Thunderbolt eGPU - Magma ExpressBox 3T - nVidia GTX 680

Thought I'd add my experience setting up an eGPU over thunderbolt.

I really need the portability of a compact laptop with the video power of a desktop.

After doing a lot of research I decided to buy the Acer Aspire S5 laptop and the Magma Thunderbolt external chassis, I also bought an nVida GTX 680 to go inside.

This was a bit of a risk as the power requirements for the GTX 680 were quite close to the maximum available from the Expressbox power supply.

I decided on the Magma solution because it had the most powerful power supply out of any of the other external solutions.

Once everything had arrived I quickly assembled the setup using both the molex power connectors to drive the card. Into Windows 7 and the GTX 680 was detected correctly and driver installation began.

Unfortunately no matter what I tried I could not get the drivers to install correctly. Reboots, different driver versions, no matter what, I would always get 'device could not start' error message in the device manager.

This was sooooooooo frustrating!!

I spent a week fiddling about contacting Magma technical support and trying to get the card to work. Magma technical support were very helpful but unfortunately since this setup is new and video cards are not officially support they could not help other than say that they did have a Quadro 4000 working with a Lenovo s430 laptop.

Thunderbolt should just work out of the box and the whole thing should be transparent to Windows... I decided that the card might not be getting enough power so I bought an EVGA Superclocked GTX 660 to see if a card with a single 6 pin power requirement would work.

I got the card home installed it in my Magma box and no luck. It suffered from the same issue as the GTX 680. No driver installation possible.

I was pretty sad at this point. Desperate, I tried upgrading to Windows 8 which also didn't fix the issue.

The next step was to see if it was a hardware compatibility issue. I decided to buy a Lenovo s430 since that was a known eGPU compatible laptop.

I was getting worried, I had already dropped a lot of money on this setup and my friends and girlfriend all thought I was pretty stupid.

In a couple of weeks the laptop arrived and I eagerly connected the Magma box... boom the drivers installed... quick reboot and I had a fully working eGPU GTX 680. Happily playing Far Cry 3 at max settings.

Very happy times.

Now I just had to sell off the GTX 660 and Acer Aspire S5.

I've been using it for a few weeks now and there's one slight annoyance in that after a cold boot you have to let the drivers install again... then reboot to get the eGPU working.

It's a pretty minor issue to be honest.

Anyway two key things for anyone attempting to try this setup:

1) Avoid the Aspire S5 - a far as I can see it is incompatible and a risky choice
2) The Magma chassis has enough power to drive a GTX 680


Anyway hope this helps.

Cheers

 

Almost a 1,000 dollars for this, holy crap man. That's a big pit to be putting money into.

 

I have rationalized it, it's cheaper than the $2k I spent on a dell precision m6400 a few years ago and it's a better solution in every way. More up-gradable, more portable, more powerful etc.

 

very rationale when you could just buy a th05 for less then $200 that does the exactly same thing.

 

Hah hah I can rationalize that too. Id also need a compact portable case with power supply and cooling. Plus I have a spare pci express slot in the magma which I'm also using. Is someone on the forum offering a tested turn key portable solution for under a grand? Since magma are selling out of stock and the latent demand in the forum is high, there's a business model here.

 

MojaMonkey if you want to know the truth: your magma will only be 15% faster than TH05, expresscard will probably be the same speed on 1.2opt too (because of optimus compression feature)

You can google for "DIY eGPU experiences [version 2.0]" to see the comparision about magma vs TH05

I think the conclusion is that all current solutions are about the same speed (with different pricetags )

 

So you couldn't find/build a case cheaper than 800$? hard to believe Doesn't matter anyways as you already got the magma.
By using a additional PCI-E device you'll cut performance heavily. What device do you use in the spare slot?
Any benchmarks with and without the additional device?

You can enable 1.2opt with Magma / TH05 aswell by taping lane 2 onwards.
You'll gain performance for DX9 but lose lots of perfomance in DX11.

(Image by nando4)

 

Thanks heaps for the additional information. Not sure I'll go for 1.2opt since I do use direct x 11. I realize my setup doesn't stack up when you compare to a DIY solution from a cost perspective. I've had a look at the TH05 and for the size I might as well just build a micro gaming PC and have an ultrabook on the side.

I do a lot of fiddling with my laptops, re-pasting, copper shims and SSD raid etc. But I also study part time on top of a full time job and don't have the time to build a diy egpu on top of the customization I already do.

What I am definitely saying is that external pci express with laptops is the future for sure. When my friends see my setup they agree. Desktop power with the flexibility of a laptop.

My setup is awesome in terms of cost when compared to what I used to spend on high end 17" laptops. Anyway this community has a good thing going here and I hope my contribution steers people away from the Acer Aspire S5!

 

not on the forum. but yes there's a turn key portable solution for under a grand. th05. as easy as pluging cables. or magma sends you a technician to connect the thunderbolt cable too? for that price, they should.

 

Stop trolling him... he's got his Magma and he's fine with it.

I'm still really interessted in benchmarks with a second PCI-E device.

 

Yeah it would be interesting to see how big of a hit the 10gbit would take. I'm just imagining a 680 in one and a red rocket in the other.. I think that would be a pros dream.

How much bandwidth would a ssd take up? Is that just a 1:1 ratio of how fast the read/write speeds are?

 

I still cant believe that the performance would be better with the th05. And he pays and buys for his stuff whatever he wants.

and still between a th05 or a sonnet echo express se or a mlogic mlink, I wouldnt go for the former.

