Aero 15x v8 - Thunderbolt 3 and EGPU

Hi all.

First of all, sorry for my english.

How can we know if Thunderbolt 3 port of the aero 15x v8 is PCIe 4x lanes?

Is this laptop full compatible with any Egpu like gigabyte aorus gaming box?

I have this laptop, so if you know how to check this just tell me if you need any screenshot.

Thank you!!

 

Yes it's PCI-E 4x, because it's TB3 and yes it's compatible.

 

Oh, thank you very much for that fast response.

I really have some problems searching for this...

Is there any way to check this? Do you have this laptop?

Thank you!

 

All thunderbolt ports are PCI-E 4x. The only difference is the volume they can put through. TB1 has 10GB/S, TB2 has 20GB/S and TB3 has 40GB/S.

Just google about how thunderbolt ports are made if you're interested.

 

I'm afraid that is not true.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/eGPU-Two-PCI-e-lanes-no-problem.266658.0.html

There are a lot of laptops with thunderbolt 3 with 2 lanes of PCIe, and I dont know how to check if aero have 2 or 4.

It seems the max bandwitch you can get with 2 lanes are 16gbps.

How can I check if the laptop has 2 or 4? any software or something like that?

 

Thanks for this, normally TB ports should have 4 PCI-E lanes, but seems people started even cheaping out on those now.

Normally you should always assume 4PCI-E lanes, PCI-E 2x is rare, only lenovo yoga and dell XPS (older alienwares included) seem to have 2 lanes.

 

Is there any way to know or check if we have 4 lanes?

 

If you can find a service manual you'd be able to look it up there.

 

I saw yesterday PCI express version 3.0 and 4x.

So, this weekend will test egpu

 

I use my gigabyte aero 15x on the daily with an aorus gaming box enclsure that has a R9 Nano in it. No issues and works great. Any benchmarks people want me to run?

 

Out of curiosity, why do you run it with the nano since that's almost certainly resulting in worse performance than your 1070 Max Q?

 

To be honest, its really just the convenience of a one cable docking solution for a dual monitor setup. I'm not a gamer, bought the gaming box enclosure used and got the r9 nano gpu from a friend. Since the aero 15x can't support multiple displays out of its tb3 port, I patch it into the egpu which can. Both the egpu setup and the native 1070MQ run adobe premiere and solidworks fine for my needs

 

Is there any way to use de external GPU for something and the 1070 for other task?

I'm not talking about SLI, just use it both for different task.

Thanks

 

I've done this in the past. sort of with different tasks/programs, but more so two different graphics cards for two different monitors from the same laptop. I think it only worked because the dgpu was an nvidia quadro and the egpu was a radeon fire pro something.
It might also work if you have two gpu's from the same nvidia line - like both geforce or both quadro. I know for sure that you can't mix and match a geforce and a quadro since you can't install both the geforce and the quadro drivers on the same instance of windows.
I think nvidia optimus can be configured to switch between dgpu and egpu(Rather than igpu and dgpu as its intended to do), but it might require some finnagling.

Check out https://egpu.io theres a wealth of info there.

 

I think is depend on the program. Some programs lets you choose which gpu you will be working on while some, mostly games, will not. Do you know what software you are using?

 

Hi all.

Today i Got the e-gpu and I did a few test with it.

1 - It's not easy to install all needed drivers
2 - It's not easy to understand the 2 drivers method
3 - it's false that the d-gpu is faster

I explain myself, first of all you have to unistall the lastest thunderbolt 3 drivers and install the one with version 16.2. If you don't do this, the updates for, in my case, gigabyte gaming box, won't install. So, first, unistall thunderbolt 3 software and install that version.

The problems come when you connect the thunderbolt 3 to PC, if you get unlucky you will see a blue screen of windows, the big problem is that the driver for nvidia you installed for 1070 Maxq is not the same of the e-gpu will use, in other words, you need 2 drivers installed on your system, one for 1070 maxq and another one for e-gpu.

If you install 2 different nvidia drivers for every card... blue screen.

Shutdown pc, plug the tb3 and start windows, update driver, restart...

Once you get 2 same drivers for dgpu and egpu, NOW you can rest, 1070 will be "inactive" and 1080 will be active by default.

Good things about egpu:

1 - If you use external screen, you can use e-gpu and d-gpu at the same time, one in monitor and the other one in laptop, this is ****ing usefull if you, for example, want to play in one screen (using e-gpu) and streaming in the other one (using d-gpu).

2 - the performance of the e-gpu is not SO BAD, I checked a lot of videos on youtube about this, and the real results are not so bad, in my example, I've only lost 14% comparing with 1080 desktop, that is not the 25% or event 40% I saw on youtube.

3 - My test on laptop screen vs external screen are nearly the same, youtube say another 15% but that is not true, in my case, 87 fps on external and 80 internal (less than 10%).

All my test have been in 1920*1080, tomorrow will test 4k, and I think the difference between 1080 desktop will be even less than that 14%.

Sorry for my english and will report if I do more tests

 

There are many more laptops that only have 2-lane TB3. You have to do a ton of research to make sure you get 4-lane. Sometimes I've even seen people claim 4 and it ends up being 2.

4 is definitely more common, but 2 is not as rare as you say.

 

What notebook do you have?

@hfm
can u name a single gaming notebook that isn't dell, that has 2 lanes?

 

gigabyte aero 15x v8

 

Can you check how OC scales on eGPU compared to desktop GPU?

I'm very interested to see if overclocking actually changes the performance.

 

Yes, the performance changes.

I did some test using unigine valley, using:

Internal Display
1 - 1070 max q (1080p)
2 - 1080 egpu on internal display (1080p)
3 - 1080 egpu on internal display with OC (1080p)

External display
4 - 1080 egpu on external display (1080p)
5 - 1080 egpu on external display with OC (1080p)
6 - 1080 egpu on external display (4k)

Desktop 1080 GPU
7 - 1080 desktop (1080p)
8 - 1080 desktop (4k)

Results are:
Internal
1 - fps: 78 (min 26, max 154)
2 - fps: 78 (min 26, max 137)
3 - fps: 80 (min 34, max 142)
External
4 - fps: 85 (min 34, max 175)
5 - fps: 88 (min 37, max 171)
6 - fps: 29 (min 17, max 56)
Desktop
7 - fps: 102 (min 36, max 200)
8 - fps: 32 (min 16, max 63)

In other words, really good performance using 4k, nearly the same as 1080 desktop.
If you plan to use egpu for 1080, the performance is good but not as good as desktop.

The real problem of EGPU is the "multi task" operations.

If you are going to play, just play, one game and nothing more, it's near perfect.
The problem is if you want to play AND record your game, streaming or something like that, thunderbolt3 cant handle that, you will get a lot of problems there, fps drops and other problems, there are problems too with alt-tab games, it's slower and laggy.

Hope it helps

 

Pretty insightful, as already shown games like PubG would run at full desktop performance.

Yeah I know about that, but why stream on your eGPU if you have dGPU on your notebook

 

Maybe the question is, why not?

it's true, with the 1070 maxq is stupid the eGpu solution, but think in, for example, 6 years, the e-Gpu will be a real solution, I really think there are a lot of problems that can be fixed througt software.

The software today is on early stage, they have a lot of things to improve.

I like the posibilities of any eGpu, but if the companies want to sell more units, they have to improve the software and usability, the performance TODAY is really good, there is no need to spend more money on that, fix the problems with plug&play for example...

 

Unigine is a very bad benchmark for testing this. Try something like Assassins Creed Origins. You see you will lose quite a bit with TB3