Windows 8 was chosen is that it is a lot more friendly with EFI booting.(allegedly)

This leaves 2 obvious choices.

Wait for intel to release a new driver(not ideal).
Test EFI booting on Windows 7 and go from there(current line of investigation).

Also, there is the horrifying cludge option that I outlined earlier, however, I'm not in a hurry to set that one up.

There is another school of thought, which is being investigated by people a lot more dedicated than me, over at macrumors.com and that is poking directly at EFI to massage the GPU into a more normal looking shape, but that is a deep dark rabbit hole that I'm not going to dive down.

I'll keep updating as I uncover more.

Also, I'll post up some real benchmarks and videos soon.

 

Made a video showing an indication of performance of this setup as is.

Just to give a worst case kind of impression, I ran this at 1920x1080, with everything set to maximum.

Gaming on a Macbook Air over Thunderbolt (Borderlands 2) - YouTube

The build photos..

EchoExpress SE



Plenty of space for a double width card



Need to cut out the back of the 8x slot



Even though I was careful, still slightly bent a pin, electrically ok though



You could probably fit a double slot card in, if you cut a groove in the bracket



Clear of the PCB when seated



For a 650, you need a molex to PCIe adapter




Molex extenders so the card fires up



Running both displays



The party box



Card runs perfectly and the so does the gigabit nic

 

Well done Kryzaach, your setup looks sweet. If I have the time and the money, i will try something similar with the sonnet echo express and a GTX650.

But quick question (might be a really stupid question). Since thunderbolt is plug and play in windows (or atleast as far as i know in window7), couldn't you just boot into windows 7, and after boot complete, plugin in the graphic card. In theory the Nvidia optimus driver should be able to run the card after the driver is properly install, shouldn't it?

By the way congratulation on your sweet setup, hopefully you have better luck with windows 7, without having do all the work around like you did for windows 8.

 

Thanks Gordon1hd1,

It's not a silly question, that is exactly how I wanted to run things myself. I will have a look at it again, but I suspect that the issue is with the way Apple do their BIOS emulation. The machine just won't detect anything plugged in like this(not correctly anyway) and if you boot in BIOS mode with the chassis connected and a graphics card in the slot, it just hangs(although I have some additional understanding around this now, so might be able to try a few things).
I have access to the 2012 Macbooks(Air and Pros) at work, so I'll do some extended testing with them as well as my own machine over the next few weeks.
I've also asked for an eval unit of an Acer Aspire S5, it will be interesting to see how a non apple thunderbolt machine handles it.

 

Hey, this is really awesome. If its not too much trouble do you think you can run a couple of more games and post videos or even a couple of common benchmark numbers would be great!

Thanks
Andrew

 

Just an update.

It seem that there are people over at tomshardware forum that was successful in hooking up thunderbolt through the Express Card adapter to vidock to gtx560ti setup. (in Windows 7, by the look of the posting date)

[Solved] Thunderbolt eGPU - Graphics-Cards - Graphic-Displays

In theory since his setup is also going through thunderbolt port, it work the same for us doing it over the standard thunderbolt to PCIE adapter. So i am hopeful that Kryzaach can pull off a seamless windows 7 setup with his MBA.

Kryzaach please keep us posted, we are all hoping to hear good news from you

 

That was actually me that posted that

Seems as though a few people have gotten an external graphics card to work over thunderbolt already (in Windows 7).

 

HTML:

Hey just read your post on tom's, you do know that your computer doesn't actually have a thunderbolt port. The port was first introduced with the 2011 macs and they all have core 'i' processors.

Regards

Andrew

 

Check my signature lol. I wasn't the one who started the thread. I was who Gordon1hd1 was talking about who got it working via sonnets thunderbolt to express card adapter.

 

Well that give us hope. So if thunderbolt -> express card -> pcie works in windows 7 with macbook pro/air, then it should work with just thunderbolt to pcie. I guess we will wait on Kryzaach for confirmation.

 

wortlhless piece of overpriced crap limited by the expresscard bus.

 

I personally don't care about the drop in performance. I went from playing counter strike source at medium/low settings to playing Battlefield 3, Borderlands 2, Just Cause 2, and all the other games I play at a much higher frame rate than my crap intelHD could ever make. Sure that's what I got for diving in early, but not everyone wants m@x settings 1080p ultra hd graphix. No matter how you implement an e-gpu, it'll be lightyears ahead of your regular laptop

 

Thanks for the great thread.

