Since my Macbook is fitted with a Thunderbolt 1 interface and the AKiTiO chassis has a Thunderbolt 2 interface (2x the transfer rate of Thunderbolt 1), my chosen combination will have the Thunderbolt 1 port on the MacBook Pro as the speed limiting bottleneck, however I still wanted to see what performance could be possible. This particular AKiTiO box supports a single half length PCIe card and supplies 25W of bus power (as per the PCIe specification). There were also a few articles by people that had successfully enabled video cards over Thunderbolt.ĭue to the increasing popularity of Thunderbolt accessories, the price of PCIe Thunderbolt docks has dropped to the point where I was prepared to take the plunge and buy an AKiTiO "Thunder2 PCIe Box" to connect to my MacBook Pro (Retina, 13, Late 2012). However, there is a catch as delivered MacOS doesn't support or recognize a GPU connected to an external PCIe chassis via Thunderbolt.Ĭonducting some pre-purchase research on the internet was not encouraging since most of the opinions confirmed that MacOS will not drive displays over Thunderbolt and even if it would, since the PCIe bus is so much faster than Thunderbolt, a GPU will be continuously constrained by the bandwidth of the Thunderbolt interface. The theory is as follows, GPU's are typically connected via PCIe ports and since there are several manufacturers that provide Thunderbolt to PCIe expansion chassis for MacOS, physically connecting a GPU to a Thunderbolt equipped Macintosh is easy. My plan was to attempt to run an external Graphics Card (GPU) via the Thunderbolt port of my MacBook Pro 13" (Retina, Late 2012) and see see if I could improve on the poor performance of the built-in Intel 4000 GPU (included in my Macbook Pro's 2.5GHz i5 processor). "Using an External GPU via Thunderbolt on a MacBook Pro ( If you're also using a Thunderbolt cased PCIe video card, send a report to news at )
Original Article from 2015 follows, with a 2012 MacBook Pro using older OS X version. Update: On March 29th, Apple released macOS 10.13.4 which includes eGPU support for some Macs/TB3 cases/graphics cards. ( Troubleshooting & external power supply notes at bottom) Using a Thunderbolt Video Card with a MacBook Pro (Late 2012)
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