HP Envy 14 with eGPU/ViDock

Hi everyone,
I have an Envy 14 1xxx series with the Radeon HD 5650 and the 1600x900 Radiance display.

I have had this laptop for about a year and already it is starting to run out of steam with some graphics intensive games. So my question is has anyone managed to get an eGPU/ViDock working with this laptop?

I know that as the Envy 14 does not have an ExpressCard port we are forced to use the Wifi mPCIe port which HP (in it's infinite crapness) decided to whitelist so we have two options:

1. Try to unlock the Bios.
I have found this thread on another forum with a person who may be able to do it (even though this is the 2xxx series). Maybe someone with another mPCIe wifi card could try to contact him and see if you can develop/test an unlocked F.23 bios?
Insyde Bios Whitelist HP Envy 14

2. Try the DIY eGPU Setup 1.x utility
I don't know if this will work on our laptops and unfortunately I am overseas at the moment so I cannot even test it. Maybe someone with a working mPCIe eGPU/ViDock could test it with the Envy 14?

I am wondering if anyone has any interest in trying to get this working (and is living in a developed country) as it will greatly increase the lifespan of this laptop.

Cheers,
Mike

 

It will work, or can be made to work. Unwhitelisting bios mods won't help here since the bios does additional checks to ensure it's a wifi card attached (eg: radio checks). Worst case you'll need to boot with the wifi installed, then hotplug the PM3N to get your eGPU (preferrably GTX4xx+) working. Though I've had success using DIY eGPU Setup 1.x to overcome the whitelisting on a HP 2510P, 2530P, Compaq CQ41/DV4-2000.

A GTX4xx or better will benchmark considerably faster than a Envy 14. I know a Acer 4830TG owner is looking to go an eGPU solution as well: http://forum.notebookreview.com/acer/622316-egpu-my-as4830tg-possible.html .

It would be worthwhile considering a Sandy Bridge candidate notebook such as a AS4830TG due to their Series-6 chipset having pci-e 2.0 specced mPCIe/expresscard slots. We'll be seeing a pci-e 2.0 kit released in the coming weeks which will have twice the bandwidth of current pci-e 1.0 kits. With the NVidia Optimus pci-e compression, such a installation will see approx half the bandwidth of Thunderbolt solutions so will give impressive benchmark and real-life gaming performance.

 

Thanks Nando - it is good to see another Aussie leading this eGPU work!

In Australia particularly, I don't know why we as consumers cannot take these manufacturers to court for anti-competitive behaviour by whitelisting certain products:

It seems a waste to need to buy another laptop when in most regards this Envy 14 is still a very good laptop (even though I have recently buggered up many pixels on my Radiance screen and will need to order a new panel).

Is there anyone in this forum who is able to test out Nando's recommendations and see if we can get an eGPU working with the Envy?
(as I have said I am not in a developed country at the moment)

Cheers,
Mike

 

old thread, but thought i'd post here. i've gotten this to work on my gen 1 envy 15 1050nr model. i worked around the whitelisting issue by using the expresscard dock from bplus. i boot up with the expresscard dock empty (hooked up to the mPCIe slot via adapter), and the bios reports the wifi card is missing. windows 7 boots up, i go into standby, plug in my vidock into the expresscard slot, come out of standby, and it detects it. no bios mods or nando's setup files are necessary.

 

Can you show which Bplus mPCIe-to-expresscard product you are using? Any pics of the complete install? The Envy 15 1050nr is a 1st gen i7-quad (no iGPU) with HD5830 dGPU so no Optimus' pci-e compression available there. In which case the performance of the eGPU would be worse than the HD5830 dGPU. Only value of an eGPU being the addition of NVidia CUDA processing if you need it.

 

MR13  ( ExpressCard 34/54 reader ) There's a picture of the setup using the mpcie to expresscard reader.

mine has the 4830 from amd/ati. i'm evaluating realworld performance still. in skyrim, my 4830 runs a little slower than my geforce 560 gtx. it's the equivalent of a 1x link because the pm55 pch runs at pcie 2.0 at 2.5 gt/s. the 560 gtx seems to take less of a hit in performance when running antialiasing. i'm going to try sc2 and mass effect 2 this week.

3dmark 2006 scores suck. they're about 6000 or so. my 4830 overclocked puts down about 8000+, but realworld performance isn't correlating to these scores. i'm sure i'll have issues with bf3, so i'm probably going to try this out on my macbook air soon since it has an intel igp.

 

i'll post pics of the setup later tonight.

 

I assume you are running a Villagetronic ViDock, hence the requirement for an mPCIe-to-expresscard unit (MR13). If you were running a DIY eGPU PE4L/PE4H then wouldn't need it.

Yes, the MBA would perform better since the iGPU would allow the Optimus' pci-e compression to engage on the x1 link, giving approximately double the bandwidth. Futuremark benchmarks showing more than a doubling gpu of performance.

 

has anyone ever tried to force optimus compression on the nvidia cards for those without an intel igp? has anyone done pci config space dumps of cards that have it enabled, and disabled, and done a diff? or is there some sort of hardware requirement that the intel igp has to help offload some of the decompression? (i doubt this)

 

I tried many things but could not get pci-e compression engaged on a non 4500MHD/HD/HD3000 systems. No amount of comparing pci-e dumps helps since the driver itself must initiate the compression as part of a sender-receiver pair. The NVidia driver itself would need to be hacked to bypass the Intel iGPU checks. Not easy, especially when it appears NVidia have encrypted that part. I wish it wasn't so...

 

that really stinks. i was looking into the old buffer tracing capability that people have used with softice, but it looks like it's not supported anymore.

real world performance is actually better than my overclocked 4830 in skyrim. AA seems to really have no detriment on the framerate. still exploring the possibility of overclocking the pcie bus.