Hi

I’ve installed a m.2 2280 oculink card and connected it to a minisforum deg 1 egpu dock (yes i know, beelink now make a nice little mini pc to eGPU dock but i didn’t think of it at the time).

Installation for the m.2 card worked well enough, just a slight mod on the plastic under panel to get the cable out of the case and the thin cable version i bought still fit under the m.2 heat sink.

I’ve got it running well and stable with a RTX3060 gpu.

However it had some issues to get going well. These were

• I originally intended to use a RX6600 gpu, but it just was unstable as it appeared to be unable to install drivers with with the igpu inplay.
• I tried disabling the iGPU in the bios but it proved still to be unstable afterwards with the RX6600
• I tried uninstalling the igpu drivers, disabling the igpu device in windows device manager in order to give the RX6600 a chance to work well,, all didn’t improve the stability of booting windows and it kept crashing still
• I by chance use a usb wifi adaptor and ble dongle. i did this to improve stability of the wireless side of the ser8. Ironically to clear cable clutter, i tried again without these devices and reenabled the onboard wifi device in device manager. System became unstable. No idea why but i’m guessing the combination of the SSD, eGPU & wifi on the m.2 system was too much. Just the SSD and eGPU is fine
• I ended up swapping the graphics card from my other PC (RTX3060) with the RX6600 and all the egpu issues went away. It’s clearly something of a compatability/driver issues between the RX6600 and the 780m.
• Observation is that when the RX6600 was booted, i would see the boot screen, but with the RTX6600, i cant see the boot screen, but can see windows when it’s booted up.

My main question is

• Is there a way for in the BIOS to have the SER8 disable the internal GPU when it detects an external GPU? but then enable if no external gpu found.
• What would be the settings in the bios to truly turn off the igpu as there was only one setting i turned off, what would be the recommended settings to turn off?
• Why doesn’t the RTX3060 show the boot screen on boot up, but the RX6600 does?
• Any reason why the addition of the a oculink egpu and enabling the wifi dongle would create stablity issues? (i get that i’ve pushed the boundaries of what the device intended, just curious here as i’m happy with the usb wifi donle).

end goal would be to be able to use the RX6600 with the SER8 but it appears to be a compatibly issue.

Cheers
Dave

So i tried again, this time i disabled the igpu in device manager, then removed RTX amd installed the AMD RX6600… worked this time and has been stable on mutliple boots / tests etc.. I guess i needed to disable the igpu first before getting the RX6600 installed. Maybe anyone who is looking to do similar would be to try uninstalling and installing the drivers in safe mode first for both AMD gpu’s.

I also noticed that the RAM went down to 28gb so i booted to the bios and set the igpu memory to it’s lowest setting which was 512mb and the available ram went back up to 31.3gb.. Considering the egpu has 8gb itself, i think this is a win.

So in the end it’s working now to my original intent and stable. GPU performance is much improved now (not that the 780m was bad, it’s a cracker of a igpu)

Next time i’d just consider getting the mini pc model that allows docking into the beelink egpu dock but for those that didn’t this has worked well for me in the end.