Judging by this you can still gain a massive performance gain with a TB external
a whole article on the performance of GTX 480s in electrical x16, x8 and x4 slots
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2011 Thunderbolt Mini=External Dedicated Graphics Card?
- Thread starter lilsoccakid74
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Judging by this you can still gain a massive performance gain with a TB external
a whole article on the performance of GTX 480s in electrical x16, x8 and x4 slots
well then the 480 costs? 300 or so. so if the adapter is 100 it is a 400 dollar add on. a base mini at 600 becomes 1k with very good graphics for some it would work for others too much coin.
The GTX 480 is an extremely high end GPU it demonstrates that almost any GPU can be used near full power
Are you suggesting that BattleForge, Call of Duty 4, Call of Juarez 2, Company of Heroes, Crysis, Dawn of War 2, DiRT, Quake Wars, Far Cry, Far Cry 2, HAWX Prey, Quake 4, STALKER, STALKER - Clear Sky, Unreal Tournament 3, World in Conflict are not actual programs?
Are you suggesting 3DMark 03, 3DMark 05 and 3DMark 06 are not actual benchmarks?
That does seem a bit weird indeed.. But fact is that one can't really tell how good things will perform until one tries it. And I don't think anybody has tried to use an external GPU on a TB connection yet. So not actual programs/actual benchmarks are an issue, but actual external GPU's are.
Thunderbolt isn't as fast as PCIe 2.0 x4 though. TB has maximum bandwidth of 10Gb/s while PCIe x4 provides 16Gb/s. According to Intel, TB provides around 800-900MB/s in real world, which is equal to 6.4-7.2Gb/s (quite a big overhead).
Those charts are promising but I don't think it is time to start celebrating yet. The Sonnet thingy does not even say that it supports GPUs. To put it bluntly, it isn't as simple as slapping any GPU in the box and then it would magically run. Some software is most likely needed and your GPU choices are most likely limited, just like in Mac Pro.
Yes. Only a few of them are OS X compatible.Are you suggesting that ... are not actual programs?
Yes. Each is a synthetic benchmark that applies only to Windows.Are you suggesting...are not actual benchmarks?
Which is less than AGP 4x!
Yes.Hi. New to the forums here but reading this thread I just had to join in.
One small detail and I could be wrong here but isnt Thunderbolt speed 10 Gb/s in each direction for an effective 20 Gb/s? (or however lower it is in RL).
Just finsished reading this thread (which wasn't much it is quite small) but has there been any updates relating to this topic? I read a post over at Engadget during the summer about the company Village instructor that had plans to construct a Thunderbolt PCI Express graphics card enclosure. I was wondering if there's been any progress or is it still just a rumor?
I appreciate that this is a Mac mini discussion forum. However, this type of solution seems like it would make very good sense for a laptop. At your desk, you could plug the laptop into an external graphics card that hooks to a monitor. That would make the laptop a better (if not super) gaming or graphic work solution. And yet it's still a portable solution, as you just disconnect from the dock when you travel. You could actually sell a thunderbolt display with the graphics card built-in if you wanted...
Hi. New to the forums here but reading this thread I just had to join in.
One small detail and I could be wrong here but isnt Thunderbolt speed 10 Gb/s in each direction for an effective 20 Gb/s? (or however lower it is in RL).
Yes but a GPU doesn't have much to say back to the computer. That's all one-way traffic. So the limiting factor is the outbound direction of the thunderbolt, so it's limited at 10Gb/s.
If you're attaching a NAS or SAN with 2-way traffic it would make more sense to count it that way.
ViDock has all the information you are wanting on their facebook page. They are opening up pre-orders soon and the more pre-orders received, the cheaper the ViDock will be. They are hoping to make it under 400$. It does sound like a good solution for some and I thought it would be good for me too, but they said it wont be out until after December so I can't wait that long for a new PC.