GPD G1 + Minisforum UM790 (and a chat about Oculink and Thunderbolt Next)

where we're going we don't need Thunderbolt I'm playing on a mini Forum machine 150 FPS 1440p native Doom internal but no I'm not playing on the internal GPU I'm playing on the external GPD G1 I know what you're thinking yeah yeah this has got USB 4 which is basically Thunderbolt you can use an egpu dock no this is much faster than Thunderbolt more than twice as fast for some things it really is something special let's take a closer [Music] look the GPD G1 is an ocul link external graphics card it's the 7600m XT it's just another egpu right it's the G1 it's a 7600m it's not even upgradeable there's not a pcie slot why would you want this because it's got oculink in addition to Thunderbolt 4 all right I probably should start by filling you in on a few things about Thunderbolt 4 Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 3 basically the same thing really the difference under the hood between Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 has nothing to do with the data layers the interface speed well a couple of non-optional features but Thunderbolt 3 already was implementing a lot of the optional features most manufacturers were implementing the optional features long long time ago THB 3 is advertised as like a 40 gbit solution it's going to give you a to 40 GBS that's basically the same as four PCI 3.0 lanes and for some things you can basically get the same amount of bandwidth but for other things it's a little trickier to get that amount of bandwidth if you're using it for Block storage for example you can get that but generally you won't on Mac computers and most Windows computers Without Really jumping through a lot of Hoops partly because of the dma engine partly because of the implementation of the Thunderbolt chipset which almost all Thunderbolt chipsets are Intel like the Thunderbolt name is Intel Intel will not let you call it Thunderbolt unless you pay Intel to certify it as Thunderbolt but under the hood one of the features of Thunderbolt is pcie tunneling being able to take PCI devices from one place to another basically Thunderbolt 3 and 4 in 2023 is absolutely anemic and the fact that Thunderbolt 5 is not out yet even though it's already advertised it's like oh it's an 80 gbit solution it's up to 120 gbit in in One Direction what most people don't realize is that these type c cables the reason they're reversible is because the top and bottom half of the cable actually has the same connections and so when you plug it in and then you plug in the other side it doesn't matter because there's two sets of connections there you may have seen like 20 gbit as 2x 10 gbit on the USB side of things and that's simply just two USB connections in one end some of you have even seen these funky C cbles you can get at some of the markets in Taiwan where it's a USBC into 2 type A and all that cable does is take the connections on the top and the bottom part of the port and Route it out to two different USB ports not all USB type-c ports are implemented that way on motherboards but a lot of the time to save costs and complexity that type- c header really is two type A ports that are wired to the top and bottom half of the cable but you only use one at a time not everything is that way there are some things where legit is just one connection and it can electrically route it between the top and the bottom half of the connector but at least for the 2x10 GB connections it really is two 10 GB USB connections by the same token Thunderbolt the original Thunderbolt 3 specification actually allowed up to eight pcie Lanes in this wire which is wild the reason that you don't see that very much is it is very difficult to get certification you see that type of a layout with that many wires in your cable and that much going on in a tiny little USBC connector generates a lot of RF interference not just for other devices but even for other radios that exist in your device so if you wanted to have an eight Lane Thunderbolt set up for example that would run at 80 gabit instead of 40 gbit it's the equivalent of eight PCI lanes because there really are eight channels on the wire as there are you know four channels with Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 on The Wire well four channels plus there's a lower bandwidth side Channel but let's not be super pedantic but in a nutshell know that on the physical USBC wire there's four high-speed pair and that's what's doing all the heavy lifting and the specification does actually allow for up to eight highspeed pair and you do have eight high-speed pair and a 2x10 GB USB type-c cable so a theoretical implementation of doublesided Thunderbolt you could see an 80 gbit connection Intel has actually demoed that in the lab some of there like oh look at this it's 80 gb Thunderbolt it's actually just double-sided Thunderbolt the new Thunderbolt that's coming that is 80/20 gbit uh is actually a higher rate of speed they're not going into the whole eight pair thing they might be able to do eight pair in the future for some sort of something but uh Thunderbolt 5 is not there yet and for my opinion I don't think 80 gigabit up and down or 120 gigabit out and 40 gigabit back is enough of an upgrade that's just sad how you know Thunderbolt 3 and four is not enough is manufacturers like GPD and minis form are adding oculink to their devices now strictly speaking oculink is already an obsolete connector it's on its way out oculink has its origins in servers and it is a four-lane connection there are an eight Lane versions actually I think as far as that goes I think there's even a 16 Lane