MacBook Air With External GPU - Do It Yourself Project

It can be said without any doubt that the Apple Updates Macbook Air With Haswell; Promises Up To 12 Hour Battery Life is an excellent notebook when it comes to performance and battery life, but the one thing missing from it is high quality gaming. Since it only comes with Intel HD Graphics 5000 it can handle your World of Warcraft addiction but it will definitely struggle with the latest Battlefield 4. Keeping this problem in mind, a user on the Tech Inferno website named as Larry Gadea has come with a DIY hack to attach a GPU to his 11-inch MacBook Air. To get his project started Larry first started buying peripherals. He first bought a Sonnet Echo ExpressCard Pro which is an adapter that turns 10Gbps Thunderbolt to 5Gbps ExpressCard slot. Next in order to attach his NVidia GTX 570 he attached an ExpressCard to PCI-Express adapter called as BPlus PE4L V2.1. Finally since the MacBook does not have the capability to power a GPU he had to use off-the-shelf 400W power supply. Once he got the hardware part complete. It was time to get the appropriate software.

Homemade GPU

To get the GPU working he started with DIY eGPU Setup and installed Windows 7 64 bit version to his MacBook with the help of BootCamp. Finally after a lot of work as described in #-Link-Snipped-#, he was successful in making his MacBook an able gaming notebook. But we have to advise the readers to take this news with a pinch of salt as #-Link-Snipped-# reports that commercial off-the-shelf products like this cannot be manufactured as Intel would not be issuing the licenses needed to commercialize Thunderbolt GPUs any time soon. But till that time feel free to take a look at Larry’s work in the video below.


Source: 11" MacBook Air Owner Connects High-End Graphics Card With Complex Thunderbolt Setup - MacRumors

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