System specs
Early 2011 15" Macbook Pro w/ AMD Radeon 6490m.
macOS 10.13.2 (17c205)
Samsung U28E850R - UHD 28" monitor
eGPU hardware
Akitio Node Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.
Gigabyte Windforce nVidia GTX970
Apple Thunderbolt 3 -> 2 adapter
Apple Thunderbolt 2 cable
Installation steps
Followed the instructions here.
I also need to login, turn on Node, plug in thunderbolt cable, then logout and then I see the login screen on the external monitors.
Benchmarks
CUDA-Z on external monitor
Comments
Just set it up. Wanted to run 4k Monitor and play around with tensorflow.
@harijan , thank you for your guide. Any pictures of your gear? I also wanted to point out that your CUDA-Z host-to-device result is half of what we expect for a 10Gbps-TB1 link:
https://egpu.io/external-gpu-implementations-table/#perf
Did you happen to do a bootcamp install so can test CUDA-Z in Windows to see if its consistent underperformance with the OS?
eGPU Setup 1.35 • eGPU Port Bandwidth Reference Table
2015 15" Dell Precision 7510 (Q M1000M) [6th,4C,H] + GTX 1080 Ti @32Gbps-M.2 (ADT-Link R43SG) + Win10 1803 // compares M.2 vs TB3 performance inc unoptimized H-CPU BIOS [build link]
@harijan , thank you for your guide. Any pictures of your gear? I also wanted to point out that your CUDA-Z host-to-device result is half of what we expect for a 10Gbps-TB1 link:
https://egpu.io/external-gpu-implementations-table/#perf
Did you happen to do a bootcamp install so can test CUDA-Z in Windows to see if its consistent underperformance with the OS?
No pics currently, but only because my work desk is a total mess, and is covered in work documents. I have literally just got it going a couple hours ago. The Node is still open, from when I figured out that I didn't insert the gpu in properly 
Interesting I'm only getting half performance. Not sure what I can do there. System Profiler says the Akitio Node is running at "Up to 10Gb/s x2". https://imgur.com/WjFQVAU
Unfortunately I do not have a bootcamp install, and probably will not on this machine (only have a 250GB SSD installed). It is running well enough for now, running my UHD monitor. When I start playing around with tensorflow proper, I may look into it.
Thank you for posting your build. I’ve been following egpu.io for some time now and have been waiting for someone with exact same MacBook Pro to post some recent results.
I have so many questions that I hope you can help me answer.
Did you have to do anything extra in order to get this working in MacOS? Other than the OS patches to get the Nvidia graphics working?
Have you done any gaming or benchmarks? How are the laptop thermals? Is it possible to power the internal monitor with the egpu? Is it possible to do this with Thunderbolt1 considering the smaller bandwidth?
If you went with an Radeon RX5/6/70 would you have to go through any additional steps or is it plug and play?
To do: Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.
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