MacBook Pro Running GTX 780 Ti Via Thunderbolt 2

So to make a Macbook Pro Fast all you have to do is frankenstein the laptop. Sweet
 
I've been waiting for this to become more of a thing, I think there is a decent market of people who want to have a portable computer (surface pro), bring it home and dock it into screen/mouse/keyboard/ethernet/gpu allowing just one device,

Hopefully someone with thunderbolt2 on desktop can do some comparisons to see the performance difference more accurately.
 
This should apply for any thunderbolt 2 computer (macbook air, mac pro, etc).
 
With all that junk on the table he could have just set up a desktop and finish with it. I don't see the point. A mobo, ram and CPU is 450 dollars extra to that setup.
 
this is an interesting development however at a 1500 buy-in for the setup the dude is running in the vid i believe it is a non-starter. Anandtech has a writeup about this as well and the bare parts to get it working is 300 + the cost of case and gpu.

mac people it is better to build your own rig vs addons to your laptop
 
todlerix said:
I've been waiting for this to become more of a thing, I think there is a decent market of people who want to have a portable computer (surface pro), bring it home and dock it into screen/mouse/keyboard/ethernet/gpu allowing just one device,

Hopefully someone with thunderbolt2 on desktop can do some comparisons to see the performance difference more accurately.
Click to expand...

This makes sense. I wonder at what point the mobile CPU becomes the limiting factor in terms of mid-to-high video cards. Would a GTX 760 be utilized to 100% via a setup like this?
 
So, Um, rather than, um, um so ...I stopped watching after that.
 
This looks pretty bad ass. I'd be more interested in seeing it on the built in screen though. I'd heard this was possible, but there was a problem in getting it working under Mavericks, IIRC.
 
49436806.jpg
 
Honestly, at that point, you might as well finish building a desktop computer.
 
MrCaffeineX said:
This makes sense. I wonder at what point the mobile CPU becomes the limiting factor in terms of mid-to-high video cards. Would a GTX 760 be utilized to 100% via a setup like this?
Click to expand...

That's my take on it too, the CPU is a limiting factor, unless you buy a really high end laptop, but where's the crossover point of an inexpensive laptop to do what you want in a mobile setting plus a fully fledged desktop rig that has the power to do this.
 
MrCaffeineX said:
This makes sense. I wonder at what point the mobile CPU becomes the limiting factor in terms of mid-to-high video cards. Would a GTX 760 be utilized to 100% via a setup like this?
Click to expand...

This is becoming a bigger issue with everyone soldering their CPUs to the board. Thus you just married your laptop to whatever CPU it came with. I have older generation of Intel/AMD laptops and the CPUs you can buy to upgrade them are dirt cheap. Sure it's used, but if it works then why do I care?
 
todlerix said:
I've been waiting for this to become more of a thing, I think there is a decent market of people who want to have a portable computer (surface pro), bring it home and dock it into screen/mouse/keyboard/ethernet/gpu allowing just one device,

Hopefully someone with thunderbolt2 on desktop can do some comparisons to see the performance difference more accurately.
Click to expand...

MrCaffeineX said:
This makes sense. I wonder at what point the mobile CPU becomes the limiting factor in terms of mid-to-high video cards. Would a GTX 760 be utilized to 100% via a setup like this?
Click to expand...
That actually may be the future of computing right there-- the idea of having a smartphone or tablet to carry around, but if you want to do stuff that can't be done on a mobile device, you dock it at home that's paired with a more powerful video card, monitor, and a keyboard and it becomes your desktop PC.

Ubuntu is planning on doing something similar with their upcoming smartphone. Dock it and it becomes an Ubuntu desktop computer. I wouldn't be surprised that after the Windows ecosystem is unified across Xbox console, smartphone, tablet, and PC, Microsoft plans to do something similar with their Surface tablets and Windows Phone OS-capable smartphones. Apple and Google probably have something cooked up in a mobile-device-turned-into desktop PC. Imagine the next iPad or iPhone that when docked becomes an OSX-capable Mac desktop computer.

And, in the past, many computers that wanted this portability and have power when they want it, wanted something like this. In the past, there were considerations of an external video card connected via the PCMCIA CardBus (who remembers those?) interface. The other one years later was via an external PCI-Express cable, but that never took off either. With Thunderbolt, the bandwidth is finally here. Sure, you can build your desktop PC, but what if you just want only a laptop? The laptop does all the light to medium work you do and on the go, but when you're home and not on the road, just plug in your external video card, or dock it, and you have a capable gaming PC right there.

There is a market for this, and in several years or more, we may be docking our x86 tablet to be turned into a mid-range desktop PC. Imagine the future Surface Pro with a future Intel Core i5 processor that when docked becomes a mid-range computer with the dock serving as the host to a PCI-E video card, keyboard and a touchscreen-capable LCD monitor. This convergence and flexibility of computing is going to happen. It's going to take some though before we reach that point.
 
The problem is the outrageous price for the enclosure. Someone needs to kickstart a reasonably priced one, and this will be cake.
 
I don't really see this a specifically a laptop issue; this looks to me like the foundation for the holy grail of gaming; a fully modular gpu solution.


You buy a gpu container box that includes
- a standard interface to connect with a computer (laptop OR desktop)
- a standard interface to plug 1 or possibly more gpu cards into
- a place to mount a power supply
- some kind of cooling solution

Ta-da done. Run your cable from your computer (laptop or desktop) to your GPU box, then run monitor cables from the GPU box. Want to upgrade your computer? Fine, you don't have to worry about the GPU box, just upgrade away. Want to slap a new card into your GPU box? Fine, you don't have to worry about your computer.