version but I've seen four and eight Lane versions in the wild in servers for cabling up drive back planes and just moving pcie Lanes around you see internal server connections for network cards high-speed storage fpgas network cards more network cards more different kinds of network cards gpus it's all about pcae Lane routing sometimes you got to do that with a cable sometimes you got to do that with a printed circuit board sometimes you got to do that with a combination of a cable that goes to a printed circuit board and then turns the cable back into a PCI slot because you physic need to Route devices somewhere that you can physically cool them so you got to get creative and server design so oculink you also don't have a lot of room on motherboards for physical connectors or slots and so again oculink saves the day oculink is being supplanted right now because of Gen 5 pcie it was too hard to get Gen 5 and Gen 6 speeds working on that oculink connector it's being replaced with something called mini cool Edge mcio but there's a lot of occulent connections in the channel and so yeah it's not a reversible connection and it's not even a connection that can deliver power it's not a connection that supports side channel so it literally just carries PCI but boy does it carry pcie well and it carries Gen 4 pcie Gen 4 yes 80 gbit so you can experience what it's like to have Thunderbolt 5 at least the external GPU part of it not the USB part of the display tunneling or some of the other stuff right now today directly with oculink and that is what the GPD G1 gives us you can get oculink pcie docks as well none that are as nice and sexy as the G1 but you can do that and it actually is going to cost less the G1 this is a device that I paid for I actually paid for the G1 and the uh minis Forum 2023 but this is a video mainly about the G1 on a mini Forum machine but I also have the GPD windmax 2023 and which also has oculink and we have you know some other stuff if you order the G1 it comes with an m.2 2 to oculink adapter and so you can use that with pretty much anything you can use that with a laptop my system 76 laptop that has 2 m.2 it'd be super awkward but you could use this external GPU even with that laptop as long as you have an m.2 that is accessible it is a little bit janky there is the Jank Factor but it is a doable thing that you can run for this setup I've got the GPD G1 connected only by an ocul Link cable to a minis Forum 780 XTX and that was Doom internal that I was enjoying at 150 FPS and it basically works as advertised it's an external GPU a 7600 MXT that is unconstrained thermally and with power because it's in an external enclosure it was originally designed for a laptop there's actually some really interesting software stuff that goes on with that that we should talk about because AMD tries to do a power budget like as if they were these were in one combined system and it does a really amazing job with that but if you have a non-amd system this is just a PCA device it's going to work fine you can install the adrenaline drivers it'll work in an Intel system hell it probably work on an arm system I don't have an arm system with an m.2 thing to test we're going to get this thing running on risk 5 I don't we'll see have to mail the whole thing to Jeff geerling probably but all of this is background for you to really just bring you up to speed on where we are with pcie connectivity outside of a normal looking pcie slot oculink was what was chosen and I sort of joked with the Intel Thunderbolt 5 Guys I met the Intel Thunderbolt 5 guys at inov and I just sort of said as like you know you guys have been so long in the tooth coming with the Next Generation Thunderbolt successor that we're using ulink connectors these physical connectors like the people that manufacture the oculink connector They Don't Really rate them for the number of insertions that you can get with USBC connections a lot of these USBC connectors start at 10,000 insertions and go up to like 100,000 500,000 insertions on this connector if you if you if you have a cell phone that has a type-c connection and you plug it into charge every day you can definitely vouch for the fact that wow these connectors are only rated for a couple of hundred insertions it seems it depends it depends on which vendor and which model that you get how thick the gold plating is there's a lot that goes into it a lot of these oculink connectors are only rated at a tenth of the number of insertions that their uh USBC counterparts are similarly the cable the cable that Min Forum bundles with the G1 is intended for use internally inside a server this cable was not intended to be used outside of a nice protective chassis I mean sure it's got a braided exterior but this thin plastic braided exterior and then the foil wires underneath it is really all that separates this thing from chaos this connector was not meant to be bent or pulled this connector was not meant to be inserted more than probably 50 times and this length of cable quite frankly is a problem for pcie Gen 4 signaling speeds you see even though GPD designed the r drivers on the side of this to be able to deal with this long of a cable most of the time it's really borderline you want to use a cable that's about half this length so this is uh what 100 cm you really want to use a 50 cm Gen 4 rated oculink cable and in fact you'll have to run GPU Z if if you buy one of these and set it up you run GPU Z and see and verify that it's linking up at Gen 4 speeds a lot of the time for auto negotiation with a cable like this it's only going to link up at gen 3 speeds if you've got a particularly good system