New gaming set up

[maw_walker]

Bit of background: I have been a PC gamer since the late 80's, well, then it was on an Amiga. Early 90's I got a PC and it just grew from there. I built a gaming rig a few years ago after I switched back to Macs from Linux and my thoughts were to have a dedicated machine to game on. Well, my poor brand new (2020) Intel Mini just sits with nothing to do so I thought I'd get rid of the gaming rig and use an eGPU on the mini since the architecture on it is newer than the PC gaming rig. I am giving up some games and gaming platforms (GoG) but it's fine. I own dozens of games and rarely play most of them. The ones I really love are on Mac anyway.

I predominantly play World of Warcraft which has pretty low system specs and the mini plays it fine using the on-die GPU, until my ePGU comes in. It felt good to do a reset on my Windows 10 box and put it up for sale. I have never liked Windows, even since 1993 when I first saw 3.11 back then. Under my desk is now clean, only 2 cables and now I can use the Mini instead of it sitting idle for months. I also use it to do graphics editing, scanning photos, writing and ripping my CD collection.

I chose the AKiTiO Node Titan as an eGPU. I have an AMD RX570 as a gaming card and it works perfectly for the things I play. I'll post back how this works as I have never used an eGPU before.

Thanks for letting me ramble

 

[maw_walker]

Got the Node Titan in last night and it is much larger than I thought. I was going to put it on my desk but had to put it under my desk on one side. The Thunderbolt 3 cable they supplied was very short so that clinched the decision where to put the device. Installing the video card was easy, although the instructions were terrible so I had to figure out the power wiring myself. The RX570 card is large and requires extra power. The node Titan has a 650 watt PSU so has plenty.

Once hooked up, I powered the eGPU on and then the mini and everything worked great. I thought I had to turn the eGPU on and off when I turned the mini on or off but it is intelligent and knows when the mini powers on.

Games work great and World of Warcraft is smooth at high graphics settings. I am just happy I don't have to have a separate Windows machine anymore

 

[clementishutin]

Nice, how much RAM do you have.

 

[maw_walker]

32GB. I went with that much because I also run a couple of VMs. It’s overkill I am sure but better than not having enough.

 

[maw_walker]

Update: the RX 570 is getting long in the tooth as they say so went with the maximum card this Akitio Node Titan will support: an AMD RX 5700 XT. Once that maxes out, will probably build another Windows gaming box. My Mini runs fine with this set up but since WoW has updated several times since my original post, I've had to lower the graphics settings to nearly "low" and even then it can get jumpy in complex battle scenes.

if I upgrade the Mini, the M1's and M2's cannot use eGPUs and I am not convinced they are up to par with modern games. I could be wrong but pretty sure I've read frame rates are not even close to a dedicated Windows gaming box with a higher end GPU. I hate having to do that but I figure I've got a couple years to figure things out.

 

[maw_walker]

So, the RX 5700XT doesn’t work well at all with the Akitio Node Titan. I gave up and am gaming with the on die GPU in the Mini. Not ideal at all so started a gaming PC build. Had a nice run with the Mini though. It’s life will be easier writing and editing photos