2012 14" Dell Latitude E6430 + [email protected] (EXP GDC 8.4d) + Win8.1 [artnetx]^  

Hello,

Check your CPU t° while gaming. I'm still surprise about the performances of the old true quads, with modern games the CPU goes on rampage and heat a lot.

To give you an example, i'm on mafia III atm with my [email protected], the cpu t° are 85°/90° already ingame, if i oc a bit the cpu/ram to 3.2ghz max turbo, the t° climb to 90°/95° on 4 cores on average. The limit since the t° max is 100°. Note that i unmounted, cleaned, and repasted the laptop 1 month ago!

So at the end, depending the cpu optimization and cpu load of a game, the cpu will heat more or less. In some games that are cpu intensive, it just shut down the laptop cause cpu or chipset t° too high.

Even a bad noname 450watt is enough to power decently a 1050, since it need only 10A on 12v rail. I don't think is a power issue, at least it should not.

Hey wimpzilla,

Thx for feedback. Initially I thought it was because of the very old psu, but now it seems more of a software issue (possibly because of the driver), because both Skyrim and Fallout NV are using the same engine.

Yes it could be. I proposed you the one that involve the cpu t°, it is never bad to check the whole averages t° inagme. The operating system and drivers matter too like you said, maybe an issue with he engine with your actual os setup?

As i said, check the psu current specs under the 12v rail. If it is not a really bad one with like [email protected], [email protected] and support 10A minimum on 12v it should be fine. With the dell psu it should be also more than fine for this card, power side!

I would exclude high cpu temperatures. With NVidia nvs5200 (dgpu) I saw temperatures climbing easily to 98*C under heavy loads. Last night I played Crysis 2 (very high settings at native 1600x900) for about 3 hrs and the temps never exceeded 80*C (measured with Core Temp). This is a remarkable achievement for my old laptop. I repasted cpu using Arctic Cooling MX-4 few weeks ago. Also the maximum cpu performance state is set to 98% to prevent it entering turbo boost mode. 

Also my mistake, Skyrim and FalloutNV are using different engines, but the existing problem is related only to this two games.  

Thx for the psu advice.

@wimzilla, the 22nm 3rd gen quad-core runs a lot cooler than the 32nm 2nd gen  quad-core CPUs.  My own testing finding a 45W 2nd gen would often hit TDP limits way on approach or just barely into the start of their turbo multipliers limits. The 3rd gen wasn't nearly as affected with a 45W i7-3720QM hitting turbo multiplier limits before TDP limits.

The 3rd gen i-cores are a great CPU. The are still performance competitive against their 7th gen equivalents. See source.

@artnetx So repasting with MX-4 made a significant difference? The 3740QM in my E6430 gets insanely hot under load, it's hit the 105'C mark at times. I've disabled TurboBoost in the bios and limited it to 2.4GHz in Windows, it sits between 80 and 90'C under load now, but I'd prefer getting full performance from it if possible.

I can test out Skyrim on my setup for you if you want, it's almost identical to yours, just has an EVGA 1050 instead, Win 10, and a 96W power brick. Fallout 4 runs fine on it though.

(Also, where can I get the A20 bios for the E6430? I've only been able to find A18. Thanks)

@nando4: Yep completely agree, i would prefer invest in a true quad old generations instead of the the actual dual i5/i7. The latest true quad i5/i7 are out of price atm, unfortunately. Performance per dollar side the Ivy bridge is awesome. Was just pointing on the t° issue due to the fact that some games demand much more cpu side.

I just repasted and changed the pad on the chipset this morning. I was quite dumb the last time i cleaned everything, i put an old 1mm thermal pad for the chipset instead the new arctic 0.5mm one freshly arrived. This morning i swapped the pads, repasted, t° drooped even further, mid 80° for the cores and 55°/60° for the chipset, under stress test with 100% fan! I use throttlestop to fix the turbo clocks, happy.

@artnetx: Usually when you start a game, can play a couple of minutes depending the load you apply and then everything shut down, mean an t° or power issue. So if the t° of the cpu/egpu are not in cause, then the psu could not be so reliable even with more than [email protected] or your wiring setup not sustain heavy current under heavy load. Aka feed the egpu with only one connection, so [email protected] through a couple of wires.

Or just a random game crash with your os, drivers, updates config.

@ybodhanya, MX-4 did not made any difference regarding minimal temps, i.e. 55-65 idle as always, but I observed a lot better thermal management under load. The cpu was way more likely to stay under 90*C in light to medium gaming. I re-enabled  turbo boost in bios, but set maximum performance to 98%. Bios A20 is available starting 03/03/2017.  http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=1DWW4

After that I refreshed few other drivers and ended up with additional few degrees on average on temps, but I cannot say if it's because of bios update or something else.   

