Okay, so my two W600 cards arrived yesterday, and today I managed to get them up and running.
I put both FirePros into the Sonnet Echo Express Pro. Windows picked both of them up, however one of them ended up with a Code 12. The solution is to make sure the AMD Audio Devices are disabled (I don't need them) to free resources, and then enable the W600 cards one by one: Disable the card that did not suffer from a Code 12, then disable the one that has Code 12, and then enable the Code 12 card first, followed by the one that did not have the issue. Both cards should be functional at this point. Unfortunately, this needs to be repeated on every boot, and docking-and-undocking, which makes using both cards at once very inconvenient. Here goes my dream of being able to run a 12-screen video-wall off a TB1 enclosure. Drat. Not that I actually need a video wall like this, but I could do it once by borrowing monitors to just show it is possible. My system already has the Large Memory space to allocate devices into, and all PCIe devices are there by default, so the Code 12 is likely not trivial to solve, but it might be doable.
I guess six monitors off a single TB1 enclosure is good enough 🙂
The really nice part here is that unlike my Quadro K2000, which doesn't quite support eGPU use (the NVidia driver complains about "External K2000 Unsupported" when the eGPU is detected, and the detection can take a little bit to actually happen after docking), the latest AMD Professional drivers support an external W600 perfectly, with a full feature set. As a result, docking/undocking is almost as fast as hooking up a USB mouse to my laptop, which is all sorts of awesome when I need to get to and from my desk in a hurry. It also seems like large screen movement across the external monitors is smoother with the AMD card, but this might just be a misconception by me.
I really recommend these FirePro W600 cards for someone who wants a cheap card to drive multiple monitors (you can run six 4K panels off one of these, or three 5K monitors fed by two DisplayPort 1.2 connections each). There's still a stock of them here with the same seller I bought mine from. They aren't gaming cards, but they might run games in lower resolutions or older games (they are about equivalent to a GTX650). If you have an older laptop and just want to get a little faster than integrated graphics, it is hard to go wrong with a whole eGPU setup for about 50$ that can even drive 4K monitors for daily desktop use (Dell DA-2, the card and a 7$ mPCIe to PCIe adapter and a little bit of DIY).
Some screenshots of this stuff in action:
My eGPU Zoo - Link to my Implementations.
Want to output [email protected] out of an old system on the cheap? Read here.
Give your Node Pro a second Thunderbolt3 controller for reliable peripherals by re-using a TB3 dock (~50$).
"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it."- Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love."
@Yukikaze, thank you for another great value and unique eGPU build.
With regards to your requirement to disable then enable devices to fix error 12, consider adapting @jzfgs's package to fix error 12 here to automate this via a batch file. Can then just click it or even extend it to fire when detects the Firepro eGPUs appearing with error 12 as a startup infinite loop process.
@nando4 - There were some other issues that arose from the two cards (occasionally, none of the cards would be picked up by the AMD driver at all). I think XConnect doesn't play with what amounts to two cards connecting at the same time in the same enclosure or something. I just ended up using a single one of the cards, and this works flawlessly, docking, undocking and all.
My eGPU Zoo - Link to my Implementations.
Want to output [email protected] out of an old system on the cheap? Read here.
Give your Node Pro a second Thunderbolt3 controller for reliable peripherals by re-using a TB3 dock (~50$).
"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it."- Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love."