it will actually link up the GPD wind Max 2023 generally will link up at Gen 4 with our 100 cm cable but I have an older uh GPD machine that putting in the m.2 it will not Link at Gen 4 with this longer cable I have to use a shorter cable and then it'll it'll link fine but it'll link up a gen 3 and it'll work at gen 3 you just won't get dramatically better performance than Thunderbolt but it is better performance a gen 3 via oculink than gen 3 via Thunderbolt because 40 gbits is not always equal to 40 gbits you see you got Pure pcie bandwidth versus Thunderbolt bandwidth where some of the bandwidth is reserved for other things like USB that's the other thing I mentioned it but just to be clear there's no USB side Channel there's no power side Channel there's none of that this is just a PC connection fortunately both the G1 and the GPD devices have stuff in them so if you connect Thunderbolt and ocul Link it'll still try to use the the oculink connection and then you've got a fallback for USB so this thing's got USB ports on it but USB ports and the memory card reader are not going to work unless you have a USB Channel going back to the host device so when I only had the oculink cable plugged into our 780 XTX from Min Forum none of those USB ports are going to work I'm literally only going to get display port out in HDMI and yes cuz this is a full GPU you can drive three external displays full fat 144 H Herz no problem with this external GPU because the gpus are connected in fact if you got a mobile device like this you can actually do the rendering there and then send the signal back to the device that uses some of your bandwidth so it'll hurt performance very slightly but it is a much lower fraction of the overall bandwidth in oculink pcie Gen 4 mode than it is in Thunderbolt gen 3 mode if you're used to doing research and homework and looking at an external GPU solution it's like oh if we send it to the GPU and then the rendering of the GPU back to the internal laptop display that's slower than having a display connected to the GPU and the egpu dock it's much less noticeable with a Gen 4 oculink because it's twice as fast but you still do have a little bit of a performance hit whereas with the G1 you can just plug it in and it works it's also not as remotely Plug and Play to be sure pcie can can be hot plug a little bit not as hot plug as USB 4 but still fairly hot plug in this case surprise removal of the GPU crash the whole system now like I say these are AMD systems you know AMD mobile AMD mobile blah blah blah and AMD has done some really amazing special things in their driver for AMD systems but at the end of the day this is a PCI device it'll work just the same on an Intel system okay actually it won't work quite as well on an Intel system owing to the fact that AMD has done a lot of Plumbing with the driver and the setup you see normally AMD thinks this setup is going to be used in a laptop so the driver does make some assumptions to do with the power mode of the CPU and the GPU and so if you do things like set your power limit in Adrenaline that will affect the CPU power and the GPU power you see It'll try to budget power between the two of them depending on the parameters that you set in this case it's not actually relevant and that behavior in the future may change but if you set 100 Watts for example it'll try to use 100 Watts between the two systems even though the G1 has external power as does our minis Forum desktop machine it's a really interesting situation because a lot of the time in a laptop the cooling solution is shared so that the CPU and the GPU uh have you know basically a heat pop connection to the same heat sink or set of heat sinks that's way not the case here but that's not something that AMD really takes into account in their software they just look at it and say ah yes you got the AMD CPU you get the AMD GPU all right sounds good and that can affect your game performance and some other stuff if you have an Intel system you're adding this to an Intel system or you've you know added an oculink m.2 adapter which is all that's in there 780 XTX it's just a slightly different flavor of m.2 to oculink than what physically comes with the G1 but the fact that I'm able to combine Min forum and G and GPD products which they're kind of competitors kind of not me they're in that small form factor PC you know more like full handheld like micro laptop versus micro desktop but it's interesting that their products work so well together because this works really shockingly well like the 7600 MXT is a lot of GPU horsepower combined with something as powerful as the 780 XTX I mean 150 FPS at 1440p in Doom is pretty darn good now just because it's U link doesn't mean you can't use it in Thunderbolt mode because GPD knows that there's a lot of devices out there that still only have Thunderbolt so you can use this as a thunderbolt egpu and the 7600m when we're talking about this much Graphics horsepower is rot in the edge for what's useful like you wouldn't put you know a 6900 XT at the end of a thunderbolt connection because it's going to severely bottleneck by that anemic 40 gbit interface between the GPU and the the system doubling that for oculink that's going to change the game you could run a you know a really high-end GPU off of an oculink dock that's a possibility and it will bottleneck a little bit but not as severely as Thunderbolt 3 I mean Thunderbolt 3 man that's it's 10 years old it was obsolete two three years ago I mean 10 years what other piece of technology has lasted 10 years or what other aspect of technology is Thunderbolt 5 is going to be obsolete before it even comes