Dedicated External GPU (eGPU) subforum POLL.

For background information about what an eGPU is, please refer here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/5324240-post1.html

Tl;Dr:
Basically we are able to use expresscard 34 or thunderbolt slots to hook up an external graphics card (think NVidia GTX 470, 690, or Radeon HD 6970, 7970) with the addition of an external power supply in order to improve the performance (primarily gaming or hobby) of our laptops. We are a very strong community and would like to organize and prioritize the way posts are viewed and that would best be through a subforum. This poll is to gauge interest in an eGPU subforum.


Disclaimer:
This is to gauge interest in a subforum via polling. This is not a guarantee of being granted a subforum for eGPU solution, but more of an opportunity to demonstrate that there is a strong interest among the entire NBR community and that we would like a decision from the head moderators based on the response.

 

We have one subforum for all graphics cards and gaming threads together, currently. I feel like eGPUs are relatively niche, but there is a lot of talking that goes on about the solutions, largely because a lot of DIY tinkering is being done to get it working, which is fine.

Still, I feel like it would make more sense to first split up graphics card talk and gaming talk, rather than to have one place for graphics cards (integrated and dedicated) and gaming, except external GPUs, and then a separate place for eGPUs. My two cents. Or, depending on how many threads are spawning (not necessarily how much conversation is happening) - perhaps leave it as is.

 

More background info on two previous attempts to get a eGPU/external graphics subforum as posted here with some responses copied across:

I agree but my two previous attempts during PMed discussion with the head moderator, Charles P Jefferies, failed to get us a dedicated area. I recall it was passed for discussion with the moderators who didn't allow it to proceed. I initiated the first discussion and the second one was requested by SimoxTav.

It was also not clear why the moderators resisted allowing such a subforum. I would have assumed there is not really that much to moderate in our discussion area. Only really responding to flagged posts, which are also a rarity here.

Can anybody propose a different approach a third time round such that we may get a subforum? We do now have the option to go elsewhere if there is resistence on NBR to provide the tools deemed as necessary. I was thinking a polled question along the lines of Does NBR require a dedicated external graphics subforum? YES/NO/candy with as many YES votes as possible would be the most likely way for us to get such a subforum.

Move to a dedicated DIY eGPU host?

A user (who wishes not to be named) has volunteered a vbulletin/phpbb equipped system to host a dedicated DIY eGPU forum.

I wanted to see how users feel if we made such a move? Some brief pros/cons:

Pros:
+ subforums so info could be partitioned better
+ wiki would allow user-wide editting of the current quicklinked info

Cons:
- new website, new user registration, no guarantee on uptime, split off from other NBR discussion.

I'm also watching if NBR can implement an all-edittable first post summary as requested in http://forum.notebookreview.com/sit...nbr-forums-suggestion-box-13.html#post8497355 which would help to manage content.

 

I dont think a new site is needed, some of the current/new users might not find it easily. And I feel some content from this thread could be lost.

that being said, a subforum within NBR would be better than a separate entity.

I'm sure NBR could arrange that versus losing a valuable thread like this, that definitely brings people to the site (EGPU search on google is how I first found NBR)

 

exactly the same for me, i found this website via search engine with the string diy egpu

 

A sub within the Gaming subforum might work.

 

DIY eGPUs are a bit too narrow of a subject to justify its own subforum (fragmentation males it more--not less--difficult to find threads and posts of interest).

I do like the idea of splitting the Gaming section into a GPU/eGPU Hardware subforum and the parent-section for General Gaming Discussion. This idea has been brought up and discussed among the moderation team quite a few times in the last few years.

There's one big problem, though: where to draw the line between what goes where. Do threads like "Can ___ GPU Play ___ Game?" belong in the general category, or in the GPU subcategory? Sometimes it's inevitable that hardware talk will be brought into general game discussion as well. Where does a thread that discusses the Crytek engine and its optimization for Nvidia GPUs go?

There would be some confusion among users (especially newbie posters), as well. But, if you guys can come up with some constructive ideas, we are definitely open to them.

 

A sub for potato.

 

There's a decent amount of eGPU discussion here, but it's only of passing interest to a lot of the people who visit this subforum, so count this one more vote in favor of a subforum to get those darn kids off the Gaming subforum's lawn!