Companies can make GPU boxes, sell them with or without cards, with or without nifty cooling solutions and they can slap as many damn glowing stickers on the damn thing as they want to try and help sell them. Personally I would LOVE to have my gpu solution completely disconnected from my cpu/storage solution.
 
xeddex said:
I don't really see this a specifically a laptop issue; this looks to me like the foundation for the holy grail of gaming; a fully modular gpu solution.
Click to expand...
But what would be the point of having amazing graphics that sits at one location? We've had that for years, it's called a desktop. All the laptop does is act like a CPU. A very expensive and slow CPU.

P13950969.jpg


Personally I would LOVE to have my gpu solution completely disconnected from my cpu/storage solution.
Click to expand...

Personally, I'd like to see GPUs that are like CPUs. Socket based that plugs into the motherboard, with a special expansion for memory. Rather then having a card so dam big it might as well be as big as the motherboard it sits in. And because it takes up so much damn room, it becomes increadibly hard to fit good cooling on them. Usually eating up a PCI-E slot or two.

ramp_1024x768.jpg
 
That picture made me look that up, and I wish that was a thing...and I kinda don't want it to be. Look at how much extra crap you'd have to cover the motherboard with to install a high-performance graphics processor alongside a CPU...socketed GDDR5 would be cool though.
That picture also showed me this page full of old Voodoo card box art.

http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/boxes.htm
It's like going to Egghead as a child!.
 
Holy crap that guy needs to take a communications class. Just pause, don't say "uhh" or "umm" a billion times.
 
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
 
I thought everyone was just being assholes about his communication skills until I watched the video myself. Damn that kid uhh, sucks, umm, at uhh, talking. Umm, for, uhh, real. Umm. Bye.
 
It always amazes me the lengths that people will go to so they can use the wrong tool for the job, at that point why not add a MB/CPU/RAM and have a real gaming PC. Personally I wouldn't want to put that much wear and tear on a laptop due to heat issues and the disposable nature of them.
 
So spend almost $1000 on a huge video card enclosure, then buy a dedicated power supply, plus hook it up to an external monitor... so you can hook a desktop GPU up to a laptop? So instead of buying a non-portable desktop, you end up with a multi-piece, external power supply equipped "laptop" gaming setup that isn't really portable either. Sounds brilliant. :rolleyes:
 
xeddex said:
I don't really see this a specifically a laptop issue; this looks to me like the foundation for the holy grail of gaming; a fully modular gpu solution.


You buy a gpu container box that includes
- a standard interface to connect with a computer (laptop OR desktop)
- a standard interface to plug 1 or possibly more gpu cards into
- a place to mount a power supply
- some kind of cooling solution
Click to expand...

Great so the "holy grail" would mean:
-A second heavy box to tote around. A unit that encompasses a case, GPU, and power supply would be heavy.
-Cool, more things to plug into an electrical outlet. Like I don't have enough power cords to plug into electrical outlets, I need to plug in my GPU separately from my computer too. I also need additional cables running between boxes on my desk.
-Awesome, I want another second cooling system's fans whirring away.



xeddex said:
Want to upgrade your computer? Fine, you don't have to worry about the GPU box, just upgrade away. Want to slap a new card into your GPU box? Fine, you don't have to worry about your computer.
Click to expand...

So just like now? Building a new computer and want to keep our video card? You can! Want to upgrade your video card and not the CPU, etc.? You can!
 
A lot of negative opinions about this here. The video is gone now so I couldn't see it, but I've been looking at eGPU-solutions for a long time now and it's something I really want.

You can do it much cheaper with Expresscard/mPCIe, but then you only get 5Gbps. With Thunderbolt 1.0 you get 10Gbps, and 20Gbps with TB2. Unfortunately, not many laptops except for Macbooks have Thunderbolt, and the enclosures that you can buy are really expensive. There was a cheaper Thunderbolt-solution a while ago called BPlus TH05, but they had to stop selling them because Intel complained or something.

I want to replace my desktop PC with a laptop. Why? Why not?

What I want is a very portable laptop (12-13") that I can carry around and use outside my home, and when I get home, plug it in to my large display and external GPU, plus access to a NAS. It would be awesome!

Won't be able to upgrade the CPU, but my i7 920 is almost 6 years old now! I would be perfectly happy to replace that with a newer i7 laptop CPU.
 
Unknown-One said:
Wow, that external enclosure is gigantic/

Might as well have just built an entire PC, would have been roughly the same volume and MANY times more practical.
Click to expand...

If It didn't have a PSU in it, it'd be smaller. Don't forget though, that thing holds a couple full length cards, so it's not going to be tiny.
 
And since when did you guys start caring about "practicality"?
 
Can't imagine the fps loss and latency introduced adding the PCI-E to Thunderbolt conversion layer. Gimmicky but not practical. Better off with a complete SFF.
 
Ruoh said:
And since when did you guys start caring about "practicality"?
Click to expand...

Speaking for myself, since forever. Its a nice proof of concept but practically its not there yet, especially since it seems to need an external monitor. Its far easier and practical to put together a SFF/itx system that will blow the pants off a laptop system.
 
Ranulfo said:
Speaking for myself, since forever. Its a nice proof of concept but practically its not there yet, especially since it seems to need an external monitor. Its far easier and practical to put together a SFF/itx system that will blow the pants off a laptop system.
Click to expand...

This particular setup required the external monitor. It wouldn't require one with an iGPU (Iris Pro). I think most of you are poo-pooing this because of the Apple factor.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top