Mike The Fool

at those prices, I'd go Tomahawk. As stated above, the Gigabyte board has the potentially annoying software dual BIOS and the odd M.2 configuration that potentially takes lanes away from the GPU. Between the TUF and the Tomahawk, the Tomahawk gives you wifi 6, an internal USB-C header, BIOS flashback, 2.5 gig LAN, and built-in I/O shield--maybe none of those are deal breakers, but for me at least they fall into "nice to have" territory.

So, I nearly bought a 3080 version of one of these today, thinking that I could pull the GPU out of the enclosure for use in my desktop, and drop my desktop's old GPU in the enclosure for occasional use with my laptop. I understand that back in the Pascal days, buying these eGPUs for the card inside, and then either reselling or repurposing the enclosure was pretty common practice, but I couldn't find any info whether this was still possible/practical with the new Ampere versions (couldn't even find a teardown video of one). From the marketing photos, it looks like the I/O is screwed directly into the rear panel of the enclosure, which makes me wonder if they're using a non-standard card configuration. Anyone know if there's still a standard format graphics card inside these, and whether you can replace it with a different card and have both the enclosure and the card still work?

That board does have a BIOS flash button, so you can update the BIOS without needing an older generation CPU. Check the manual for the exact procedure (and don't forget to unzip the BIOS file, I've totally made that "oops" once.) Any time you're flashing firmware on a device, an interruption in the flash process can brick it, so try to do it in the safest way possible-- i.e. make sure you're plugged into a good secure power outlet where the cord won't fall out or get bumped, nobody in the house picks that moment to turn on Every Single Electrical Appliance and trip a breaker, etc. If you have an Uninterruptible Power Supply, this would be a good time to use it. I've flashed a couple MSI boards like this, one additional caveat is that both times I had the computer fully assembled, and it did boot up on its own after the flash process was completed. So make sure the CPU cooler is installed, nothing's blocking the fans, that sort of thing

Missed it by that much! Great job everyone! Will keep the laptop's 1070MQ folding, and the 2080 going during down time, but I think Ye Olde 980ti is going back into retirement for now.

Fair enough. It'd be nice to be able to cap it at like, half an hour, but I could see how letting users change the setting would lead to major issues. Yeah, I do this manually when I'm up and around, just haven't yet mastered the ability to interact with my computer from the dream realm

Big thanks to everyone organizing the event and helping with the tech support and answering questions! Is there a way to cap the maximum time delay to check for WUs? I'm finding it kinda annoying to wake up and find that my best GPU has been sitting idle for six hours, and is going to be waiting another 2 hours before it checks again for work.

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