 

and what about threads like "will this particular e-gpu setup run [particular game]?

I think part of this is the assumption that extra partitions make it easier to manage information in the context of a forum (noted above). You have to consider the scope of a forum in the first is geared towards public conversational exchange.

You've also noted the need for a wiki, which makes a LOT of sense. Since a lot of effort has been invested into DIY egpu stuff, it's perfectly sensible to want to collect that information and keep it together and organized. A subforum won't help you with that, but a wiki will.

In short, the need for a wiki arises out of the desire to collect, maintain, and organize information. The point of a forum is to provide a venue for recorded public discussion. I think that the idea of a separate subforum for a particular topic because you find it important isn't really the right way of thinking about forums. It's better to keep topics grouped as broad as possible until crowdedness becomes such an issue that splitting is necessary. The "gaming and graphics cards" subforum on this site isn't crowded at all. You've got threads staying on the front page for maybe 48 hours before pushed all the way to page 2.

I think what you certainly need is a wiki.

 

Here above you will find my request sent via PM to Charles, explaining what are the points that would grant benefits in visibility, usability and clarity IMHO (the poll was already posted anyway ).
Do not forget that while today we're mostly speak about the "DIY" solution, once MSI GUS II will be released (and several others will follow), the number of threads would increase easily, so having an already setted up subsection could help to organize better and categorize the topics.
Today the main problem of the "sticky" is related to the amount of work needed to index every experience, problem, side topic, while trying to answer to people questions. It often happens to have difficulties to find the right answer in the past replies because it is no more listed in the recent news and this is where the wiki could help. Having a dedicated subsection could help to keep the experiences sorted, something like a "diary" of each own solution, related to DIY enclosure, modding (we had several DIY fixes while the product was during the engineering saple phase that are hard to be recalled), benchmarks and so on. It's an approach more "user-based" than a single topic where the amount of info and the jumps between arguments make difficult to follow the thread.

I would also agree about the splitting of the GPU / Gaming section but the already mentioned problems are real so I don't have any solution to promote in that direction.

Simone

 

As stated, there is simply to many users having separate discussions on a single thread for it to be fully productive. The thread is simply growing too fast and its content is becoming/will soon become too diversified to keep it all in a single thread. Have you seen the new Mac OS eGPU discussion thread? With thunderbolt becoming standard on notebooks, and the release of a(nother) commercial product, a distinct subforum is becoming a necessity.

 

Again, if there is a large quantity of information and experiences that you need indexed, a forum is not the correct venue, and a subforum won't resolve the problem. You need a wiki.

I've looked through the eGPU experiences thread. A subforum isn't even close to what you need. You guys definitely need a wiki to hold all your information. Conversational stuff (questions, support, discussion) should happen on a forum, and you don't need a subforum for that. That small subset of what you need should be easy to manage in the main forum.

You guys have sort of stumbled into an (inevitable) organizational disaster. That has already happened, and a subforum won't even slow the growth of the disaster at this point (and it never would have). A subforum simply doesn't provide anything like the level of organization you need to collect all the data you guys have generated. You might as well be thirsty and ask for socks.

What you need to do is get a wiki set up right away, and start getting all of the data organized in the wiki. When new data comes in, add to the wiki. Use the top post to link to the wiki rather than try to keep all the information in the top post. That just doesn't work for the amount of data you have. Having all that information across a bunch of threads in a subforum would just mean that it would be even less organized.

 

Actually I got to say that maybe we are overlooking this niche thing. Keeping all of it in a single thread makes it so difficult to find the relevant info. There are experience posts, support posts, new product discussions and recent one it had is collaboration thing (too long to explain). This is a general outline of topics and if you think such variety isn't enough for sub-forum, you haven't read enough there.
From personal experience, when I came to that thread, it took me a huge amount of time to find relevant info. About 1 post per page was relevant to what I was looking for. I gave up after 4 days of reading, read about 300 pages. Now the thread is over 1000 pages long.
Wiki is only gonna sort the info out (even though I think the first page works exactly like a wiki), but it won't sort out discussion mess.

 

I think a wiki would be ideal. It would provide a much better way to find information, and it would cut down on the amount of discussion since theoretically people would be able to look for info on the wiki instead of asking the same questions and having the same micro-discussions every few pages of the thread.