out if they're not careful we need like 16060 or like 20080 that's what the that's that's the ballpark where the bandwidth should be if that thing is going to be expected to last another 10 years but I digress the 7600m XT is a good choice for the Thunderbolt 34 oculink crossover point because when we're talking 1080P 1440p and some cases 4K for a game that's super optimized like Doom maternal you're going to have a reason a 4K play experience on the 7600 MXT which is mind Bing to me that you know this thing on my desk here that is playing a game consuming maybe 100 watts and it's as good of an experience as it is as quiet as it is and low power as it is the run three displays really is something um that you can do that through the oculink interface is really nice now could you run a highend GP GPU through oculink yes uh and it not bottleneck it's getting there like a 7800 XT is going to bottleneck a little bit through an oculink interface cuz it's still only four lanes at the end of the day so 7600 MXT H I kind of get it the price for what it is is kind of high and kind of not on the side of the the price is kind of high for the G1 it's not expandable this GPU is going to be obsolete in a year or two not obsolete but it's going to be it's going to age in a year or two it's not really upgradeable or replaceable $800 today is kind of a lot of money it would be nice if there were some upgrade path where you could swap the GPU or a module or something you get that with a pcie egpu and there probably are some sketchy egpu pcie adapters out there you could probably fashion and DIY something and this with the oculink interface is already a little bit sketchy because of the cable and the connector and rated insertions and so on and so forth with a Thunderbolt 4 connection that really does sweeten the pot because you've got an alternative interface you can use if something ever does go wrong with ulink or you can't get an oculink adapter or the oculink adapter is just not stable enough for you or you want to be able to more easily hot plug between devices then you might have an easier time with Thunderbolt for those are really the downsides the upsides are this is a unique Innovative product in the market there's there's ulink is feeling a void because we were overdue for a thunderbolt replacement a long time ago and it is really Thunderbolt adjacent not a true Thunderbolt replacement because it doesn't have the USB functionality yes you can send the display output back over pcie that part Works basically nothing else does you don't get charging you don't get USB side Channel you don't get any of that so you would have to run two connections OC link plus some kind of a USB connection to your G1 in order to get the USB parts of it to work correctly if you're going to use it as some sort of a dock and the power delivery on this is really not sufficient to charge a lot of higher-end laptops the power delivery on the G1 if I'm doing something with a GPU is not sufficient really even to charge the battery on our windmax 2023 I got in running Linux on this um I can be doing enough background tasks and light gaming that the battery on the windmax 2023 will slowly discharge even when it's connected to the Thunderbolt port on the GPD G1 in fact uh GPD seems to recommend that you connect their uh stock bundled power brick to your wind Max 2023 laptop as well as the USB connection plus the external power brick of the G1 so you've got two power plugs that you're occupying plus the USB connection plus the oculink connection and that does work great and that is stable and that's fine there's no complaints there so something to keep in mind this also works astonishingly well under Linux to be kind of as bleeding as Edge as it is because at the end of the day it's just a pcie device so AMD GPU and all of the features of the Linux kernel that support AMD gpus works really well uh you can even use ryzen adjust which is a nice command line utility for doing your power budget stuff and the power budget stuff basically works the way that you would expect which is pretty awesome one of the features that is a little sketchy on the the mini forign machine is you can't force gen 3 or Gen 4 mode you're left to autodetect and even with my short cable sometimes if this cable was close to uh you know a power cable or something like that it would still detect a gen 3 mode there there was no way to force it whereas GPD learned that lesson and they they now expose a bio setting that's like oh on the oculink port always Force Gen 4 and it will always Force Gen 4 sometimes that can lead to stability issues but generally it's basically fine min's Forum has not yet learned that lesson in terms of BIOS features and updates but oh they're getting there if they keep being successful in selling a lot of these enough of you will complain about bios updates and bios features that they'll start rolling those features into the BIOS trust me so there you have it that's the G GPD G1 in a nutshell and yes it'll work just fine on non GPD devices how about that it's just oculink it could run in a server it's going to appear in all sorts of weird videos where we're shoving pcie where it doesn't belong because that's what we do here at level one I'm W up signing out you can find me in the level one forums if you have any ideas for a project or something you want me to test hit me up there all right I'm signing out and I'll see you [Music] there

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 39,753

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: XQGG5dgRf3k

Length: 23min 5sec (1385 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2024