DIY External GPU?

Hardware GPU
1

Since the new release of the Revisions of the RX platform having more competative cards against Nvidia. I'm curious of building my own enclosure of an external case for a gpu but going in cheap, something like the rx 560 or a cheap 460 can do.
But i have one curiousity of a theoretical idea.

Is it possible to do an external gpu setup with a nintendo switch? (I mean it maybe a stupid idea)

Yeah it's on the Tegra x1 chipset and is on the way of being crackable going into into the kernal and such but is it even possible or even work if lets just say make a set of programs launched in the system as an exploiting code that get the internal gpu to halt of information and send it to the external gpu providing increased performance.

2

is it technically possible? yes. you may have to program quite a few things and learn everything there is about gpu's but it is technically possible.

3

As the great philosopher says:

As the Cat Says:

Not without significant effort that would essentially require the same skills as designing the nintendo switch from scratch anyway.

2 Likes
4

If the switch could access Steam perhaps

5

Yeah looks like a very hard thing to do at the moment.

6

Which i feel that will least likely happen unless nintendo is that desperate to get more people to join the switch wagon, which is very rare.

7

Pretty sure Razer makes an overpriced product like this for their ultrabook.

Might want to look into how they do it and see if you can re purpose the tools they used and DIY it. Not sure what the limits were to that external GPU box.

There seem to be a few products like this out there

8

Maybe you'll find these links interesting, it seemed the best way to describe what I was thinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500

http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/bbc/bbcz80.htm

https://www.cnet.com/products/intel-desktop-board-ca810-motherboard-micro-atx-socket-370-i810-series/specs/#p=intel-desktop-board-ca810-motherboard-micro-atx-socket-370-i810-boxca810a3/

http://www.supermicro.com/products/superblade/module/SBI-7127RG.cfm

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best-gaming-laptops-top-5-gaming-notebooks-reviewed-1258471

http://cdm.link/2017/04/apple-announces-theyll-announce-something-later/

https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/05/the-tech-behind-hbm-why-amds-high-bandwidth-memory-matters/

9

Wouldn't the switch have to have some sort of vacant hardware interface that connects to the external GPU? Laptops had some sort of PCI slot and intel has rights to thunderbolt. I'm assuming that the switch dock connects to some sort of display out. Especially considering some games experience a performance hit when outputting to a higher resolution through the dock.

10

unless the USB Type C connector has direct PCIe connectors (a MASSIVE security cock-up on Nintendo's part were that the case) then I don't see any really feasible way of hooking up an external GPU to a switch. You would also need an operating system for the switch with drivers that could even take advantage of the graphics processor and up the resolution.

Legend of Zelda already runs reasonably well on PC, so unless you're getting a different title that is switch-exclusive, I see on reason to go to all the trouble.

With other platforms like old laptops, this is a different story that is technically feasible and one that I have tested, but even that is very janky and not something I'd recommend doing.

11


if you can get through Nintendo's locks