External GPU on Macbook Pro Retina

Hey peeps,

I have a Macbook Pro Retina 15 (Early 2013) with the 650m and have been thinking about upgrading to a new laptop, as it's becoming insufficient for gaming. However, I've known for a while now that external GPUs can be connected to Macbooks via thunderbolt, and looked up to see if there was anything I could do.

So I stumbled upon this: http://www.amazon.com/Akitio-AK-T2PC-TIA-AKTU-Thunder2-...

I know that I'll have to use an external PSU- that I already have. I plan on getting a 960 or 970 if I go with this. My question is...will this work if I have windows on my macbook? When I game I go on windows, I have that bootcamped. Also, how would I go about having the laptop even detect that there's and external GPU even connected. Is this practical? What do you guys think? That's all. Thanks.

 

Won't likely happen. And will be Windows only, and only on selected laptops for gaming. MacBook Pro is not a gaming laptop.

 

I think it is a really cool idea, but in the description it says "provides a maximum of 25W", and I don't see how to plug in extra power without modifying it.

Are there other solutions out there like this that are made for GPU's?

Edit - actually, looks like it works:

https://odd-one-out.serek.eu/thunderbolt-2-egpu-setup-using-akitio-thunder2/

 

To be honest, external GPUs are kind of a waste of time and money.

You're going to spend $100's on the external enclosure, plus the cost of the GPU. It's going to take a lot of effort to get everything recognized and working. And then you need to deal with loading drivers. And even when drivers get loaded, you won't be running the GPU at full speed, because external GPUs typically run at PCIe 4x. And even if you get all of that working, you're out-of-luck once something goes wrong, because running an eGPU over Thunderbolt is unsupported, and you'll be stuck on your own trying to troubleshoot whatever may go wrong in the future.

And even if ALL of that works, you'll be stuck using the eGPU on a desk, connected to an external monitor. And at that point, you might as well just buy yourself an inexpensive gaming desktop for the amount of time and money you put into trying to get an eGPU working.

So unless you really know what you're doing (which I'm guessing that you're relatively new to eGPUs), or unless you have a lot of money to burn on an experimental project that may or may not fail, I'd say just skip the eGPU idea. It's nowhere near ready for consumer use yet.