hey welcome back to the channel all right so one of the easiest ways to
improve the graphical performance of a Mac is to use an external GPU now the
problem with that is that apple only officially supports macs with
Thunderbolt 3 connections and not those with Thunderbolt 2 but there is a way to
get that working and that's what I'm going to show you today
everything I show you is going to apply to just about anything with the
Thunderbolt 2 port be it a Mac Mini and iMac or MacBook Pro but today I'm going
to show you how to use an external GPU on an older Mac Mini, so here we go.
alright now
Before we jump into the tutorial I just want to make it clear I'm not gonna be
doing benchmarking or anything like this to show you the improvements if that's
something you want to see leave a comment down below and I'm happy to do a
before and after video on some games and some video editing even some 3d programs
if you want to see that now there's four things you're gonna need to make this
work on the hardware side not including the computer
I love links down in the description to all four of these but you're gonna need
the e GPU enclosure I use the sonnet EDF X breakaway box it's 200 bucks on Amazon
it's a really really solid breakaway box it's Thunderbolt 3 and I would
definitely recommend if you don't get this one that you get an enclosure with
Thunderbolt 3 don't get the Thunderbolt 2 enclosure because then you're kind of
limiting yourself with the Thunderbolt 3 enclosure you're kind of future proofing
yourself a little bit the next thing you're going to need is that video card
that goes inside that a GPU enclosure I'll have a link down in the description
that takes you out to a site from Apple that shows you all the officially
supported video cards for EGP use now the method I'm going to show you today
allows for some additional cards that aren't on that list but if you want to
stay official check out that link use one of those cards I'll be using a
radiant rx 470 for today's tutorial the next thing you're gonna need because
this is a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure is you're gonna need a Thunderbolt 3-2
thought of all to adapt there I've tried a whole bunch of them and the only one
that I've gotten to work is the one from Apple so if you know of another one that
works please leave that down in the comment section especially if it's a
little bit cheaper than that Apple one so we can all save a few bucks then
after that the last thing you're going to need is the Thunderbolt 2 cable that
goes from that adapter into the back of your Mac Mini
or your iMac or your MacBook Pro whatever Thunderbolt 2 device you're
using and then you are ready to go on to the software side so let's check that
out right now all right so we got the GPU put in the enclosure everything
hooked up and we are here on the desktop the first thing I want to do is show you
what happens if we don't run in a script and just try to run it right now so I'm
going to plug the Thunderbolt 2 into the back of the Mac Mini here let it start
up and we can see it starts up and normal but it's not showing any GPU and
that is the problem because this is a unsupported Mac it's got a Thunderbolt 2
and even though we have a support of GPU in a supported GPU enclosure it's not a
supported Mac so we have to run a script called purge Wrangler on here to get
this to work so I'm gonna unplug this Thunderbolt 2 and this is the purge
Wrangler Wrangler page its github page I'll have a link down in the description
that'll take you out there so you here read through this if you want but once
you're on this page you just take the text in the installation section copy
that and paste it into a terminal window I'm gonna paste that and execute it and
this is going to download the script and execute it you're gonna have to type in
your password and it's gonna run through now it'll take a few seconds I've run
this on my computer before it'll take a little bit longer for you but once it
comes up really the only things you have to worry about are the AMD GPU and the
NVIDIA GPU don't worry about the rest of this stuff if you use in Mojave use an
AMD GPU because Mojave does not have web drivers for NVIDIA GPUs yet so just to
be safe use AMD GPU and like I said use that a supported card list that I linked
down below to use a card that's supported I'm using the rx 470 so I'm
going to select AMD it's gonna start running through it and basically what
this is going to do is it's going to trick the system into thinking we have a
supported Mac so we're gonna go ahead and hit yes we're going to enable this
TI 82 and let it run this is going to run for just a few minutes and then when
it's done we'll go ahead and restart our system and give that
external GPU or try again alright so we're all done we're gonna go back to
the main menu here quit out and restart the system and I'll be back when it's
restarted all right so here we are we are freshly restarted after installing
purge Wrangler and I'm gonna go ahead and plug in that external GPU again and
see what happens the second it should pop up here and there it is it's
switching over because it detected our GPU and if we take a look we can see
that we have the AMD Radeon rx4 70 at this point we can just yank out that
HDMI cable from the back of our Mac and everything go run off the external GPU
giving us much better performance and applications and games 3d apps video
editing all that kind of good stuff so there you go that is how to use an eGPU
on an older Mac Mini or iMac or MacBook Pro anything with a thunderbolt tube
connection this should work that script works great I've been using this after
you get it all set up you can even restart and it still uses the e GPU you
don't have to run that command every time and it vastly improves the game
performance again if you want to see a dedicated video on that showing you some
before and after leave a comment down below I'm happy to do a video for you on
that and hopefully you found this useful and informative if you did please give
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meeting new people on there and chatting with them and I will see you in the next
video