Purchased an empty Aorus Gaming Box on eBay that previously held a GTX 1070, and fitted it with a Gigabyte GTX 1660 SUPER 6GB OC (ITX). No issues with power - the 1660 also uses 8 pin and both components being Gigabyte products there was no issue with the card powering up.
Applied the H2D update and getting a very nice 2200 / 2700 MiB/s. First thing I did was play F-Zero GX on Dolphin at 60 fps in 4k!
Currently having to hotplug during Windows startup, but will make myself an EIF partition on a USB stick. Only downside I have seen is that Aorus Engine software recognises this as an Nvidia card as opposed to a Gaming Box, and therefore cannot change the LEDs, but I can live with that!
To do: Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.
.@hey-pablo, Nice setup! Have you tried RGBFusion 2.0 to control the lighting? There's also a macOS version of Aorus Engine that I've found to work well in changing the RGB settings.
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2020 14" MSI Prestige 14 EVO [11th,4C,G] + RTX 3080 @ 32Gbps-TB4 (AORUS Gaming Box) + Win10 2004 [build link]
Thanks! Pretty happy with the setup.
Great tip for RGB Fusion 2.0. That worked well. Now have everything a matching cool blue.
One thing I haven't figured out yet, I'm almost matching 1660 SUPER benchmarks for an internal GPU, but only when connecting to my display via HDMI from the Mac Mini. If I connect via HDMI from the ePGU itself, the performance actually drops. I wonder if its the high 2700 MiB/s number for Device to Host that actually makes it faster that way.
To do: Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.
.Do you have game benchmarks? I will build something similar but would love to have an idea about games FPS on internal and external monitor
To do: Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.
.Have been using the Kombustor OpenGL FurMark Donut benchmark at 1080p. Best result from that is 4200 which is 67 fps on that benchmark.
Interestingly that is via the 'internal' dislpay (HDMI plugged into MacMini). When I connect direct to the eGPU that's about 10-15% slower. I'm not sure why that is the case as the direct connection should be faster. So either:
a) I'm missing a setting somewhere which is throttling performance when outputting directly from the 1660 SUPER, or;
b) that very high Device-to-Host number at 2,700 MiBs means the throughput is actually better when routing back to the Mac Mini. I'm not sure why that would be - perhaps to do with the GDDR6 memory being able to return output faster than the previous generation of Nvidia cards.
To do: Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.
.@hey-pablo, your Device to Host number is 2851 MB/s. Your Host to Device number is 2334 MB/s.
The 2851 MB/s is better than the 22 Gbps that Intel usually says is the max to be expected from PCIe. I guess controllers and CPUs have gotten more efficient since the beginning of Thunderbolt 3.
Mac mini (2018), Mac Pro (Early 2008), MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015), GA-Z170X-Gaming 7, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Sonnet Echo Express III-D, Trebleet Thunderbolt 3 to NVMe M.2 case