 

Are they forcing you to put all the different types of posts in one thread, or just the "this is my experience" type of post? You should generate new threads for new topics as per usual.

The critical information that comes out of the "this is my experience" posts should be put into a wiki that acts as community documentation.

Check out the ubuntu community documentation if you need a model of what that looks like.

 

masterchef, I re-read your posts, I misunderstood what you meant with the wiki.

The main problem is the huge quantity of unindexed content that the thread holds; on that we both agree. A wiki would probably do more good than a subforum could.

However, there is still a huge amount of conversation and experimentation going on on the subject of eGPUs, and with the release of commercial solutions (MSI GUS, thunderbolt, etc...) I think the discussion on eGPUs should still be "isolated".

A schism between gaming hardware/software seems like a good approach, but other issues arise...

 

if diy egpu was more finite then a wiki would be easier, but everything changes so a subforum would allow for more announcement/news type additions and eventual replacing and evolution of old knowledge

 

A subforum for eGPU discussion has been added.

 

Many thank yous to the moderators to create this. As an aside it helps to deal with DIY vs commercial issues as well.

 

Thank you for attention and swift response to the poll. This will hopefully bring even more attention to notebookreview and egpu solutions.

 

I just hope you guys get a wiki setup for your own sake.

this is the precise system that a community documentation wiki solves elegantly. hopefully the subforum helps, but I still feel like there's a lot of technical information that took a lot of work that is going to get lost and buried without a better organizational system.

 

I don't really see a need. They can be discussed here.

And to top that off, egpu's are pointless.

Expresscard 34 has the same bandwidth as a PCI-e 1x interface.
Thunderbolt has a bandwidth range equaling a PCI-e 2.0 2x or 4x interface depending on the manner in which it is connected.

For modern, high end gpu's that simply does not come anywhere close to cutting it. Using those interfaces, they are severely bandwidth starved and as a result perform very, very poorly.

This is the #1 reason why egpu's haven't caught on.

Buying a $300-$500 gpu and then a egpu enclosure which ranges from $150-$300 isn't practical for the resulting performance gains, which in a lot of cases are negligible over the laptop's current onboard graphics.

My thoughts/bias aside, I don't see a large enough community advocating egpu's to warrant their own board. It would be a ghost town.

What is needed is some kind of external MXM interfacev-vlike how esata is an external sata interface which retains ALL of the capabilities of internal sata.

Then you could have an easy MXM to PCI-e converter in your egpu enclosure and actual have something remotely practical.

MXM is going to need an upgrade though. 3.0b has a max bandwidth equivalent to PCI-e 2.1 8x. That's cutting it for now, but in one or two more gpu generations, we will run out of bandwidth.

 

You haven't read enough of eGPU, before making your claim.

With NVidia Optimus, eGPU is able to achieve 85% performance of desktop counterpart.
3DMark benchmark on the first page of this thread with high-end GTX680 and GTX580 confirmed that:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/e-gpu-external-graphics-discussion/418851-diy-egpu-experiences.html

P.s: And I see we were already granted a sub-forum.

 

I suggest you to check the section more often. Half of your considerations are wrong, the other half are outdated

The main problem related to the eGPU is about the compatibility of the space for allocation of the GPU itself that should be probably overridden thanks to thunderbolt that has a dedicated amount of space among the PCI lanes.
About the prices, a DIY eGPU is about 300$ comprehensive of the desktop GPU that matches a GTX 580M (GTX560Ti) used at 85% of the x16 performance). Using it with a subnotebook instead is priceless The global cost of the solution is far below notebook gaming machines, with different pros and cons (weight and heat above all, the need of a power source as the main con). The performance, instead, often comes on par of a single mobile chip gaming solution (check the thread in my sig for performance analysis).

To conclude: Thunderbolt on the newer IB is able to provide a 4x PCI 3.0 equivalent bandwidth and starting from 2013 every Intel MB will be equipped with it. ( Thunderbolt to Become Standard in 2013 - Softpedia)

 

Hi,
I'm really interested in the egpu.
I realized that you can use a GTX 680 to 85% performance.
For now this is the best?
In 2013 you can use desktop card to 100%?
What laptop should I buy to get maximum results? (I like 17").
What is the best adapter?

For now thanks!

 

A dedicated eGPU section has been added, therefore we're closing this thread.

Enjoy