I am using the TH05 instead but the complications appear to be the same. I have tried installing Win 8, in EFI mode, in a number of ways, like you describe with dual boot and also with win 8 stand alone. But I get an error at the end of the first installer part that says "Windows could not update the computer's boot configuration. Installation cannot proceed". I am running a Macbook Pro 17" Late 2011.

If you could detail the process of getting windows 8 installed on a mac from scratch, including the OS X part, it would be awesome.

Even better will be when Windows 7 can be used. I have a theory that if I can get windows 8 to install under EFI, I could then use a windows 7 backup from ShadowProtect to restore without overwriting the MBR of Win 8. Thoughts?

Does anyone know if the DIYeGPU Setup app would work with windows 7 with the TH05?

 

Might as well post my PM to kryzaach here since maybe someone will find some useful info.

congrats, nicely done. i enjoyed your writeup.

i have the echo express pcie adapter and have had trouble getting my gtx560 to run. like you, i have had nothing but problems with loading windows with the graphics card plugged in.

here's where i am at.

i've created a wiring loom that breaks out the 12V and 3.3V signals on the 1x connection (section before the slot). the wiring loom is connected to an external atx power supply. i've basically severed any sort of power being supplied by the echo express.

here's the problem, my gtx560 won't detect. i used to have the echo expresscard thunderbolt adapter, and the way i got this to work without any modifications to efi bios was to boot with thunderbolt connected but expresscard unplugged, select windows, then plug in the expresscard. windows would detect the gtx560 upon bootup.

the problem i'm having now is that when i bootup, select windows, then power on the card (all the while the echo express is plugged in), windows will never detect the card.

funny thing is i have an older ati/amd card, and that works fine using this sequence. so there is something i'm missing in the poweron sequencing requirements for the nvidia card, it just won't detect.

since you are powering on directly into windows and do not hang, you do not have this issue. kudos to you for figuring that out.

my expresscard setup had optimus working. your setup works with the echo express pcie adapter. my echo express setup just works with an older ati/amd card.

any help is appreciated.

 

Well I finally got Win 8 installed in EFI mode on my Macbook Pro 17" Late 2011. I had to attach the HDD to another PC that had EFI and install there. Then I installed that same HDD in the mac and used the option key to boot it from there. It took a couple of reboots for it to work as it froze on setup of the drivers in the new machine, but it eventually booted every time after.

This was on a HDD that has only Win 8 and no OSX.

 

Does that mean you got it working? And I have my windows 7 installed on a completely seperate ssd too.

 

Thats odd Borealiss. Did you already have the 560 drivers installed?

 

it works! i had to get the atx power supply power good signal to hook up to the pcie card via my wiring loom. diy egpu setup now detects it like it does the ati card.

i'm not sure if i have the minimum/maximum number of isolated wires for power and reset. but basically i the PWRGD signal, 3.3V, 3.3Vaux, and 12V lines on the small notched connector completely isolated to an external atx power supply.

you may not need to do all this, but it should work. i was looking at the signals last night and it looks like PWRGD was the only control signal associated with keeping the card in a reset state.

you can see the pinout here:

PCI Express - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

everything else is either smbus or jtag related for testing/debug purposes, or legacy I/O related.

pics of setup.



Here is the poweron sequence.

Plug echo express into macbook air, power on macbook holding option, select windows, power on egpu powersupply. that's it.

everything else including windows 7 setup should work like the old thunderbolt expresscard setup.

optimus should work too, i'll post some pics later today when i get back from work.

 

No. I am having some issues when I install bootcamp drivers. On restart it just shows a black screen after the windows loading logo. I might try again without installing those drivers.

 

Ahh I forgot about this. Ok so this is actually an issue with putting windows 7 on a different hard drive. What you have to do is put your windows hard drive in the main hard drive bay, then put your mac hard drive in your caddy. I did it a while ago so I'd look it up on google there are a few good ones. Pretty much windows will only install itself if its in the main hard drive bay.. once it's installed you can switch them back.