 

Nobody in this thread or on techinferno said TH05 has better performance. Actually Magma / Sonnet have up to 12.5% more bandwidth as they are able to use full 10GB/S. (Magma / Sonnet = pcie 2.0 x4 with 10 GB/S thunderbolt cap - TH05 = pcie 2.0 x2)
The question is: are these 12.5% worth 800 bucks? For this money you can overclock any GPU to match these 12.5% and even more + a nice case and still have lots of money left over. If you have to much money to toy with just go with a Magma or Sonnet as they're no-brainers.
I'm fine with my TH05 @ maxed rMBP. (to bad you Karamazovmm won't tell us how to enable Optimus for internal eGPU usage even though it works out of the box for you -_-;; j/k )

If you're using 2 PCI-E devices in a Magma you'll lose lots of performance as they share Thunderbolts 10GB/S. I'm just curious how much perfomance you'll lose by doing so. It should be way more than 12.5% though...

You don't have to be a believer to see this. Just read up the given information.

I hope MojaMonkey will share some benchmarks even though he got trolled.

 

But as "he who should not be named" said in the other forum, in 2014 it could be that we just need a new cable/laptop? It would be interesting to see which controller the sonnet and magma solutions use.

 

You'll need a new Laptop as you'll need the upcoming thunderbolt devices. Just buying an optical cable won't help. I don't think current Magmas / Sonnets will be able to handle 20GB/s cause there's no chip for this yet.

 

Not going to tell you how I got it work, it really involves basic steps, aside that i sold my rmbp, thought that I could manage the weight and bulk and i cant. rmbp 13 with haswell or broadwell is what its going to be for me.

and every controller that wont use the new ones that intel will release in whatever year they decide (some say next year, some say in 2014 or later), because from what I gathered from the white paper that intel released on thunderbolt the problem is in the controller, not the cable. The optical one is for longer deployments currently, in the future (higher speeds) its because of the limitations of copper.

still, for 400 and a very nice portable enclosure (that is one of their problems as well, they only accept up to half length card, aside the very low psu [which can be averted by using a notebook psu] and the fact that you will need to modify something for the 12v rails that the higher end gpus need, only the magma offers a clean solution for this, with a very hefty price tag) that will resist some mishandling, I prefer to go that way. Not that everyone should of course.

 

Of course you won't because you can't. I actually know the "basic steps" your're talking about. They are 1.trolling, 2.???, 3. profit and I'm fine with it
Aside from bugged Intel drivers (which are bugged for every Mac booting EFI and even emu BIOS; maybe you don't know how Optimus works and thus thought it was functional; nvm) I'm already done and able to boot Windows with Intel HD as primary VGA device. So real Optimus is just around the corner.
I guess you're not in the position to troll all MB owners and Linux developers which were unable to activate Intel HD due to the same bugs and they are the real pioneers. Just stop spreading false information. Even if you think you're right. It's not the right place for this anyways.


That said let's stay on topic for now and wait for some Magma benchmarks.

 

It isn't magma, but heres a high end card using the sonnet echo chassis.

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

 

Yeah, I know those. What I'd like to see is Magma /w GPU only compared to Magma /w GPU + _active_ second Device.
As far as I know MojaMonkey seems to be the first one giving the latter a try. If he's gone I might ask nando for some further tests.

 

^this is exactly why Im not going to say anything. I thought that was pretty clear on the last ''argument''. Think bumblebee.

I would like to see more performance numbers, what I saw at toms doesnt make me want a more powerful gpu than a 660 ti

 

What benchmarks do you want specifically, if you give me some details I can run them in a way that is directly comparable to existing data you have?

Let me know.

 

Oh one other thing, when I'm playing Farcry 3 it appears that I'm CPU limited since fiddling with my CPU power throttling affects frame rate way more than it should. Or maybe using a thunderbolt connection it has a higher CPU usage.

 

You're not arguing at all. Your claiming nonsens stuff without any proof. You are basically saying "I went to Mars yesterday. It was really easy... but I sold all stuff I used and I won't tell anyone how I did it."
That's why I'm making fun of you. I like feeding trolls so just keep up posting Now bringing up Bumblebee just supports my points as it's not really out of the box isn't it (i'd bet you just googled it *rofl*). You won't need Bumblebee/Ironhide and it won't fix Intel bugs at all. You're just smattering which is pretty dangerous.
You don't want to tell "me" anything? .... you won't tell anyone, don't you? Tell eg. EpicBlob how to do it and proof me wrong as he probably would love to have optimus with his eGPU, too. I'm fine to concede that I was wrong if I actually am.

Anyone who's able to use google will see how trustworthy you are.

Great! I'd don't really know what your second device is, so for now try to run a benchmark (eg. 3D Mark 2011) first with only GPU connect.
Then connect the second device and use it somehow (it shouldn't idle; eg copy stuff to a network drive if it's a network card) and run the same benchmark again.
Idealy the second device shouldn't eat to much CPU usage (or try to figure out how much CPU it actually needs).

 

you see you feel like an entitled child, I really dont care. If you didnt notice last time I was receptive till a point. I really dont care if you call me a troll or not I dont own you anything, nor you will know something

thats my problem, I dont care about the needs of entitled childs

 

So in the modern societies that we live in, sharing is not caring...

 

At least it fits inside the enclosure, although the price is pretty steep...

 

th05 will receive an update in Q1 2013 that will deliver the same performance of the magma. so buy now a magma for 1000$ or wait a couple months and save 800$ or just buy th05 now and have ~10% less performance.

 

yeah and without anything to share it's impossible to care

 

Did they announce 2.0x4?

 

yes like a month ago

 

just a quick update:

Buyers of TH05 received a recall notice and BPlus removed all Thunderbold product from their homepage.
The recall notice points out some "compatibility issues" but they don't want to comment any further on this.
Most likely Intel put a ban hammer on it as BPlues doesn't seem to be a certified partner
.
Everyone with a functional TH05 should feel happy and shouldn't accept the recall as they probably won't release any new Thunderbolt products in the near future.