Vaio Z128 Laptop + External GTX580 = BIG Grin! ;)
 

And now for something entirely different........... :)

Take one....

Vaio Z128GG Laptop

https://blufiles.storage.live.com/y1...top.jpg?psid=1

and one....

PE4H-EC2C-ver2.4 Express card to PCIe adapter +

https://blufiles.storage.live.com/y1...2.4.jpg?psid=1

and one....

Gigabyte GTX580ud

https://blufiles.storage.live.com/y1...3GI.jpg?psid=1


Shaken not stirred...

https://blufiles.storage.live.com/y1...350.JPG?psid=1


https://blufiles.storage.live.com/y1...348.JPG?psid=1


And you get...

https://blufiles.storage.live.com/y1...580.jpg?psid=1


https://blufiles.storage.live.com/y1...age.jpg?psid=1

Blackdeath 35-50FPS @ 1920x1080 Everything on high, shadows & SSAO off. :)

That's Genius lol :)

Shouldn't that be "Vaio Z128 Laptop + External GTX580 + Ruddy great external PSU + Please keep the cat off it..." ;)

Interesting.

How do you get the 2nd power supply(external for the video card) to turn on when you turn on your laptop?

Its on the to do list after I finish rebuilding the main system to put this into the case below with the built in 450W supply! ;) Make it a bit more compact and portable! :)

https://blufiles.storage.live.com/y1...(1).jpg?psid=1

The PCIe board comes with another little board with a switch that plugs into the 24pin PSU cable. You power up the laptop and wait for the bios boot screen to show before powering on the GPU. Or leave it turned on and plug the expresscard in after the bios boot screen appears. It's hot pluggable once your into windows too as long as you have it configured properly during boot up.

I have 8GB ram in my laptop which means I need to move stuff around in memory with a pre-boot utility to make address space for the external GPU.

With most 4GB ram laptops you can just boot straight into windows no problem.

Whats the price of such a PCI-E Adapter?

$85 US.

Everything you need to know is here...
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gami...periences.html

WARNING its not a simple plug n play affair. You have to do a fair bit of driver hacking and bios hacking to get it to work for some systems, particularly for the Vaio Z because of it's gay Hybrid graphics and Sony's slack video driver support!

For those wondering what real world performance is like.

In Crysis 2 DX11 Ultra pak @ 1920x1080 I get min 24fps avg 35fps outdoors and 50FPS indoors. Compared with the GT330M struggling to do 20FPS on lowest settings @ 1600x900!

ClOD gets 50FPS compared to 3FPS with the GT330M.

18K Vantage compared to a desktop GTX580 @ 24k.

And just to put that into perspective, my built in so called dedicated GT330M does Vantage P1825 and 5fps vs 18900 and 55fps for the external GTX580.. Thats a 1000% (10x) increase in performance.

lol!

Insane :)

Very happy for you.

Like we would afford to even think about such a system.

Btw I get about the same 3DMark score with my 2 700USD iMac. :-D

Hmmm I doubt you get anywhere near 19k with that setup.. Its nice though!

Look here.. 6970M Vantage P11k, Thats HALF my score of 18.9k. (incidentally I got 19.3k with a small CPU OC)

https://blu1.storage.live.com/items/...20graphics.jpg

Aren't those Vaio Z laptops $2k? I thought they already came with an external GPU/BluRay thingy.

I was talking overall 3D score where your pic shows just below 14K and my iMac with a slightly OC:d vidcard gets just above.
Dunno score for GPU only.

Anyways, just a reflection. :-P

$4k for a Vaio Z. I have a 2010 Vaio Z128, the new Vaio Z2 series have sony's version of a thunderbolt port. Though the external drive/GPU on the new Z2 is barely better than the old integrated GT330M. Such a waste of a great concept!