Nerdvana: External GPU Docks

My Lenovo USB dock is like $180 and it still requires two cables to the laptop. It has five USB ports, ethernet, and two displayport connections. It does work decently well despite the high cost.

This just kept fucking happening so I am ditching the 1080 and going with a 1060, falling back to glassy smooth 1080p max everything vs 4k.

With the new 1060 I just ordered placed in the Razer Core I can install latest nvidia drivers just fine! There has to be some generational issue or firmware bug with the 1080 cards that is causing this. It was INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING, like punch the wall material. And I literally tried two different 1080 cards, same result each time. Push the 1060 in there and bam no issues whatsoever easy breezy lemon squeezy

I will revisit when the successor to 1080 Ti comes out. That’s the beauty of a generic external PCI box!!

So weird, haven’t seen anyone else with that problem.

Bum power supply?

Why would that affect driver install? The card is under no load at that time, and I saw no heat or power issues in 4k gameplay which is very heavy load.

I strongly suspect a generational firmware issue / bug as the 1080 is the oldest of the series. I bet you dollars to donuts the 1080 Ti in there would not exhibit this problem.

(It has been a looong time since I updated a firmware on a video card but it does happen.)

Just the difference between a 1060 and 1080 is a lot of power. A lot of other things too, of course.

Have you ever tried another enclosure? Does the enclosure itself have firmware to update?

And I’ve already updated the firmware in my 1060 twice. Mostly it was fan curve stuff though.

Like I said it worked fine with the 1050 Ti and 1070 in there as well. But all those came after the 1080 in the release cycle.

It’s actually five fans, as the PSU has two! There’s three on the bottom, plus the PSU fans.

The previously referenced disassembly guide is quite excellent. It’s not difficult except there is one torx screw where you will definitely need a right angle driver to get to it, in where the power connects to the PSU internally.

The PSU assembly kinda looks like this once extracted (which is not that tough, just watch for all the screw locations)… I’ve marked the 3 fan locations. Fan 3 is technically attached to the shroud, pushing air upwards, while fans 1 and 2 are internal to the PSU but pretty easy to remove and replace. They all have headers, though not typical mobo fan headers.

I went through the exercise to replace the PSU fan and decided to pull one of them, because the bottom shroud has a fairly large fan pushing air up into it anyway. Appears to be temp controlled since there is a temp sensor on it.

You can see where the two plastic fan shrouds attach on the front and back respectively. The “back” is the side with the power connector cables coming out.

Of course me being me I had to snip some fan grills for better air throughput:

I don’t suppose I need to point out that having a returnable (under warranty) GPU dock would be sort of handy right now. Just saying… :-)

Why would it need to be returnable?

Just for keeping your options open. As you said, it’s likely that the 1080 cards just weren’t compatible, but it’s not out of the question that something might be out of spec with your dock. Swapping it out while it’s under warranty is something I’d consider doing just to eliminate that possibility.

This was an interesting comparison between Thunderbolt 3 (Razer Core) and proprietary direct PCIe lanes (Alienware Graphics Amplifier).

tl;dr – either the TB3 shared lane design or Razer’s implementation thereof leads to much lower performance for a 1080Ti in challenging games. I’d love to have to seen some 4k testing, though.

Yes, I found that interesting too. Would have expected them to basically perform identically. But the explanation makes sense; thunderbolt goes through the system chipset while normal PCI lanes (such as those routed to the amplifier) come directly off the CPU.

And in related news…

For anyone else who would rather not click the related news link to get the gist of things:

Intel Announces Plans to Integrate Thunderbolt 3 into Future Intel CPUs and to Release the Thunderbolt Protocol Specification to the Industry

Aorus will be selling the box for $599, a roughly $200 premium over a stand-alone GTX 1070 card. This works out to roughly $100 cheaper than even some of the cheapest eGFX chassis on the market, further bringing down the overall cost of going with an eGFX solution.

Looks to have extra USB ports too-- that’s more like it! Starting to see some innovation here.

What I really want to see is a $300 TB3 dock with an integrated GTX1060. Not upgradable, everything fully black-box-- you plug it in and it charges your laptop, gives a bunch of extra USB ports, gig-ethernet, and that GTX1060 eGPU.

My feeling is that at the higher-end, your 1070/1080/1080ti levels, most people will want to buy the thunderbolt enclosure separate from the GPU. They value that customization and upgradability. And that’s not where the money is, anyway-- great margins maybe, but you’ll find volume at the lower-end.

I’ll buy that. Good thing it’s got a solid chance of existing by the time my PS4 Pro is getting long in tooth.

Apparently Apple actually demoed using this box in their WWDC content today, makes it semi officially supported

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/egfx-breakaway-box.html

$299 standard thunderbolt 3 to egfx from what I can see.

I was super excited when they mentioned this during the keynote. My (now old) MacBook Pro 13" with Touchbar is actually surprisingly capable with gaming (OTC looks and runs great), but now I can really take it to the next level if I want. I hope it pushes Blizzard to develop a macOS version of Overwatch, and Bungie to do Destiny 2. But I’m probably dreaming. Back to the PS4 Pro…

Oh. I didn’t know this didn’t exist and just assumed it was a Mac/Windows launch like their last few games.