ViDock and/or DIY eGPU

[CityK]

I had seen mention of ViDock before on a number of occasions, but, for whatever reason, had never really checked it out ...either that, or, it never register with me what it was for (I probably just thought it was an external harddrive enclosure or something).

Anyway, was checking the stuff out yesterday, and there is some serious utility in these products for some laptop, notebook, tablet users.

- http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock
- http://www.facebook.com/pages/ViDock/89321949134 (<-- they have a lot of discussion on their forthcoming designs, Thunderbolt based, here)
For the DIY crowd:
- http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/418851-diy-egpu-experiences.html
- http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/har...let-pcs-experiences-benchmarks-setup-ect.html
- http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...7667-lets-figure-out-how-make-diy-vidock.html

It seems that other vendors are now being drawn into this space as well, and have some competing designs in the pipeline.

Looks like Win7 would be the best bet. Linux would have to improve its hybrid graphics before this will take flight there likely. Mac, no clue.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm cautiously interested in such a thing, if only to give a home the retired gaming cards I can never seem to sell.

Perhaps these things will be a nail in the coffin for "gaming notebooks."

 

[MaxBurn]

I think it was on H somewhere they had a review where they artificially limited the video card to different PCIE widths and had a surprisingly small change in the speed of the card on smaller lane numbers.

 

[Mercutio]

I think it was on H somewhere they had a review where they artificially limited the video card to different PCIE widths and had a surprisingly small change in the speed of the card on smaller lane numbers.

That really wouldn't surprise me. Even the super high end cards are only using all that RAM for multi-sampling textures that are getting used over and over. It's not like they actually need to deliver 16Gpbs of output.

 

[CityK]

a review where they artificially limited the video card to different PCIE widths and had a surprisingly small change in the speed of the card on smaller lane numbers.

That really wouldn't surprise me. Even the super high end cards are only using all that RAM for multi-sampling textures that are getting used over and over. It's not like they actually need to deliver 16Gpbs of output.

From what I saw in ViDock user reports (which obviously encounter similarly constrained usage scenarios), they seem to indicate that they achieve 50-70% of a card's expected performance under normal usage conditions (i.e. stuck into a x16 slot).

Anyway, here is an interesting tangentially related article (and video):
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4832/the-apple-thunderbolt-display-review