External GPU unrecognized in windows

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dracolord1001

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Apr 21, 2016
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Hi, so I have a crap computer and I wanted to be able toand run some games I play at actually decent (45+ fps) frames. So I bought an external dock and PSU and installed it. I have a Lenovo N580 Thinkpad, which only has one MPCI port, so I unplugged the network card (have a wifi usb adapter) and plugged the dock in. Plugged all the power connections in, and plugged the monitor into the port on the graphics card and started my computer. The dock's blue power light lit up, the gpu and PSU's fans starting spinning, and Windows 7 booted up fine. The problem is, Windows detects something but doesn't know what it is. Under "Other devices" Device Manager lists a "PCI Simple Communications Controller" and "Unknown Device" which are failing because they don't have drivers. I thought installing the AMD Drivers (using XFX AMD HD7770 OCE) would fix it, but I can't even install the right drivers because the installer doesn't detect the card. I've searched for solutions elsewhere, and the closest I've gotten to an actual fix is by modding BIOS to unlock the advanced tab to enable the MPCI port that the dock is connected to, which also doesn't make sense, since it seemed to be working fine with the network card in it. Except I can't mod the BIOS because when I tried flashing, it returned an error of something like "Error caused by safety parameters"..."please contact vendor to remove safety feature" or thereabout.This is all just very frustrating spending the money on the dock and PSU and for it to not even work, while seeing other eGPU setups EXACTLY like mine working on the first try, very easily. Please help!
TL😀R eGPU setup not working, Windows not recognizing it

Hardware:
Lenovo Thinkpad N580
8GB DDR3 RAM
Intel Pentium B960
Dock: http://www.ecrater.com/p/23083902/exp-gdc-beast-laptop-external?gps=1&id=115927741939

GPU: XFX AMD HD7770 OCE
PSU: EVGA 500w
 
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"Unknown Device" it's the PCI-e translator chip on the external dock. You need those drivers from the dock manufacturer installed first, before you can install the video card drivers.
Also, some of the mPCIe ports might not fully compatible with the dock connection, because they have support for an mSATA SSD card in their WWAN card slot.
Read the laptop manual closely.
 
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Okay well I installed the drivers for the PCI simple communications and all that seemed to have done is get rid of the error because Windows still does not recognize the video card, and there is still an "Unknown device" under other devices in Device manager.... I cannot just install the card's drivers because the installer doesn't recognize that its there so it wont even install. what i CAN do however, is install my hdd on a laptop that has an AMD APU in it, install the AMD drivers on that, then transfer the HDD back to the Lenovo and see if it recognizes it then with the AMD driver on it. The reason I can't just use the other laptop entirely is because its a borrowed laptop (I have permission to do the HDD swap) and the owner doesn't want me in the BIOS and to use the dock requires me to flash whitelist removed bios. But after the swap I'll post an update.
 
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Okay so I did the HDD swap and installed the AMD drivers onto the HDD. When I put it back in the Lenovo and booted now the computer won't even load the BIOS with the eGPU on. So I turned the GPU off via turning off the power supply and booted into windows 10. Now Windows still doesn't recognize the eGPU but I can install it via installing legacy hardware. Now whats happening is under display adapters "AMD Radeon HD 7700 series" is there with the yellow caution sign under it, showing its malfunctioning. And whenever I try to update the drivers via AMD Installer, it now says I can install the display adapter and all that other stuff, yet when i hit continue, it sits at 2% for a few seconds, then immediately finishes (no error or anything) and doesn't install the drivers. I also looked into the manual from lenovo.com and there is nothing about the mPCIe port and what can be used in it. At this point I sincerely think its an issue with Windows and I'm about to factory reset the laptop WITH THE EGPU INSTALLED to see if Windows picks it up any differently (on a seperate HDD so I don't lose my data). Any suggestions? This is really frustrating, worked all weekend on it with no results.
 
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Also, just remembered trying the drivers for the dock, will try that also today
 
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Just kidding on finding drivers for the dock, I've done a bit of research and watched other installations, the dock does not require drivers, I have not seen anyone install drivers and I cannot find any drivers from the vendors website. Should I try AMD XConnect? I'm not sure if its different or not because the XConnect Docks are directly from AMD but perhaps its a dock driver needed for external AMD cards? I realized this when I saw that all these tutorials on youtube and such use Nvidia cards, not amd. But turns out the XConnect drivers are included in the AMD Radeon Crimson driver.... which I cannot install because the installer doesn't detect the card or the dock at all. Doesn't make any sense, I should be able to install the driver manually without the hardware detection for cases like this, obviously its a little dirty in computer terms but this should work...
 
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That's the most important thing - drivers for the dock, that "unknown" device. It's either automatically supported by Windows or they need dedicated drivers. In your case seems that you don't have generic drivers avail for that dock.
The "PCI Comm" thingie is irrelevant for your issue, don't know why you even wasted time on that.
The AMD card won't be "visible" to the OS if the "bridge" to the PC is broken - that's what the dock drivers do. You can try 1000 AMD drivers, they won't help at all until you fix the "bridge" drivers.
 
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Okay, the only thing I don't understand is where to get said drivers, because there aren't any from the manufacturer, and Windows isn't installing them. Is there some sort of Windows driver from manually selecting it from the list when i 'update device software" via device manager?
 
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And also, I tried manually selecting to install the AMD HD 7700 Series drivers for the unkown device, but what usually happens if its the wrong device for the driver, it'll just fail installing, but what happened was it returned an error saying the driver didnt support the operating system, and instead of unknown device with the exclamation, it now says AMD HD 7700 Series with the exclamation. Perhaps try it in Windows 7? Currently dual booting, but mainly use the Windows 10 partition
 
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Okay so something very odd is happening now. To get the hardware codes, I plugged in the dock and GPU and power supply and here is the key part: USED THE ORIGINAL HDD THE LAPTOP CAME WITH ( because at my moms i have fast internet but at my dads (current residence) i do not so I took the HDD with my games on it which isnt the original and put it in the lenovo for the gpu) and now the unknown device isn't there, but neither is the GPU in the device manager. Im going to try to dl the drivers from amd now to see what happens.
 
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I had tried that, nothing new came up. But I do see PCI bridge controllers or PCIe devices and such under one of the tabs, so maybe this drive does have the drivers. Not sure yet, didn't have enough time last night to really mess around with it, I'll get to you tonight about what happens.
 
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okay messing around with it right now. I've found a device under system devices or a phrase like that called "PCI to PCI bridge". I was thinking this must be it but it must not be using the right driver. so i've been installing different drivers from the list. something to note is that when i try to install the generic microsoft display adapter driver it returns an error yet when i try to install things like amd graphics tunnel it doesn't. trial and error is what im using right now
 
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