 

Not sure I get you? I successfully installed win 8 on the HDD on another PC (No OSX), transplanted that same HDD to my MacBook and booted. When in Win 8 on the Mac I installed the BootCamp drivers but this caused it to stop working. I am going to try and get the TH05 working without installing BootCamp drivers in Win 8 cos I think there is some sort of conflict.

 

Wait are you in windows 7 or windows 8? If it's windows 8 then it might be your bootcamp drivers are outdated? I'd check if there are specific win 8 drivers for bootcamp. And I'm not too sure it will work without the drivers. When I got windows 7 working before I had the drivers installed, lots of stuff was funky.

 

Windows 8. I don't think there are any specific Windows 8 bootcamp drivers yet cos these ones I have are the very latest. I will update when I know more.

 

Is your TH05 plugged in while you download it? Might redownload the drivers, then make sure the only thing connected to your macbook is the flash drive (or whatever your using to install the drivers).

 

And do a restart. Someone said that restarting your computer got windows 8 to get his e-gpu working...

 

TH05 is unplugged. I have not got as far as trying to get the TH05 working. I was only trying to get the basic Macbook drivers on first.

 

Wait so what happens when you try and get the bootcamp drivers working? Your in windows 8 then when you go to install the files, it just freezes?

 

It crashes and wont go any further at reboot than just after the windows loading screen. Apparently the following command fixes and boot/freezing issue, but I have not tried yet:

(Run in CMD as Administrator)
bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes


What I would really like is to just run windows 7 under bootcamp and use DIY eGPU application with the TH05. Is this even possible?

 

You could just wipe the hard drive and install windows 7 on it.

 

Might try that command first, though

 

Windows 7 does not work on the Mac at all under EFI. Which is what's required for the TH05 to boot with a graphics card. This is why I was hoping someone could confirm if the DIY eGPU software would work with TH05.

 

Wait what do you mean windows 7 does not work under mac os x? All you have to do is switch the hard drives, go to bootcamp assistant in os x and let the magic happen. I don't think you can simply keep it plugged into the macbook; when I keep mine plugged in it freezes. There's a sequence.

Also, I think borealiss might be trying to figure it out with the diy egpu

 

OK here is the situation. Under bootcamp, Win 7 will not boot with the TH05 installed when a graphics card in plugged in. The TH05 on its own (no graphics card) boots fine. This is because Win 7 is installed under BIOS emulation though bootcamp. TH05 with a graphics card installed needs to run under EFI install (Boot camp will not allow this). Win 7 install disk wont run under EFI boot on the Mac either. Win 8 install disk does run under EFI on the Mac, however it does not set the boot sector at the end of the installation process. This forced me to install Win 8 on a blank HDD using another PC and then transplant that drive to the Mac and successfully boots (This new Win 8 install includes no OSX or bootcamp).

Now my job is to try and get Win 8 to work with the TH05 without freezing or crashing. However, I would much prefer to run Win 7, but after lots of tested permutations of OS installs (with and without OSX/Bootcamp), and lots of reading, I can only conclude that Win 7 cant be used, unless the TH05 can be used with the DIY eGPU software.

 

What happens if you hot plug? Does it show up in device manager? (you need to scan for hardware manually)

 

No it does not.

 

Here is an article that will bring you up to speed:

https://darobins.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/native-uefi-windows-7-boot-on-mac-mini/

 

Hmm. And I forgot but did you try to get it recognized with your igpu and dgpu disabled? (while connected to an external monitor)

 

No I have not tried that because Windows 7 does not boot (under boot camp) with a graphics card installed.

The article in my previous post is a great read.

 

But if you unplug the thunderbolt cable, it boots into windows 7 fine?

 

Yes it does.

 

Have you tried going into windows with it unplugged, disabling your igpu and dgpu, restarting, then testing if it works?
And I hadn't seen the article before you mentioned it. Ill try and read it quick

 

No I have not tried that. What if it fails? I might risk not being able to renable again.

 

It appears as though my Windows 8 reboot crash issue, when installing bootcamp drivers is related to the intel HD graphics. I will test later tonight and post my progress in this thread.

 

I've disabled my igpu in my macbook pro numerous times and restarted and it was fine. One of the other users on here got their sonnet echo express se working by disabling the igpu and using an external monitor. The only issue I faced while the onboard graphics were disabled was that the resolution was a bit low :l