Thought this was pretty damn awesome, and possibly open the eyes of manufacturers! IT IS POSSIBLE!
Hate just copying and pasting, but every thing is pretty self explanatory!
http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/4271-2013-11-macbook-air-win7-sonnet-echo-expresscard-pe4l-internal-lcd-%5Bus%24250%5D.html
TLDR: By buying around $250 in commonly available parts, plus a video card, you can make the graphics of your 11" Macbook Air from 5X to 7X faster. Demo video at end of post. Step-by-step, here's how to exactly do it. Warning: not for the faint of heart! (click to see larger versions, video at end of article) Hey everyone! This is my third article here on this forum, though it's the first that the process can be done by anyone with off-the-shelf parts. No more discontinued exotic parts like the BPlus TH05 are required. All you need is a macbook air, a graphics card, a power supply, Windows 7, and ~$250 to buy some adapters and software online. All these parts are readily available for anyone. Like usual, I really want to thank nando4 for his help in doing all this. He's the mastermind behind the technicals, I just like writing articles and making stuff easier for everyone. He's super dedicated and eGPUs wouldn't be anywhere near where they are today if it wasn't for him! Thanks! So what are we doing? We're going to make a Macbook Air accept an external video card via Thunderbolt! Yes, you might have read in the news that real commercial solutions are just around the corner. We've been promised by these companies over-and-over again, with youtube videos, hands-on reviews, press releases, etc, but nobody is releasing anything. It's been like this for over a year. Intel even openly admits its bias against GPU usage where it's listed as unsupported in their Thunderbolt Certification Application. Talking to one of their thunderbolt guys, here's what that "Not Supported" means:
The “Not supported” means that Intel won’t neither certify your product nor deliver, at the moment, any Technology License for this kind of usage. As you know, this Technology License is required to develop a Thunderbolt device in the market and Certification is a must have to market any Thunderbolt product.
So with the bad news out of the way, the good news is that you can still do it yourself -- just a bit less elegantly. We'll be using the Sonnet Thunderbolt to ExpressCard adapter, together with the BPlus PE4L ExpressCard to PCI-Express adapter. This PE4L adapter also includes a Delayed PCI-Reset jumper, making Windows 7 + Internal LCD rendering possible on the Macbook. Also, it's not that bad. As you'll see by the benchmarks later in the article, yes you're only running at expresscard 5Gbps x1 2.0 PCI bus speed (as opposed to 16X 2.0 on a proper PC and only half of Thunderbolt's 10Gbps), but its WAY WAY better than the internal integrated graphics of the laptop, plus you can still max out tons of games. The full PC bus speed is super rarely used anyways, so it's not like you'll get 1/16th the performance. As part of this tutorial, we'll be using Windows 7 BIOS (installed the regular Bootcamp way). Things are possible in Windows 8 as well, but the instructions differ, and I've also had troubles getting Internal LCD rendering working on Windows 8. Yeah I'm not a fan of using legacy Windows versions either, but whatever, every game works on both OSes for now anyways. Oh and we're using Windows because games only exist for it, and I can't get the setup to work on OSX (haven't tried too much though). Alright, lets get started! My laptop specs
Mid-2013 11" Macbook Air
1.7 GHz Intel Core i7-4650U (basically the most maxed out 11" mba)
8GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Intel HD Graphics 5000 1024 MB
512GB Apple SSD
http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/4271-2013-11-macbook-air-win7-sonnet-echo-expresscard-pe4l-internal-lcd-%5Bus%24250%5D.html