Yeah, regarding skyrim, would be glad to see how it performed. btw what drivers are you using? did you got all kind of errors (12, 43)? are you using setup 1.3x? 

Thanks, I updated it to A20.

I just tested Skyrim, played through the Prologue without any problems, running at native 1600x900, 60Hz, all settings maxed out, getting a constant 60FPS.

I'm also using the 375.63 drivers, anything later than that gives me an Error 12 or 43. Not using Setup 1.xx so far, disabling the PCIE Root Port in Device Manager worked for me as well.

@ybodhanya thank you for testing Skyrim. I look forward to try a Dell power supply. Once solved, I plan to make a case similar to this one: 

http://www.owen-lu.com/egpu  

if I'll still encounter shutdowns then I'll be getting a GTX 970 Mini

@artnetx I've been looking for a good plastic case that I can mod for it, haven't found anything yet. Right now I have it in a cardboard box, looks like crap :$, will probably make a wooden enclosure when I get a chance.

@artnetx Do you have Dragon Age Inquisition, by any chance? I'm getting a really choppy framerate with it using my 1050, with settings on the lowest possible, so I'm thinking of upgrading mine to a 1050 Ti as well to make it more playable.

@ybodhanya Wooden enclosure would look really nice, but I'm about to quit egpu experimentation. I've updated my chipset and igpu drivers and the egpu started to give me bsod's every time I launched something. Last night I rolled back old drivers, reinstalled nvidia 375.63 and after trying to benchmark shogun 2, my egpu and psu died. I'm waiting for the dell charger to see if it's only psu or both 🙂 Regarding benchmarking I downloaded a bunch of demos from steam (coz they take a lot less storage) and it goes like this: Doom (high-very high ~ 50-60 fps, bsod after first level, mars outdoors), Call of Juarez Gunslinger (very high ~ 60+ fps, bsod after about 10 mins), GRID 2 (40-50 fps, worked fine), Darkness 2 (25-30 fps, very bad quality, unplayable), Sniper Elite V2 (60+ fps, worked fine), and Shogun 2 (Dx11, medium/high settings, AA off, native res ~ 20 to sub 30 fps, unplayable, bsod after serveral minutes of screen time on tactical map). If 1050ti is alive I'll test Inquisition no prob. Owen Lu's egpu implementation shows clearly that egpu's performance is very dependent on game's resolution when playing on internal screen (though he used the method of modified drivers). I would suggest you to try and test the game with different resolutions. 

Damn, sorry man, hopefully the PSU is the only part that's damaged.

@ybodhanya, indeed it was the psu issue. Yesterday received Dell Da-2 220W charger, hot-plugged the egpu, the screen blinked and it worked just fine (without crashing or a restart). I finished Doom demo, (high settings, internal screen, native resolution) at 45-60 fps. Skyrim fullscreen max settings native res.: 50-60 fps. But one thing bothers me a lot and it is how inconsistent is the egpu's performance in different games. For example Shogun 2 shows 19-24 fps no matter what I do, resolutions, switching off settings, etc. Same is ARMA. BTW, I will try Dragon Age Inquisition, I hope next weekend. Also, I will connect the egpu to my TV and see the results.    

Hi! Sorry for the grumpy request, you can take a photo, in which connector you connected the adapter on the laptop. I have the same model of laptop, just interesting.

It is a known problem with bus load in all Total War games. You won't be able to do anything with it and you will always be getting around 20 fps, doesn't matter what settings you use. It might be similar with Arma due to it's odd loading system (terrain and details are "streamed") which might also be overloading the bus. However I never saw any official egpu arma tests so I might be wrong.

@Antor The eGPU adapter connects to the ExpressCard slot on the Dell E6430. It's on the right hand side of the laptop, above the DVD drive (it's marked as EC) 

I had previously tried this with an HP Probook 6460b, and got absolutely nowhere. It recently died, and I replaced it with a Dell E6430. Thanks to your guide, I got it working with a used EXP GDC and a GTX 1050 Ti. My configuration is very similar to yours (i7-2720qm, 16GB DDR3-1600 and Nvidia NVS 5200M) so I had some hope of getting it working. Disabling the upstream device from the 5200M (though it's called a PCI-to-PCI bridge on my laptop instead of PCI Express Port Root) is a really clever idea that makes this whole mess work.

Benchmarks are very close to full PCIe x16 1050Ti performance - within about 10% or so, even when using the internal display. But right now I have it hooked up to a monitor that only has a DVI input, so it makes a convenient adapter for my E6430.

The only fly in the ointment is that in a few hours of playing, I had one DirectX crash that complained about a hung device. Hopefully I won't see that often.

Hi, Would the performance of this build suffer with the Latitude E6430 but with the i5-3230m vPro CPU Clocked at 2.6ghz. Also what PSU would you recommend.