#EXTERNAL VIDEO CARD FOR MACBOOK PRO FULL#
#EXTERNAL VIDEO CARD FOR MACBOOK PRO PRO#
#EXTERNAL VIDEO CARD FOR MACBOOK PRO MAC#

How does it perform, in short - very well.

Interestingly the 'System Information' correctly identifies the GPU and screens under 'Graphics and Displays', but is unable to identify the NVIDIA card under PCI.

'About this Mac' reported the two screens and also identified the Intel GPU for the MacBook Screen and the NVIDIA Card for the external display.

NB I have successfully run this modification on pretty much all versions of MacOS 10.10 (up to 10.10.5 at the time of writing). ( and check permissions after editing.) With these tasks complete, I rebooted my MacBook with the GPU connected via Thunderbolt, startup was normal on the MacBook and the external screen remained blank.Once the log-on screen was completed, the external screen came to life and I was running two screens. I then followed the excellent instructions found on In addition to the guide, I used 'Nano' contained within the MacOS terminal to actually perform the editing of the files and I also needed to issue the command 'sudo kextcache -system-caches' to actually get the MacOS to boot and recognise the revised kext files. ( See 'Troubleshooting' notes below for general info on external power supply, jumpering and cables.)

#EXTERNAL VIDEO CARD FOR MACBOOK PRO FULL#

Half length GPU's are much rarer than full length ones which tends to limit the available choice, notwithstanding since MacOS 10.10 natively supports NVIDIA cards, I acquired a cheap Gigabyte GT 740 GPU (with 2 gig of ram), and a 600w AT ( ATX?) Power supply to power the GPU (actually the GPU would have also been fine with a much less powerful power supply).

#EXTERNAL VIDEO CARD FOR MACBOOK PRO PRO#

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.Дue 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.Д¬onducting 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)

#EXTERNAL VIDEO CARD FOR MACBOOK PRO MAC#

External video card for macbook pro