OTOY Forums

I've been reading the forums on developing a setup with the Akitio Thunder2 for the Macbook Pro (I would've posted on one of the existing threads, but I think I couldn't as I'm not yet a licensed customer).

Anyway, I was just hoping someone could advise me before I go down this route, what is the best setup for graphics cards. I am new to the world of gpus, which seems to be a jungle, and am only really investigating having now seen the speed improvements available for rendering with Octane as opposed to Houdini's Mantra, which I currently use. I want to make sure before investing in a license that it will definitely be worth putting the money in at this stage or else I might wait a little longer until I can afford a better hardware solution.

I was hoping someone can help me with any of the following the following:

1) Having looked at the available Bizon boxes as a guide of what configurations are available, they seem to indicate that the higher end graphics cards (1070 and upwards) are not compatible with OS X and so I would need to run it with Windows, which I'm not keen to do for now. I was wondering what is the best graphics card I can use with the Akitio Thunder2, which is also compatible with the latest version of OSX.

2) Are the speed improvements with an egpu with a single graphics card running octane still very much better than I'd currently get? (I'm guessing probably yes!)

3) Is there a particularly good idiot-proof guide to setting up this configuration?

4) Is it worth waiting for any likely future developments on the horizon - are there known to be any more consumer ready and affordable and upgradeable options on the market (the new Wolfepack kickstarter looks good, but not upgradeable and also I'm keen to get something sooner than their shipping time of next Feb)?

Thanks in advance!

Hi Toby,

Briefly:
1: Yes you'd have to wait to use the 1080 on a Mac as far as I can tell also.

2: Speed improvement is as per adding a card to any system - linear scale. Eg, if you add a 980Ti you'll improve your Octane bench by 100-130 depending on which model of 980Ti you get.

3: Read Goalque's post on Techinferno and use his script to set up eGPU on the Mac. Worked in a few seconds for me.
https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/ ... ay-output/
There are a lot of posts but try to skim through it as there are caveats. Downside is that earlier post info is then superseded by later versions of the script which is constantly improving.

4: Depends if you want more than 1-2 eGPUs. On a Mac though I don't think you can use more than 3? I could be wrong.

Bizon seems to be an overpriced Akitio chopped up and rebadged. Depends if you want to roll your sleeves up and mod anything yourself really!

This long thread might help You out, as there are some small things & issues mentioned =)
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=43439&p=286818&hili ... pu#p286818

Hi,

Thank you both so much for taking the time to reply (and so quickly!) and I will set about looking through this thread glimpse suggested this evening.

I n the meantime, can I just ask two quick follow up questions...

In that case, is the Nvidia Geforce GTX 980ti the best card that I can get for the Akitio Thunder2 setup (I'm just nervous about buying a card that won't be compatible)? If this is compatible then it seems a good result, as it appears to have great reviews for the cost.

Secondly, is the performance that I'd likely get out of this setup with octane, in your opinion, significantly faster than with a cpu renderer on my macbook pro.

Thanks again so much for your responses.

Toby