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15" Lenovo W530 + HD7950@4Gbps-EC2 (PE4L 2.1b) + Win7/8 [chiknnwatrmln]


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Nando asked me to make a thread after I got my eGPU working so here it is. I'll be updating it later with pictures and more info, including more benchmarks.

Components

15" Lenovo W530 (Nvidia Quadro K1000m, Intel HD 4000, i7 3740qm 2.7Ghz)

PE4L-EC060A 2.1b Expresscard-to-PCIe adapter

Sapphire HD 7950 video card @x1 2.0 (Gen2) expresscard bandwidth

Corsair CX600 as a PSU

cheap Rosewill Mini ATX case as an enclosure

Win8/64-bit/Win7/64-bit (Dual boot, works with both)

Installation

Win8:

The software part was a pain but I figured it out so you don't have to. After getting all the hardware working, I went into device manager and disabled the Quadro GPU. I then rebooted, and plugged in the 7950 while the laptop was off. I made sure that Windows didn't automatically install drivers for it. Then I downloaded the latest WHQL drivers for my card, rebooted, opened device manager and disabled the Intel HD4000 graphics. To switch back to either iGPU or dGPU, turn off laptop, unplug 7950, reboot and open device manager. Enable either dGPU or iGPU.You may have to go into BIOS and choose which GPU to use. (I need the Quadro for Solidworks when I'm not using my 7950, so that part is important.) Anyway, that's it.

Win7: Same as above, except both GPUs need to be enabled at startup to work properly. An interesting note, on Win7 I can have my Nvidia dGPU running my laptop screen and my AMD eGPU running my external screen at the same time. On Win8 it's one or the other.

Benchmarks

My card is overclocked to 1150/1600, but I've only run a few benchmarks. Metro LL scores me at 37.4 fps average. For comparison, I saw that similarly overclocked 7950's scored about 40 fps average in a desktop, so performance loss is not as much as I thought it would be. These benches had two purposes, one for the info, and two, to show me that my overclock is 100% stable. Overall I must say, I'm very pleased with performance. I saw some of my scores around those of 680 eGPUs. Summary for comparison against existing implementations being:

DX9: 3dmark06=22138

DX10: 3dmkvantage.gpu=28265

DX11: 3dmk11.gpu=8753

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DirectX9

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DirectX10

2uos1g0.png

DirectX11

20pt4xc.jpg

Metro:LL benchmark

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Unigine Heaven 4.0

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Here is a screenshot of somebody else's 7950 at the exact same clocks that ran the same benchmark (Heaven 4.0 DX11 maxxed). My score was lower, it was exactly 82.6% of the performance as the desktop counterpart. This goes to show that bandwidth benchmark is about what was expected (~80%, I'm sure more tests would show a bit more variance).

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GPUZ screenshot showing my overclock, max temps, etc. I actually overloaded my PSU on that run, it's a CX600 with only 46A on the 12v rail but when gaming it doesn't exceed 45A

Pictures

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This is my setup

xlkync.jpg

A closer look inside

inesfs.jpg

PE4L 2.1b

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For some reason DMC and RE only will run in 1280x720. DMC didn't give me my score, it just closed down. RE5 gave me 169 fps at 1280x720. I'll rerun Heaven now. Edit: Heaven isn't loading up my GPU 100%, it's only getting up to about 50% when I don't run it at max settings. The results won't be accurate.

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For some reason DMC and RE only will run in 1280x720. DMC didn't give me my score, it just closed down. RE5 gave me 169 fps at 1280x720. I'll rerun Heaven now. Edit: Heaven isn't loading up my GPU 100%, it's only getting up to about 50% when I don't run it at max settings. The results won't be accurate.

Try setting your external LCD to 59Hz in screen resolution->advanced settings->monitor. I found that then unlocked the 1280x800 mode. Ensure too you disable the video card audio in Device Manager so audio is provided by the internal notebook speaker. Doing that liberates some additional pci-e bandwidth.

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So I installed Windows 7 because of an incompatibility with one of my games and now I'm having trouble getting my rig to work. I followed the exact same process as Win8 but even though device manager says my egpu is working nothing displays on my external monitor and the laptop display is being used. Edit: uninstalled all my video drivers and reinstalled only AMD one. Now I'm getting error 12, I think that's progress maybe? Anyway I'm gonna take a look at the troubleshooting thread tomorrow after classes and see if I can figure this out. edit2: reinstalled drivers and I'm back to square one, nothing on the eGPU faq seems to help either... Nothing on external monitor but device manager says it's working. Nevermind, got it working by reinstalling Intel HD400 drivers, enabling it, rebooting, then disabling it.

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