setup-1.x

23 may 2015

motivation

extending a lenovo t530 with an external GPU via the mini pcie adapter slot for gaming and interesting setups.

we were testing both laptop adapters: EC2C (in the thinkpad)and PM3N (in a different laptop) and both were working.

approach

hotplugging the nvidia gtx 660 ti to my laptop resultet in error 12 and the first thing i tried was the DSDT override [2] which failed no matter what. so after 2 days of intense hacking i gave up on the graphics card. a few weeks later, therefore yesterday, i decided to try the setup 1.x [3] tool and this tool is very cool.

setup 1.x

on the thinkpad we only needed the setup 1.x’s feature ‘PCE compaction’ to get a the eGPU working as the t530 model was only having a intel hd 4000 based iGPU. on the other laptop had two GPUs, an iGPU and an dGPU and we needed to remove the dGPU so that the eGPU had enough address space.

the biggest problem with the setup 1.x tool was to understand what to do with it and while the manuals are a really great help it is still a lot of ‘experimenting’ with values. for instance we had problems booting into windows at first since we didn’t understand how setup 1.x chainloading works.

cost

material cost was:

  110€ nvidia gtx 660 ti
~ 91$ + 60€ PE4H-EC2C ver2.4 Package Contents
~ 25$ setup 1.3
=========
~ 275€

required working hours:

3 fulltime days where i did lots of things

conclusion

what we tested so far:

borderlands 2 on the gtx 660 (on the thinkpad)
arma 3 on the gtx 660 ti (on the other laptop)

both are playable with reasonable settings and performance.

so to conclude: everyone who plans on using an eGPU where it does not run out of the box, like with ciko’s eGPU/laptop, should really buy setup 1.x as it is a huge time saver and a well documented approach to the problem!

the next thing which would interest me:

getting PE4H running with KVM [4] and [5] and now that i have a working setup 1.x configuration that should be no problem anymore!