next »

[nutballs]

So perk, here is something of interest. They are working on a thunderbolt version supposedly, but it is currently ExpressCard for laptops. Oddly, express card is only 1xPCI, which is 2.5gb/s which is WAY less than a high end gfx card would need, since most are 8x. But I wonder if they are 8x for multichannel, not bandwidth.
http://4sp.in/70O

also, you can DIY it.
http://4sp.in/70P

this would be awesome in thunderbolt and solve my issue.

[nutballs]

there is also a thunderbolt to expresscard adapter http://4sp.in/70Q
so technically, by throwing money at it, you could do a mutlimonitor setup right now, with existing monitors.

[perkiset]

That is DAMN hot. I'm with you that I can see the complete elimination of my huge Pro rig for an air and Thunderbolt externals. I think the next step is to abstract all of My Documents into a private cloud (outsourcing is possible, but private would be preferable) so that you literally have everything with you, no matter where you go.

Which leads to the post I'm about to make related to what I'm up to ...

[nutballs]

My main interest is to get multiple monitors going, even on an air. The only reason you can't on the air is because of gRam it seems. Also the question is if a PC graphics card will actually work on a mac this way. Considering I cant get them to work on our big mac, its a bit daunting.

[nutballs]

Some lernin i did.

thunderbolt is 2 lanes of 10gbit/s full duplex
meaning you theoretically could get 40gbit/s of throughput total, 20gbit/s in 1 direction.
NANOSECOND latency, not microsecond.

a 16x PCIe2.0 slot is 8GB/s which equates out to 64gbit/s

so thunderbolt is at minimum capable of 15% of that pcie slot, and maximum capable of 30% of the speed.

The question for gaming, on an external GPU would be, how much crap does the game throw at the card? Some games will upload all the textures ahead of time, or at least textures for the area, but others might be constantly transfering.

for movies its a non-issue. 10gbit/s =1280MB/s
1080p is at most 373MB/s So you got bags of room for other shit. And thats only 1 channel being used.

So i am now really intregued by the idea of an external GPU. I bet for some games you would get almost the same performance as internal, and some you may experience some slowdowns if there is a huge amount of stuff going on like textures and such.

Considering that my MacBook Air is almost 20% faster than my desktop PC, and windows running in VMware Fusion is the same exact speed, I could turf my desktop, pull out the GPU, and hook it up to thunderbolt (when a egpu cage comes out) and get the same performance as my desktop in theory playing something like WOW (which i dont actually play, just example). But the main reason i would want this is to get 2 external monitors going from my Air.

Hurry up you thunderbolt nerds. want now.

[perkiset]

Go man go. I am TOTALLY intrigued.