😉)Īs other posts indicate no video drivers for the Mac have been made 'Thunderbolt aware', therefore historically it has been felt this is not a workable solution. I am not 100% clear as to why it could be simply to enable 'plug and play' capability which in many cases will not really be an issue. In general the accepted wisdom is that any PCIe card needs to have 'Thunderbolt aware' drivers to function properly via a Thunderbolt to PCIe expansion chassis. Plus they're way more expensive - $500 on up for just the enclosure, without the video card. 😀 It's too bad nobody made a native Thunderbolt chassis like the ViDock that would work - chassis exist but nobody wants to say that a video card will work. So once everything is here, I'll give it a go. I think it's better just to have a Mac, and down the road if I want a faster GPU I can get one unlike a MacBook Pro or an iMac.

Not waking on sleep, not fully using SpeedStep and so on. I've done so-called Hackintoshes before, but they've always been weird in the Power Management department. Cheaper than building a separate PC and shoehorning Mavericks onto it. Maybe a year ago when I got the Mini I should have opted for a 21.5' iMac, but too late to worry about that. It's an expensive-enough proposition to buy all the hardware (total of $465). I was too cheap to pay for expedited shipping at all those places. Hopefully everything will be here by the end of the week. Sonnet EchoPro Express Card to Thunderbolt adapter (cheapest at B&H, paid $135)ī-Plus PE4L-EC2C (bought from M-Factors Storage) Based on this blog post I have ordered the following:ĬoolerMaster Elite 130 mini ITX case (also from Newegg)Ĭorsair CX430M modular 80+ power supply (again from Newegg) I have a 2012 Mac Mini that I'll be using. This isn't the end of the world but there are some useful modelling tools in 2020 and it will be a nightmare having to revert back and forwards to work with both programs, especially when paying for the service select and upgrades.You can make the drivers Thunderbolt-aware for the current nVidia drivers. I've opened the model up in 2019 and it works great, flying around the model is smooth and easy in Open GL and using SketchUp and Rhino is equally great. Trying to render in Open GL makes the model unwieldy. I've tried switching on the option to prefer external GPU in the 'Get info' pallet but this seems to be making things worse. I recently upgraded my graphics card but saw no noticeable improvements, Vectorworks seems to actually be worse since the upgrade, not utilising the graphics card at all and relying solely on the integrated graphics card. I'm currently running a Mac Mini (2018), 3.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 with 64 GB RAM and a Radeon RX Vega 64 8 GB plugged in to a Razer Core X. Is anyone having any problems running Vectorworks 2020 whilst using a external GPU?

Mac mini late 2012 external gpu