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#MACBOOK PRO THUNDERBOLT PORT METAL BENT DOWN 1080P#
For example, the just-released NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti can pull 1080p at medium-high settings in many recent games and currently benchmarks as the ~40th best video card on the market! Better yet, many of these single-slot offerings are short and half as long as the monster enthusiast cards, easily fitting into AKiTiO’s compact case without any modifications. These aren’t super-extreme gaming cards, but these days they more than get the job done. Most GPUs are power hogs that rely on one or two extra power ports on top of the card, but there are a few designed to pull power straight from the PCI slot. I really didn’t want to have a PSU octopus and a ragged hunk of metal sitting bare on my table, though it sadly seemed inevitable. There are also arcane startup rituals to get everything powered and running with the right timing. Usually, the front panel is bent back or removed to fit larger cards, and then a desktop PSU is made to turn on with a paperclip and adapted to fit the DC plug. Most eGPU builders buy this case to hack up, not to use as-is.
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(AKiTiO engineers even popped in on occasion to offer under-the-table eGPU advice - off-warranty, of course.) It was also one of the cheapest options on the market at around $200: very fair considering that a barebones development Thunderbolt 2 board cost nearly as much! The Thunder2 wasn’t designed for eGPU use, but dozens of eGPU enthusiasts on forums like TechInferno demonstrated that it ran stable and performed admirably. It was clear that the anointed case for the job was the AKiTiO Thunder2. The majority of published eGPU builds involve enormous graphics cards connected to hotwired desktop PSUs, sitting in unseemly, torn-apart Thunderbolt-to-PCI chassises. But I was most concerned about the hardware hacking required to get the thing up and running in the first place.
#MACBOOK PRO THUNDERBOLT PORT METAL BENT DOWN SOFTWARE#
I gathered that there may be timing issues and other problems that would require a bevy of software hacks to fix - mostly on the Windows side of things. I knew there would be some performance loss from the limited bandwidth of TB2. I already knew I’d have to use an external monitor and do my gaming in BootCamp, which was already the case. Unlike many gaming enthusiasts, my goal was to optimize for simplicity over power: the fewer hacks and workarounds I had to use, the better. I’m usually reluctant to pursue these sorts of under-the-radar hobbyist projects, but there was enough prior art to make it worth a shot! Modern Thunderbolt 3 (allegedly) supports external GPUs in an official capacity, but older Thunderbolt 2 can get the job done as well, even though it’s unsanctioned by Intel. So I started looking into the scary world of external Thunderbolt GPUs, colloquially known as eGPU.
#MACBOOK PRO THUNDERBOLT PORT METAL BENT DOWN PC#
(Still need to see the benchmarks on that - educated guess.) Worth it for a few hundred bucks, but $2000? No way!īuilding a gaming PC wasn’t an option due to my mobile lifestyle, and in any case the kind of CPU I could buy for cheap would be comically underpowered compared to the i7 4850HQ I already had in front of me. Initially, I thought it might be time to switch out my MacBook for the upcoming 2016 model, but the winter reveal wasn’t particularly tempting: CPU performance was about the same as mine and the GPU was - at best - 3 times as powerful. I lived on a strict diet of indie games from 2015 to 2016 - thank goodness for well-tuned titles like Overwatch and The Witness! - but the itch to try games like the new Mirror’s Edge and Deus Ex became too great. But around the time that the new generation of consoles dropped, AAA games on the PC started becoming unplayable, even at postage-stamp resolutions with the lowest possible settings. My late-2013 15” MacBook Pro’s discrete GPU - an NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M - was pretty good for gaming during the first year of its life. The setup was just about as painless, though there were a few extra steps to provide the requisite 180W to the card. Update: Since writing this article, I’ve upgraded to a GTX 1080.