Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro

Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by newhouseb on Monday January 02, 2017 @05:53PM (#13305220)

I spent a while trying to convince myself I could get away with a Mac Pro (Trashcan) hooked up to an external GPU to do VR & Deep Learning using a TB2 enclosure. After fighting for hours (days?) with how the PCI lanes were allocated on Windows, I finally got output to an external display, but it still ran below VR spec according to the various benchmarks. If you wanted to switch back and forth between Windows and Mac, it always required a few power cycles because Windows was constantly thinking it was reconfigured.

I returned the whole thing and bought a beefy gaming PC, which now has an absurd amount of power in it (a 1080 + 2x970... I had forgotten how much fun it is to continually upgrade a machine). For power on the go, I have a Razer Blade with a 1060 in it. It's a shame, because I prefer to develop on a Mac, but I need modern hardware ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

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Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by lucaspiller on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @03:01AM (#13307549)

One thing to bear in mind if you need raw power is the CPU is still going to be lacking in a notebook. The notebook class 6700HQ is clocked at a maximum of 3.5GHz vs 4.2GHz for the desktop class 6700K (and much more if you overclock it), and it's probably not going to run at that speed for long due to thermal limiting.

I was considering getting the new MBP, but instead bought a used workstation. It has a Xeon E5-2670 (8 core/16 thread) and 32GB RAM, I stuck in an RX480 and now have a pretty good working and gaming machine for ~€800. Some games are still poorly optimised for multiple cores though (e.g. Arma 3), so single core performance is still the king for gaming.

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Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by hendersoon on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @09:39AM (#13309386)

CPU performance is a small factor for gaming. GPU is vastly more important. Most games are console ports, and both the Xbox One and Playstation 4 have extremely slow AMD Jaguar cores, comparable to slow Intel Atoms.

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Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by WildUtah on Monday January 02, 2017 @08:27PM (#13305924)

For power on the go, I have a Razer Blade with a 1060 in it.

There are now alternatives for those that need power on the go.[0] Well, for number crunching power on the go, anyway. Won't help for gaming and 3D modeling.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12610804

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Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by ghostly_s on Monday January 02, 2017 @09:11PM (#13306123)

> Won't help for gaming and 3D modeling.

So, entirely irrelevant to the situation described by the parent poster?

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Re:Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro by garrettgrimsley on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @02:12AM (#13307334)

No, because the parent poster also mentioned deep learning, which is number crunching.

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