Upgrading Sputnik and building Mir - the $75 eGPU dock

[Droidbot]

(If you're wondering, Mir was a space station operated by the Soviet Union and later Russia from 1986 to 2001. I named it that since my desktops are named after American ships (Apollo being my main rig) and my laptop is named Sputnik since it's made of mostly aluminium.)

 

So for a long time I have been interested in small but powerful laptops to replace my Alienware M11xR3. While I absolutely love that machine, it's getting old and the cooling system is totally shot as well as battery replacements. $300 to drop into that machine isn't exactly a smart decision for me. After some research I stumbled across the Elitebook 2570p. It's a 12.5" laptop with a socketed CPU (and support for 4c/8t quad core chips), dual HDD/SSD and RAID support, no WiFi whitelist and a 4G card port. But the big feature for me was the support for external graphics cards over the ExpressCard bus. It seems like a very cool thing to just go to my dad's place, drop the PC down into the HP dock and then plug in a GPU and start playing games. It's similar to the Blade Stealth + Core, except that this ENTIRE BUILD (Core costs an eye watering $700 here!) costs less than the Core alone.

 

I picked up a base model 2570p off a local large computer refurbisher at auction for $240AUD. It came with a Core i5 2C/4T CPU at 2.8Ghz, 4GBs of RAM, and a 500GB HDD. I quickly swapped out the 500GB HDD with a new one I had lying around, and took the 8GB DIMM I had in the Alienware out and swapped the old 2GB back into there. I also ripped out the DVD drive - it was just extra weight that I didn't really freakin need.  This thing is pretty snappy in daily tasks - the screen isn't amazing, and it gets a little too warm for my tastes, but it runs perfectly well. The company I bought it from had cleaned out the machine top to bottom, but that isn't hard as you'll see in a minute. HP offers a 120pg book on how to dismantle and reassemble this thing. 

 

Here's some views of the inside and bottom: 

 

 

Now onto the interesting part: the external GPU dock, which is nicknamed 'Mir'. The Elitebook natively supports up to Nvidia Kepler GPUs, or AMD and later Nvidia cards by using a memory override.  This didn't matter to me, as I had a 770 sitting in my main system ready to be upgraded. It also supports hot-plugging the GPU and using the internal display for gaming with the GPU via Optimus. I ordered a GDC Beast v8 Expresscard to PCI-E 16x converter for just $50 off eBay, and it arrived at my door around a month after. It included a small plastic box with a couple ports and a PCI-E 16x slot on top, a data connection to ExpressCard cable, and a 20+4pin connector to their proprietary standard cable. Pretty freakin' cool. I then went on a search for a good cheap PSU. Efficiency didn't matter shit, as long as it was from a name brand and has 6+8pin connectors, I'd take it. I found a local place that tears down computers, and I got a cheap Cooler Master 500W PSU with 2x6pin, one through dual molex conns for $25 (before it ran a 2600k and a 570 afaik), and then ordered a 2x molex to PCI-E 8pin for $7 delivered.

(For the PSU Nazi Squad, it doesn't really matter since it isn't even hitting 300W load out of 500W if I used a 770)

 

Disaster strikes, and I'm fairly sure my 770 is stone-dead. I couldn't get it to boot, but I didn't try reseating it, instead just ripping it out of my system and dropping in my new 1070. My local PC shop didn't have a system to test it in, and I was again on the look for a new Kepler GPU. And this is where this story ends for now. 

 

To-do:

- Get the special case that GDC offers for the Beast. It's not a priority, but if it's cheap I'm totally in. 

- Get a new Kepler GPU. Maybe 760, 780, or 780Ti. I'm gaming at 900p here, so it doesn't really matter that much. 

- Get a 3rd Gen i7-quad to go into the laptop. This will bring me up to desktop i5-tier performance.

- Make mods to the cooling system. Make this thing not run so hot and heck, maybe even make it last longer on battery.

- Get an SSD. This thing badly needs one.

- Get the plastics kit from HP to get a space saver for the ODD bay. I don't need it, it's 2017 for fuck's sake. 

- Test everything. 

 

If you read to here, you're awesome . This is just a little side project of mine that I wanted to share with all of you here.