System specs:
2020 13" HP Spectre X360 model 13-aw0080ca
Intel Core i7-1065G7
iGPU Intel Iris Plus
16GB LPDDR4X RAM
512GB Intel H10 SSD + 32GB Optane memory
Windows 10 1909 (18363.778 as of writing)
eGPU Hardware:
PowerColor Mini Pro/VisionTek Mini eGFX
Installation steps
First applied all windows updates. As of writing its running Windows 10 1909 18363.778
Replaced pci.sys file with the one from earlier W10 1903 build
Turned off Windows update temporarily to stop it from replacing the file automatically
Restart the laptop
Once fully booted I plugged in and powered up the PowerColor Mini Pro
Installed latest official AMD Adrenalin driver 20.4.2
Thats pretty much it
Comments
One annoyance is that I cannot keep the eGPU powered up and plugged in when turning on or restarting the laptop. For some reason it tries to boot from the thunderbolt device causing it to ask for a bitlocker recovery key, which doesn't exist. I've tried turning off USB boot in the bios but it didn't help. I just have to remember to power off the eGPU whenever I first boot or restart the laptop. Otherwise, it works perfectly fine if i turn it on after loading Windows. The 45w Power Delivery from the PowerColor Mini Pro also charges the laptop 95% of the time. ~5% of the time I get a warning notification saying it doesn't supply enough power. Just re-plug it and its fine.
I've also been fiddling with Throttlestop and undervolting the 1065G7. I believe i've been able to remove the 15w TDP cap, although i'm not 100% sure since i'm pretty new to this. Before trying to remove the cap, I would get PL1 throttling after sustained CPU usage and it would stay around 2.8ghz ~15w pkg power. After doing the "Disable and lock turbo power limits" I no longer saw any PL1 throttling, and sustained CPU usage would stay at around 3.5ghz ~18w pkg power. I assume that the pkg power isn't going all the way to 25w because I'm not using the iGPU at all.
Unigine Heaven on 1080p max settings:
Unigine Heaven on 1080p low settings:
@nutype; that's a very nice machine!! I saw a similar model on display at BestBuy (pre-COVID) with a 4K touch display. Compared to my 13" MBPro you get a quite a lot more hardware features (convertible w/pen support) and functionality (USB-A, C & SD-card) for the money. IIRC BB was running a president's day sale at the time also...
I've been hoping to see this convertible reviewed here with an eGPU ever since. Would you mind posting a few results with whichever apps, games, or benchmarks you prefer? Thx!
2019 13" CTO MBPro dual TB3 4-core 1.4GHz i5 + Akitio Node + Vega56
2009 Mac Pro 5,1 3.46 6-core Xeon + Apple-Nvidia GT120 + MSI 1080TI Gaming X
2019 13" MacBook Pro [8th,4C,U] + HD 7970 @32Gbps-TB3 (AKiTiO Node) + Win10 1903 [build link]
@cnon297, Since Unigine Heaven seems to be used a lot here for benchmarking, I'll download that and run it when I have a chance.
That should show the overall performance compared to other combinations.
@nutype, The BitLocker requester isn't because it is booting from the thunderbolt device, it is because BitLocker sees the egpu as new hardware. It's related to the enhanced security in place in the UEFI to mitigate attacks like thunderspy.
2019 16 Macbook Pro + Core v2 + Radeon VII MacOS 10.15.1
Core X Chroma + RTX 2080 Windows 10 1909
Asrock X570 Phantom Gaming ITX/TB3, Ryzen 5 3400G + Core v2 + Radeon VII Win10 1909
2019 ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 [R3K,4C,G] + Radeon VII @ 32Gbps-TB3 (Razer Core V2) + Win10 1909 [build link]