Akitio Node External GPU Box

A

AVT

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With Thunderbolt 3 starting to become widely available, I thought I'd start a thread about the first reasonably-priced eGPU box by Akitio. Got mine recently.

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Running an Nvidia Titan XP in it. My system (MacBook Pro) requires a workaround for a Microsoft problem to detect the card without a BSOD, but once that is bypassed, it works great. These are early adopter issues, and once the concept takes off and OS support improves they should disappear. My primary use case is development for scientific computing (CUDA), but it should also work very well for games, bitcoin mining, and really anything not bandwidth limited. Really excited that this is finally on the market!
 
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Can't wait for this to take off. I'll finally get more than 2 years of life out of my gaming laptops and I won't have to lug around a 10lb monster for work/travel.
 
Seems cool, and a cheap-o box is a welcome solution for near everyone out there with a spare GPU laying around from their last upgrade.
 
That is a good price! I would expect it will run just fine, even on a 4x slot.

Does it come with an active cable? I know that Thunderbolt 3 runs at half-speed if you use a passive USB 3.1 cable.

Mind you the price of SHORT (half-meter) active cables has come down a bit, it's still not free. The longer cables (2 meter) still top $60!
 
Wow, Awesome. And with it being GPU only, you don't need to worry about USB eating up some of the already limited bandwidth.
 
whateverer said:
That is a good price! I would expect it will run just fine, even on a 4x slot.

Does it come with an active cable? I know that Thunderbolt 3 runs at half-speed if you use a passive USB 3.1 cable.

Mind you the price of SHORT (half-meter) active cables has come down a bit, it's still not free. The longer cables (2 meter) still top $60!
Click to expand...

The included cable is 40gb/s, but is quite short.

whateverer said:
That is a good price! I would expect it will run just fine, even on a 4x slot.

Does it come with an active cable? I know that Thunderbolt 3 runs at half-speed if you use a passive USB 3.1 cable.

Mind you the price of SHORT (half-meter) active cables has come down a bit, it's still not free. The longer cables (2 meter) still top $60!
Click to expand...

IMHO x4 is largely a non-issue because the vast majority of applications are not bandwidth limited to begin with. If you do have such an application, you are probably using an Nvidia Tesla card on a much higher performance machine anyway. A general principle of GPU programming is that you want to keep as much data loaded on it as possible and avoid transferring anything from the system memory or back unless you have to. This is one of the tricks that makes gaming possible: frames are almost never rendered from scratch, instead information from the previous frame is retained for use in the next one.
 
suiken_2mieu said:
Wow, Awesome. And with it being GPU only, you don't need to worry about USB eating up some of the already limited bandwidth.
Click to expand...

This is especially so since adding USB can make the Thunderbolt link unstable (freeze/reboot about once an hour).

After disabling a Thunderbolt Hub in Device Manager (disables USB 3.1 devices and forces my hub to use USB 2.0), the setup is completely rock solid after about a month of use.
 
Any ideas why not supported on OSX? I thought that was the original market for these contraptions.
 
westrock2000 said:
Any ideas why not supported on OSX? I thought that was the original market for these contraptions.
Click to expand...

Not officially.

You can run a script that will make it work, as long as there are drivers supporting the video card. The latest Nvidia drivers support Maxwell GPUs, so unfortunately, my Titan X Pascal works on Windows and Linux only. Some AMD GPUs are said to work out of the box.
 
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