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External GPU?

K

Killery96

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 20, 2011
281
0
I don't know if I'm dreaming: Is there a way one could connect an external GPU from say Nvidia or AMD to an Apple Laptop, on OSX or Windows through Bootcamp, to achieve a better gaming performance?

E.
 
A few companies make these... they are pretty horrid though, mainly because of bandwidth issues. In the future if any make some that use Thunderbolt, it could be much better.
 
Sony has made one thunderbolt graphic card adapter, but it's limited to weaker cards for now.
The 13 inch MBP is the onlt machine that could benefit from that atm.
 
superericla said:
And the base 15 inch MacBook Pro
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure that the cost of an external GPU that *might* be faster isn't worth it. If you want better gfx a 2.2GHz MBP will be faster and cheaper.

I'm still concerned about the 10GB/sec limit on TB, which could even limit cards like 6490M
 
cluthz said:
I'm pretty sure that the cost of an external GPU that *might* be faster isn't worth it. If you want better gfx a 2.2GHz MBP will be faster and cheaper.

I'm still concerned about the 10GB/sec limit on TB, which could even limit cards like 6490M
Click to expand...

Why would that be so expensive? Thunderbolt is just an PCI-e cable basically so it's not that expensive to make. I would like to see a ATI 6990 ( desktop ) or a GTX 580 ( desktop ) over Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2.0.
 
mark28 said:
Why would that be so expensive? Thunderbolt is just an PCI-e cable basically so it's not that expensive to make. I would like to see a ATI 6990 ( desktop ) or a GTX 580 ( desktop ) over Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2.0.
Click to expand...

It won't be that expensive, but it would cost more than buying the upgraded MacBookPro, and thus rendered useless. The cards available for Thunderbolt would be slower than the 6750M as far as I know. (Sony is selling 6630M for TB use)

AMD 6990 or GTX580 is a total waste on Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt will only be able to push PCIe 2.x at 4x speed, versus 16x needed to utilize those cards. (PCIe is 4GBit/sec pr lane, so 4x is actually 12 Gbit/sec versus Thunderbolts 10 GBit/sec

The sonnet adapter was rumored to cost $499, and you need a graphic card as well.
 
You want this

http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock

will only work if you have a PCI Express slot, also its an expensive way to do things and not get full power out of any card you put in the box, certainly it would do no good going for a top of even high"mid range" card, but for me, still running on a 8600M 2008 MBP i can see it being a nice upgrade, however, a 27" iMac is a nicer upgrade.

If these docks were around £100 (for the top model, around £30 for the low end one) then they would be a superb purchase if the design matched the mac style, it would make an excellent docking station.
 
Last edited:
Nightarchaon said:
You want this

http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock

will only work if you have a PCI Express slot, also its an expensive way to do things and not get full power out of any card you put in the box, certainly it would do no good going for a top of even high"mid range" card, but for me, still running on a 8600M 2008 MBP i can see it being a nice upgrade, however, a 27" iMac is a nicer upgrade.

If these docks were around £100 (for the top model, around £30 for the low end one) then they would be a superb purchase if the design matched the mac style, it would make an excellent docking station.
Click to expand...

I don't think the present ViDock could support a GTX 4xx or 5xx series, could it? or any AMD/ATI desktop GPU's?
 
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