Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro

Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by archagon on Monday January 02, 2017 @04:52PM (#13304861)

I would have certainly preferred to do this, but it would have involved a $2000 upgrade first! (Well, barring the TB3-to-TB2 adaptor approach, but I've seen almost no builds doing this.) Also, from what I've seen, there's a lot of uncertainty regarding eGPU support with TB3; many people have reported problems on TechInferno etc., and even AKiTiO is unclear about Mac support. (If you check the specs for the Node, you'll see that Macs are listed as unsupported. Does this mean OSX-only or BootCamp as well? Who knows?) Might be worth waiting a year for things to shake out.

Also, I was optimizing in part for cheapness. Truly great gaming cards cost $300 and up, and $400 total was about as much as I was willing to pay for an upgrade.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by hendersoon on Monday January 02, 2017 @04:59PM (#13304916)

TB3 is supposed to be fully backwards compatible with TB2; it's just a different physical connector. That's why even Apple only charges $29 for the adapter.

Waiting a year is way too much caution for me. I wouldn't pre-order anything, but once other people post it works I'd feel safe to proceed.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by erik on Monday January 02, 2017 @06:18PM (#13305322)

These adapters support hooking TB2 devices to a TB3 host, but not the other way around.

Intel initially announced that TB3 devices would be compatible with TB2 hosts, but it looks like they quietly dropped this feature. It's _really_ hard to find a reference on this though.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by btgeekboy on Monday January 02, 2017 @06:50PM (#13305483)

This guy[0] seems to say it works with the Razer Core.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/5l3y0a/egpu_my_exper...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by erik on Monday January 02, 2017 @07:04PM (#13305556)

Looks like I had the wrong impression. Thanks for the link!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by tarikjn on Monday January 02, 2017 @06:42PM (#13305440)

I thought the same thing as you, but it seems that at least some TB3 devices work with TB2 hosts, e.g. the LG 5K display: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207448

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by intoverflow2 on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @07:42AM (#13317754)

> Might be worth waiting a year for things to shake out.

Some of us have already waited a year, nothing changed. It's been Akitio + PSU or nothing for quite a while now.

Made the jump to PC myself instead of hanging on in hope that something will come out with blessed support for Macs.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by kopijahe on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @01:41AM (#13307213)

> If you check the specs for the Node, you'll see that Macs are listed as unsupported. Does this mean OSX-only or BootCamp as well? Who knows?

BootCamp is fine. Watch this review by Linus for more details: https://youtu.be/JirCwapScUs?t=5m54s

[ Parent | on HN ]