External GPUs are in the news lately, what with NVIDIA's announcement offering macOS drivers for its Titan Xp and Apple offering an eGPU Developer Kit for High Sierra, so we thought we'd take a second to explain what, exactly, an external GPU is — and how you'd go about getting one. External GPUs: Supercharging gaming and video production All Macs have a CPU, which provides the primary processing power for your computer.
But in addition, they have a GPU — a graphics processing unit — designed to drive your computer's screen, external displays, and visuals. GPUs are what sell high-end Windows gaming laptops and desktops: They keep your favorite game flawless, your external display running smoothly, and visual effects rendering speedy. They're also very important in rendering VR experiences. But all that power comes at the expense of battery and optimization: Heavy-duty GPUs are frequent power hogs with lots of fan noise and problematic battery life. As such, Apple has historically trended toward putting in GPUs that balanced power with optimization: great for your laptop's battery life; not so great for gamers, VR, or visual effects artists.
May 23, 2016 - I run Paragons NTFS utility on my Mac so I can write to an NTFS disk this way I can copy all the things I need such as Bootcamp drivers, AMD.
Enter external GPUs: Like external hard drives, these essentially allow you to stick a GPU in a Thunderbolt housing, where you can then connect it to your computer; from there, when you run games, VR, and visual apps optimized for that GPU you should see significant performance improvements. Awesome, right? Well, almost. The cons of an external GPU on your Mac Here's the issue: Macs won't officially support external GPUs until macOS High Sierra. That's not to say you can't use an external GPU on older operating systems — only that Apple Support won't bail you out if you do something that doesn't agree with your Mac.
Proceed at your own risk, here be dragons, et cetera. In addition, should you decide to use an external GPU, there are only a handful of Thunderbolt enclosures and graphics cards with appropriate Mac drivers — you can't just pick an arbitrary graphics card you'd like to attach to your Mac. How to use an external GPU with your Mac Thankfully, you don't have to venture into the void without guidance: The community has put together a huge array of helpful how-tos and setup guides for interested users — I'm looking forward to using their startup guide and forums to make a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU for my MacBook Pro.
Questions? Other questions about external GPUs? Let us know below.
If you completed the Windows install using VirtualBox, you created a virtual machine. Even if you created a 'raw VMDK' and pointed it to your external disk, the contents of that disk are intended to be used as a boot disk for a VirtualBox VM. During the Windows installation process, the system was installed and configured to be run on VirtualBox's hardware, so even if macOS (or your Mac's bootloader) recognizes that it is a Windows disk, you will not be able to boot to Windows on your Mac's hardware because it does not have the necessary drivers (among other things). I have not personally followed this guide, but a quick glance indicates that you would essentially be stopping the process before it actually installs and configures the system. If this actually works — which would be very cool — it's likely that some part of the installation process which 'ties' your Windows install to the hardware it will be running on may have already occurred before you stopped the installation process and tried to boot directly into the SSD to complete the Windows installation. What is the error message you see when you try to boot into Windows?