So here's the gist:
I recently bought myself a really nice and cheap lenovo u310 for college and moved my desktop to my dorm. The problem with that is that I can no longer game in the weekends when I only have my laptop with me. The integrated hd4000 is pretty good but not for gaming. So I got my mind set on going external gpu on it.
I already have a spare psu and gpu(an amd hd5670) to use for it. The only thing left is to find a cheap(college student, I don't have any proper money) way of connecting it all. I already fount out about the 'usual' way to achieve this, by using a PE4L over mPCIe or expresscard or similar type of device. The only 'problem' being that those all cost around the same and a quite a bit too much and the cable being too thick to fit in the construction of the laptop.
So I found out here that it is even possible to construct one yourself. The links provided to further reading are not very detailed however. The only images don't show a lot of information but looked surprisingly easy in terms of parts and construction(did see a cap on the bottom going from pcie power to data part, wonder what it is for). This lead me to believe that someone somewhere, probably in china, was constructing and selling something like it and that it could be done cheaply.
I found this link on ebay of a similar setup at a very reasonable price that would fit much better in the laptop and can easily be uncoupled on both ends. It looks as if this could work but I do have some questions about it. Since this card supports only x1 electrically and is a 1.0 version the bandwidth might really get troublesome, I presume the PE4L are 2.0 at least. I could not find hard numbers on how much bandwidth certain graphics cards actually require but know that the performance hit on x1 v2 is doable. I also worry about power delivery. There is a fdd connector on the little pcb to supply the 12v and 5v but I worry about the 70W of power the card will pull and where it wil try to obtain it and if it could pull too much on the laptop or the pcb somehow.
Further notes: I plan on using it on an external lower res vga monitor only and playing not too demanding games, also, I cannot stress the cheap part enough, think about the amount of beer I could buy for the difference in price. This usb3 plx thing looks promising but not ready yet.
Anyone any thoughts/idea's/help/... ?