Mac + eGPU

[knurling]

Hey guys--not sure where to start troubleshooting my eGPU setup.

For months, I had Octane running fine on El Capitan 10.11.4 (MacBook Pro) until this week after unplugging an external display (Apple ThunderBolt Display) after a normal shutdown. Upon booting back up, the laptop screen resolution got stuck and OSX wouldn't recognize the laptop screen in the display settings. After trying ever trick in the book (reset SMC, reset PRAM/NVRAM, etc..) I decided to update OSX knowing it would likely cause problems.

The NVIDIA Driver Manager, NVIDIA Web Driver and CUDA all seemed to make it through the update fine, each showing the most recent version of the respective drivers install. However, the GTX 980 isn't showing on the device list.

Any ideas I can try without resorting to formatting and starting from scratch?

Thanks!

[MarioVisuals]

Hi guys,

Does anyone have 1080 in Akitio box connected to El Capitan 10.11.5 here?
Is it working?

Thanks

[whersmy]

I hope apple announces a brand new egpu through USB-C
Keynote is now live on http://www.apple.com/apple-events/october-2016/

[Uhlhorn]

The new MacBook pro has 2 or 4 Thunderbolt 3 connectors via USB-C. Thunderbolt is an Intel technology and Thunderbolt 3 is supporting eGPU.

[Makin]

Hi. I have build 4 egpus stations based on Akitio and 980ti. After eGPU Script i can work with two of them on Sierra. But when I plug 4 of them (no matter if i use two thunderbolt cables(2x2) or one (1x4)) my imac 5k won't boot and it's stuck not even making a startup sound. The same thing with three. Only two gpu's setup works perfect. Can anyone have any idea what can be wrong and how to fix this? Thank You

P.S. I have also tried the bootcamp and windows 10 sees all 4 of them but only one is active and renders in octane bench. I have the same problem with booting as in macos, so i have to do it by hot plugging thunderbolt cable.

[Collider]

Short answer.... you can only do 2 980ti egpu on Mac.

You can do up to 3 980Ti on the cMP, (cheese grater Mac, you need to use a splitter and run your own psu- not egpu) or up to 5 older non MAXWELL cards.
You'll get this advice here a bunch.... build a pc for a render server and use you 2 cards for working. Your other option is to use 2 Titan Zs that are essentially 2 gpus on one card. Folks have gotten those to run with all 4 gpus utilized.

[Uhlhorn]

@Makin: It is better to put the GPUs into a PC and use it over network rendering.
The big problem is, that Octane is not able to render with network GPUs only. So You have to use 1 GPU connected directly to the Mac.

[Makin]

So the network rendering was my second though use only two egpus for modeling and all four via network for rendering connecting two more to macbook. Damn.. All this mac experience is getting more a pain in the a... I think it's time to switch back to PC again.

Thank You all!

[Uhlhorn]

All this mac experience is getting more a pain in the a... I think it's time to switch back to PC again.

Yes, indeed. But the problem is, that Windows is the greater pain. Perhaps a custom Mac (Hackintosh) is a solution.

[rmara]

hey guys

i had an update from osx 10.12.5 which was perfectly working and now It is set to OSX 10.12.6 (16B....) and there is no nvidai cuda web driver for this versions, and the so called last update from nvidia doesn't work.

has any of your tried c4D octane with high sierra 10.13.1 and cuada driver teht goes with it ?

i have a 2011 ac and an akitio node ith a 1080ti
it was working just before that stupid update i did thinking there was no porblem with sierra has I experienced before ...
If anyone could give me a solution for this version of os x : macOS 10.13.1 (17B48) or higher it would be great ...