2017 15" MacBook Pro (RP555) [7th,4C,H] + RX Vega 56 @ 32Gbps-TB3 (Sonnet Breakaway 550) + macOS 10.14 & Win10 [Benjamin Benson]  

System specs

• 2017 15'' Macbook Pro Touchbar with Intel Core i7-7920HQ@3,1GHz, 16GB RAM, Radeon Pro 555 and Intel HD Graphics 630
• MacOS Mojave 10.14 and Bootcamp Windows 10 Pro (1809)

eGPU hardware (eGPU enclosure, video card, any third-party TB3 cable, any custom mods)

• Sonnet Breakaway Box 550
• Asus Radeon RX Vega 56 ROG Strix 8GB OC (standard clock)
• Acer Curved 27'' 1920x1080 144Hz FreeSync monitor

Comments:

I like the minimalistic design of the Breakaway. I don't need any other ports beside the one USB-C TB3. As mentioned somewhere else the USB-C port is bad in that way that the USB plug does not fully go into the port, looks and feels just wrong. When in idle mode you only slightly hear the PSU fan (which is the one only running), want to replace it later maybe.

I went for Vega 56 due to Plug&Play support on MacOS, now okayish prices and better cost-performance ration compared to Vega 64 cards. Didn't do any overclocking so far. Everything is known about the card (noise, heat) and i can unfortunatelly confirm the coil whining, in my case at the beginning if the card is not yet warm. Disclaimer: it could be the PSU of course as well, didn't check that so far.

Hardware pictures

Installation steps

Hardware: Pretty straight forward since i didn't do any mods (yet). Due to the length of the Vega card (just 2cm space left) i had to remove the big case fan (see pictures above) and slide in the card diagonally. Added the fan again afterwards. My plan is to replace that fan with a better (more quite) fan later. Also the PSU could be better.

MacOS: Plug&Play since Radeon drivers are pre-shipped already. Works with both internal and external display(s). The performance of the drivers is not as good as on Windows 10 (see benchmarks later).

Windows 10: A bit more work. I cleaned the Bootcamp Radeon drivers using Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU). Installed the Vendors Amd Radeon Drivers 24.20.11016.4. In this forum i was reading to disable (not uninstall) the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter (aka iGPU). The result is a working setup with external display only (which is ok for me under Windows).

Benchmarks

3DMark  2.6.6174 (will share later)

Windows 10

MacOS

Comments

All my games are runing fine on Windows BUT but EA games (aka Origin) don't. Battlefront 1 and Battlefield 1 are complaining that AMD driver version is 0.0 while it should be x.y. That seems to be a general problem search the web and also some hints in this forum show same issues (but unfortunatelly didn't help). Something i have to get fix  😡 

I compared the setup with an AORUS GTX 1070 Gaming Box which had around 8%-10% better benchmark performance  🙄 

I will replace the big case fan with something more quite later since when running its very loud compared to the GPU fans.