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- #External gpu for mac mini 2012 upgrade#
- #External gpu for mac mini 2012 full#
- #External gpu for mac mini 2012 portable#
- #External gpu for mac mini 2012 software#
- #External gpu for mac mini 2012 plus#
There’s no doubting that the ViDock 4 Plus and the upcoming Thunderbolt version can provide considerably more processing power for laptops with crippled integrated solutions, but not significantly more than the PCIe Radeon and Nvidia cards found in modern laptops like the MacBook Pro. In other words, the concept of an external graphics card certainly sounds appealing at first blush, but once you analyze its actual use cases you can begin to see why the ViDock is really the only product of its kind. It’s better to look at the ViDock as something that you would leave at the office, like the Sony Vaio Z docking station - but again, who plays Crysis at work? And if your job involves 3D graphics, you’re going to use a proper workstation, not a laptop. Now, you could carry a secondary monitor with you - but then you could just buy a proper gaming laptop in the first place. The ViDock doesn’t allow you to feed graphics data back into your laptop: you need an additional monitor (or two) to reap the benefits of the external, desktop-class GPU. Then there’s the need to carry an LCD monitor with you.
#External gpu for mac mini 2012 full#
A Thunderbolt version of the ViDock would alleviate this problem considerably, but even Thunderbolt only operates over 4x PCI Express 2.0 - and it isn’t understood whether an external graphics card would get the full 4x - bidirectional 16Gbps (2GB/sec) - or just 2x. The ViDock sounds like it could help on both counts, but there are two big problems: The existing ViDock uses ExpressCard, a socket that is only connected to the system bus by 1x PCI Express 1.0, which has a total throughput of 2.5Gbps - enough space for a graphics card that can beat an integrated GPU, but certainly not enough bandwidth for a modern graphics card like the GTX 560.
#External gpu for mac mini 2012 portable#
For as long as portable computers have existed we have chased the laptop that is both powerful enough to play games and also light enough to carry without sustaining a back injury. There is no denying the allure of an external graphics card. Like the Thunderbolt Display it might also provide Ethernet and FireWire connectivity, which would be useful for MacBook Air or other ultralight/ultrabook laptops. The current top-of-the-range ViDock 4 Plus provides up to 225 watts and two six-pin connectors - enough to power an Nvidia GTX 560 - and presumably the upcoming Thunderbolt equivalent will provide the same wattage or even more. This would be a Mac-exclusive until 2012 when Thunderbolt ports begin to appear in Windows-powered PCs.Ī ViDock is simply an external case with enough space for a full-length, two-slot-high graphics card - or eGPU - and a convenient two-port USB hub. Village Instruments already has experience with its ExpressCard-connected ViDock graphics card chassis, which provides extra GPU juice for Windows and Mac laptops, and the Thunderbolt version is expected to be the same kind of thing - but faster. Last week, as the result of a straw poll on Facebook, Village Instruments agreed to begin development of an external Thunderbolt-connected graphics card enclosure. So there are technical reasons for dropping support for old hardware.This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Metal also unifies the graphics api between TvOS, iOS and MacOS. Their GPU's didn't support the instructions needed to use Metal.
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Which is why Mac's before 2012 could not be upgraded.
#External gpu for mac mini 2012 upgrade#
Then more recently, I had to upgrade my friends iMAC with a Kepler GPU because Apple's latest OS's from High Sierra onward use a newer but significantly more low-level and efficient METAL graphics API. Use External GPU on Mac Mini 2014 - posted in General: Hey, I was wondering if there I any way to use a external GPU on Mac Mini 2014 Will the Alien ware Graphics Amplifier work on the Mac Mini even though the Mac Mini uses Thunderbolt 2 I have never seen any one connect a external GPU to mac so Im just curious. So they technically couldn't upgrade, period. But the fact was their cpu's didn't have 64bit instruction sets. People lost all iOS updates and were understandably upset. Like when iOS switched from 32bit to 64bit sometimes around the iphone5 to iphone 6.
#External gpu for mac mini 2012 software#
Many people have said this, but when I dive deeper into it, I've found actual technical reasons for loss of software updates. Apple have shown little regard for backwards compatibility for anything in the past. Sizzling said:That’s probably part of Apple’s business case for doing this.