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Even before the more polished products existed, people have hacked together external GPU enclosures, often interfaced to the host's PCIe bus via ExpressCard slo

Even before the more polished products existed, people have hacked together external GPU enclosures, often interfaced to the host's PCIe bus via ExpressCard slots or ribbon cables hanging off of Mini PCIe slots. And more recently, with the interest in cramming many dual-slot GPUs onto a single motherboard for cryptomining rigs, you can find cheap, "barebones stand-alone PCIe slots" (for lack of a better term) for hanging GPUs off of. A quick search turned up a couple of examples: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-PCI-E-to-PCI-E-1X-Expansion-Riser-Card-for-Laptop-External-Graphics-Video-Card/32678046394.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-PCI-E-to-PCI-E-1X-Expan... https://www.aliexpress.com/item/60CM-PCI-Express-1X-To-16X-PCIE-Riser-Card-For-BTC-Miner-Machine-Overcurrent-Protection-USB/32838193524.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/60CM-PCI-Express-1X-To-16X-P... (Ingeniously, on this one, they've re-purposed USB 3.0 cables to carry the high-speed PCIe lanes).

dogma1138 8y ago
These are for mining USB 3.0 cables are the standard they have the correct number of pins for a single lane and have decent shielding.
gambiting 8y ago
The problem with all of those has always been that they only worked with an external display - there never was any way to send the image back to the laptop's own display.
- washadjeffmad 8y ago
  LookingGlass on Linux allows displaying from other GPUs' framebuffers. We use Resolve in VM with hardware passthrough and can monitor its display output from within another VM this way. Apple nails the prosumer, but I really don't see many using their hardware in industry.
- hddherman 8y ago
  It actually is possible with nVidia GPU-s, but you'll be taking a huge performance hit as some of the tiny bandwidth is now used to send the rendered image back to the laptop and then to the screen.
- Zephyreks 8y ago
  No matter what, sending it back to the internal display is going to mean a significant performance hit. There's only so much bandwidth in a TB3 connection.

dogma1138 8y ago

These are for mining USB 3.0 cables are the standard they have the correct number of pins for a single lane and have decent shielding.

gambiting 8y ago

The problem with all of those has always been that they only worked with an external display - there never was any way to send the image back to the laptop's own display.

washadjeffmad 8y ago
LookingGlass on Linux allows displaying from other GPUs' framebuffers. We use Resolve in VM with hardware passthrough and can monitor its display output from within another VM this way. Apple nails the prosumer, but I really don't see many using their hardware in industry.
hddherman 8y ago
It actually is possible with nVidia GPU-s, but you'll be taking a huge performance hit as some of the tiny bandwidth is now used to send the rendered image back to the laptop and then to the screen.
Zephyreks 8y ago
No matter what, sending it back to the internal display is going to mean a significant performance hit. There's only so much bandwidth in a TB3 connection.