eGPU on Thunderbolt 1

[rockinaut59]

Hi all,
recently I bought a mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13". The laptop runs great! its very fast for basic and some intensive tasks, but as we all know, these laptops are not great at gaming. I didn't buy the laptop to game, but I do like doing it a bit on the side. Anyway, to get to the point, can you use an eGPU with the Thunderbolt 1 port on this MacBook Pro? I've heard on some forums that you can, while others will say you can't. I know that it will be significantly slower than the Thunderbolt 3 newer laptops, and have less bandwidth, but perhaps it won't be that bad if I got the right components.

Currently to game, I use both Nvidia GeForce Now (which works great), and sometimes I just play games on Windows Boot Camp (mostly Fortnite) with settings either low or off, gets me 30 fps. I know probably the smartest idea would be just to build a gaming pc, I don't game that much to the point where that would really make sense. Plus, if an eGPU does work with my Mac, I would be able to use it with other demanding applications as well (Adobe Premier, etc.), which would be a great value.

Thanks in advance

 

[Bornee35]

It's possible, there are script floating around that can disable apple's TB3 only parameters.

Remember that for TB1, one device can only use half it's speed, and there is a 20% protocol overhead for the language that TB uses to communicate, so TB1 runs at 4Gb/s and sends then receives one after the other. This last point is key, because it effectively means that it's 2Gb/s. This is in comparison to a normal half speed PCI-e slot giving 8Gb/s.

Your GPU MUST have onboard GDDR or it will be slower than your built in GPU or it must send image data down and up that cable a minimum of 3 times a frame. Raw uncompressed 1080p video at 60 frames per second is about 3Gbps by itself so this is COSTLY.

 

[rockinaut59]

It's possible, there are script floating around that can disable apple's TB3 only parameters.

Remember that for TB1, one device can only use half it's speed, and there is a 20% protocol overhead for the language that TB uses to communicate, so TB1 runs at 4Gb/s and sends then receives one after the other. This last point is key, because it effectively means that it's 2Gb/s. This is in comparison to a normal half speed PCI-e slot giving 8Gb/s.

Your GPU MUST have onboard GDDR or it will be slower than your built in GPU or it must send image data down and up that cable a minimum of 3 times a frame. Raw uncompressed 1080p video at 60 frames per second is about 3Gbps by itself so this is COSTLY.

[doublepost=1532373561][/doublepost]Hi, thanks for the info. So I know that I could definitely find a GPU with GDDR, and I’m assuming that I could buy a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure and use the TB3>TB2/1 adapter. But where are the work around scripts to turn the TB3-only block off?

 

[Bornee35]

[doublepost=1532373561][/doublepost]Hi, thanks for the info. So I know that I could definitely find a GPU with GDDR, and I’m assuming that I could buy a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure and use the TB3>TB2/1 adapter. But where are the work around scripts to turn the TB3-only block off?

https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/script-enable-egpu-on-tb1-2-macs-on-macos-10-13-4/