PCIe 1.1 1x for eGPU, how bad is the bottleneck?

[deAlek]

Hi guys,
I have a Macbook Pro mid 2010 17" (Macbook Pro 6.1); Intel Core i7 (2,8 GHz, 256KB L2 cache, 4MB L3 cache); 8 GB RAM 1066MHz, SSD; NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB, running MacOSX and Windows 7.

It has an ExpressCard Slot equipped; This slot offers an interface for a PCIe 1.1 1x connection. I have found a connector for it on ebay: http://www.hwtools.net/Adapter/PE4C%20V3.0.html - Connecting it to a graphics card, while supplying power through a PSU should allow me to use it with an external monitor.

Now I know: This only offers a throughput of 250MB/s, compared to a PCIe 2.0 16x connection that has 8000MB/s.

However, I have also read some articles where people used PCIe 3.0 cards with PCIe 2.0, 1.0 and even 1.0 8x with very small performance drops in the range of 10-20% compared to the maximum possible.

I have also seen quite a few people using external GPUs on their Notebooks using the Akitio Thunder 2 through Thunderbolt 1. Thunderbolt one has four times more bandwidth than my express card slot offers, and it gets really great results with high end video cards. My brother has that, too. He get's 9000 Points in 3DMark 2013 using a Gforce GTX970.

Now here comes my question: Does anybody have experience on how bad an average graphics card from today would perform using a PCIe 1.1 1x connection? I really don't need to outperform anybody anywhere, I just kind of still like my laptop and want to increase the graphics experience I have now using the internal graphics.

In the future, when Thunderbolt 3 has come to Macbooks, I will look into upgrading to a high-end eGPU solution, but as of now, do you think I could play games with my computer and a decent external graphics card?

Thanks for your opinions,
Alek

 

[ko888]

Some games, like Metal Gear Solid V and Crysis 3 for example, are virtually unaffected by limited PCI-Express bandwidth, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, you will find games like Battlefield 4 that will suffer from a huge performance loss.

 

[deAlek]

Some games, like Metal Gear Solid V and Crysis 3 for example, are virtually unaffected by limited PCI-Express bandwidth, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, you will find games like Battlefield 4 that will suffer from a huge performance loss.

Thanks for your reply, that is interesting! In that case I will order the item and check out how it works with my favorite games. Maybe I'm lucky.

I have one more question; I am intrigued to buy a 4k monitor, which is of course not working with my old internal GPU. Now if I used the Nvidia Gforce GTX970, do you think I could do Web browsing and normal office work on it at 4k res or would switching to 4k already be too much for the PCIe 1 1x connection?