Guys, I finally upgraded my setup. Here's my last one:
- 2015
Macbook Pro 15` i7 2.5ghz with dGPU radeon m370x 500gb SSD
- EVGA PSU 600w
To:
- 2017
Macbook Pro 15' i7 3.1ghz with Radeon Pro 555 500gb SSD
- Elgato Thunderbolt 3 dock (for connecting ethernet/mouse/keyboard/external SSD)
Basically I connect the Elgato dock on the upper left port and the
Mantiz Venus on the upper right one. I've tried the
Mantiz Venus on the upper left and it also worked.
Setting up on MacOS Sierra 10.12.6 (16G29):
- The setup was pretty straight forward. Connected it all, disabled SIP, ran
goalque eGPU script, restarted and done.
Setting up on Windows 10 thru Bootcamp:
- I decided installing the Windows on the internal SSD for performance reasons. I just did the whole Bootcamp setup with latest Windows 10 iso downloaded from Microsoft website.
- After installing bootcamp software on Windows and restarting, I connected the
Mantiz Venus and booted on Windows. It detected the GPU and I installed the drivers. Next restart and it was all working 😀 After a few days, I got error 12 sometimes. When that happened I tried hotpluging (worked a few times) or going to MacOS with eGPU just before booting on Windows (worked lots of times).
- I decided to install reFind and trying the
apple_set_os.efi method to use the iGPU on Windows boot. It worked well and now I don't even have to boot on
apple_set_os.efi first before booting on Windows (not sure why). The only “problem" I have sometimes is that the internal monitor freezes on the windows loading page and the external monitor starts the Windows normally with eGPU working (weird, but brings no harm while gaming for hours).
Performance comparison between setups:
1- Ok, both the Thunderbolt upgrade (from 2 to 3) and CPU upgrade (from Skylake 2.5ghz to Kaby Lake 3.1ghz) gave me a boost of 23% increase on performance when playing Overwatch. I used to get around 130 FPS on 2K reso EPIC settings. Now I get around 162fps (which is great since I'm using a 2k 144hz monitor, I kind of get his max frames per second). I did a stable OC the GPU so it runs at 2060mhz at 60 degrees with fans on medium.
I haven't tried using Mantiz USB/ethernet ports yet. Will try that soon and post here my experience.
To be honest, I'm pretty satisfied about my current setup. Just waiting now for the h2d fix to see if it makes any difference on OW. I also play BF4 maxed out and get around 80/90 FPS I believe. It’s not a cheap setup but if you need a Macbook for work, its definitely worth the solution.
