Six-way comparison of my eGPU setup

I like thin and light notebooks. But I also like having the graphics horsepower available when at my desk to play the occasional game. In the last few months, external GPUs connected by Thunderbolt 3 are starting to appear, and I was lucky enough to get my hands on a PowerColor Devil Box. And unlucky enough to experience an initial incompatibility between the Devil Box and my laptop, a recent Kaby Lake Dell XPS 13 (9360).

Luckily though, I have received a firmware update for the Devil Box, which allows compatibility with my laptop, so I thought I would finally do some testing of the setup.

System:

Laptop: Dell XPS 13 9360
CPU: i7-7500U
RAM: 8GB
internal GPU: Intel HD graphics 620

eGPU enclosure: PowerColor Devil Box
eGPU: Sapphire AMD Radeon RX470 4GB

Now, I use Arch Linux as my daily driver, and I’m pleased to report that the eGPU is detected, and can be used to render any application by simply setting the environment variable DRI_PRIME=1 (when using Wayland). The only issue I’ve had with Linux is that the system doesn’t really like when unplugging the eGPU while running, so I have to turn the laptop off before unplugging. I might investigate this some other day, but it is no big deal, since the eGPU can be connected while the computer is running with no issues.

Anyway, on to the benchmarks. I am running Unigine Heaven on Extreme settings, and rendering on the laptops internal screen:

Quality:       Ultra
Tesselation:   Extreme
Anti-aliasing: x8
Fullscreen:    no
Resolution:    1600x900

The scores were:

OS          (API)      eGPU   iGPU
Windows 10  (DX11)     1322    211
Windows 10  (OpenGL)   1230    199
Arch Linux  (OpenGL)    816    146

So what can we gather from this? Firstly, Linux OpenGL drivers are not as good as Windows OpenGL drivers. Secondly, DirectX 11 performs better than OpenGL. Finally, an eGPU is a compelling upgrade in my case.

So what’s left? Well, I’ve ordered a replacement fan for the front of the Devil Box. I was so tired of the constant high-RPM spinning, that I have unplugged both fans. But this leads to the PSU fan spinning up when under load, and the little fan on the PSU is very loud (although with quite a pleasant smooth sound). I hope a lower RPM and better fan in the front of the Devil Box will prevent this. Also, I need to investigate ways of improving the Linux experience: fix the problems when unplugging, and work out how to change the fan profile of the card when running in Linux.

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Updating my website

I spent some time today updating my website to function as an extension of my CV. For just over a year now, I’ve had a website hosted on my own machine located in my parents’ garage, but I decided that I would try and improve the look of the website a bit.

I wanted something simple, just handcrafted HTML with good code legibility, but at the same time responsive and modern. I found a few CSS templates and guides that helped me achieve the look I wanted: Modern and responsive, with gorgeously large images, that scroll behind the text.

I kept all my writings and uploaded files in place, and transferred the text partially from my old website, and partially from my CV. The website is easy to maintain, and simple to read, and I got the chance to show some of my favourite photos as background images as well.

All in all, I’m pleased with the result. What do you think? See for yourself:

www.jpamills.dk

By the way, Safari on iPhone posed a bit of a problem. The images were not at all displaying correctly, in that they were stretched too tall, with each pixel being truly gigantic. I had to put in a small fix in my CSS, inspired by the solution on this page.

The problem was, that the iPhone was not understanding the CSS directive

background-size: cover;

So, I had to introduce a fix. To make it work, I had to sacrifice the nice parallax effect where the image scrolls behind the text, but Chrome on Android was already falling back to static images, so I didn’t mind iPhone doing the same. Suffice to say, the following worked, where I set background-attacment to scroll (thus giving up hope of the nice parallax effect), and hardcode the height of the image container, and thus also the image to a set value.

/* fix for the iphone */
@media (min-device-width : 320px) and (max-device-width : 568px)  {
section.module.parallax {
background-attachment: scroll;
height: 320px;
}
section.module.parallax h1 {
line-height: 320px;
}
}