The Moment of Truth: A Desperate Attempt to Install a Graphics Card in a Laptop

So, uh, moment of truth so here we go so the graphics card being used is a 2 GB Asus direct cu2 GeForce 770 it's still pretty capable for most games today at least in medium to high settings at 1080p anything lower it would it would perform even better so it looks like the laptop doesn't really want to boot just a black screen okay let's keep trying stuff sometimes laptops like these have a whitelist they want to see the exact chip that's supposed to be in that mini PCI Express Port and uh Well's definitely not seeing it so you got to sort of trick it by turning on the graphics card at a certain point in the boot up process before Windows loads I'm going to turn it off and see what happens okay so now it's booting up and I could probably turn it on now and let's see what what happens from here I had it on before Windows loaded so that should have bypassed it all right so no luck yet device manager doesn't see the graphics card but there is one thing that I didn't do and that's plug in power to the mini PCI E to PCI ex1 adapter I was thinking maybe it didn't need its own power because the graphics cards adapter The Binding rig adapter had its own power as well so uh let's plug that in and see if anything changes

so I plugged that in and still nothing come on so I'm going to shut the computer down and give it a try another way so still nothing so the weird part to me is that if I have all of this on before I press the power button on the laptop it doesn't want to boot so it's certainly seeing that there's something there so I'm starting to think that this unit um had a whitelist um and the Whit list probably just prevents things that aren't supposed to be in that uh in that connector from from activating so if it doesn't sense the proper thing in there it's not going to even turn on the mini PCI at least that's the impression I have so far so I'm going to turn it off turn it back on with the Wi-Fi card and see if it detects it and then see if I can try to Nagle something from there okay so I got the Wi-Fi adapter back online on the computer took me a couple of tries with it but it it's it's reading the card now so it is looking to me like at some point during a boot up process that it's if it doesn't detect that cardart in there it seems to shut off the port so uh some more finagling now

all right so that was the trick needed um it's reading now as Microsoft basic display adapter I got to get to driver installations and uh let's see where it goes from from here okay so the Nvidia driver is checking for Network compatibility right now rather system compatibility come on cross my fingers oh okay it's letting me continue all right I got it success so now device manager is seeing the GTX 770 um but it's asking for a reboot so now things are going to get complicated again because I have to reboot it pause it at a point in the reboot plug the Wi-Fi card back in and uh and then swap them out so um yeah so so needless will say this isn't this isn't going to be very feasible for like on the go or anything this is just proof of concept crap so uh that didn't work out I've reached the end point because somehow the card got fried you see the little burn mark there yeah the laptop got it too well I was close I got it to recognize well my card burnt up and that's and that's that I was so close I had that recognizing in Windows it to it all it needed was a reboot and I did manage to do one reboot with the uh with the adapter plugged in and recognizing but it asked for another reboot and then after that my uh my adapter card uh got burnt up and the computer no longer wanted to boot after that so uh I tried and I tried but uh it was a nogo when I was said and done and uh well that was close that's all I can say

I was really close if I had another adapter I'd give it another try but uh I don't feel like dropping another $20 on that so it is what it is I think that as a proof of concept this actually could have worked you know with some better luck I think I could have been here benchmarking some games with the uh with the 770 but that wasn't my luck today but uh you know I got pretty far in this process so I'm pretty happy with with the end result regardless but oh well anyways if you guys like this video click that like button if you dislike it click that dislike button and uh subscribe for more there's always more coming see you guys in the next one

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody this is Chris with Coalition gaming and today going to be doing a little bit of a probably longer video but I'm going to be going over a extremely budget extremely alternative Against the Grain DIY laptop external graphics card setup so I've had the idea to mess around with external graphics card now for a while a friend of mine named Joseph he got me into the idea back when he was trying to Game On The Go more with his old M uh 2012 MacBook Pro it has a good processor in it it's an i an i7 ivybridge HQ model so it's a quad core hyperthreading up to 3.3 GHz um still pretty powerful but the graphics card GeForce GTX 650 is outdated in it now it can't really run most of most new games or anything like that uh it's only a gig card some games have a limitation that they won't work under certain amount of vram um and you know he's not the only person out there like that there are plenty of other people there out there that bought a gaming laptop the processor is still strong and powerful but the graphics card has gotten outdated and it can no longer run things the way you want it to so that's where the idea of an external graphics card comes in handy uh another example of when it might come in handy is let's say you're somebody that's on the go a lot and uh you have a powerful work laptop that that you serves its own function with its own special features well let's say you you're out and you're staying at a you know for work in a hotel for you know a couple of weeks two 3 weeks whatever and you want a game but you don't want a big Hefty gaming laptop carrying around well the idea of carrying an external graphics card is already kind of bulky which is fine but if you use it as a dock then you only got to carry it to the place once and then once you're there you can plug your laptop into it use it as a dock game at the end of your day and when it's time to work you dock go to work pretty simple pretty straightforward right plenty of people have a use for something like this and I'm going to go ultimate DIY ultimate budget with this because plenty of DIY Solutions have existed using either an Express card slot or uh the um PCI a mini pcie in a laptop where the Wi-Fi card is usually plugged in and uh newer newer solutions they use Thunderbolt 3 and uh Thunderbolt 3 isn't exactly backwards compa with Windows computer so the those Solutions aren't exactly useful for everyone that already had an older gaming laptop but mini pcie is useful Express card is useful there are a few other ones but those are the two main ones um Thunderbolt one and two are usable with the right adapter but you still need more DIY stuff like with the kishio Thunder 2 um that's usually the really popular one but you still have to make modifications to the Thunder 2 in order to work so either way you go as DIY but this this is something something else what I'm doing is I'm taking a Bitcoin mining PCI E X1 to x16 and I'm plugging it in to a mini pcie to PCI X1 adapter from the laptop's mini PCI E port so there's going to be a lot to worry about here because there's so many interconnects between these it's probably only going to run at a pcie 1.0 one lane speeds which is going to be down to like 5 gbits a second which is f because the the mining rig pcie uh X1 to x16 adapter uses a USB 3.0 cable for its signaling well that's got a only Max of like 5 gbits per second so I would have been limited either way going this route however that adapter was only $7 the adapter to go from mini PCI X1 to pcie uh X1 you know it's a standard that was $20 so I'm looking at under $30 just for the adapters and let say you have the graphics card already let's say you have a gaming computer with a good graphics card in it that's not tied down by any sort of water cooling stuff and you're going to be moving around you can always pull that graphics card out stick it in the dock so that way you're not spending double the money on graphics cards keeping the cost low you have to have a spare power supply line around you can do the paperclip trick in order to get that going and so I'm going to get that set up we're going to we're going to get everything going so just uh bear with me and let's go for a ride so this is is where the Wi-Fi card was previously installed directly on that spot with the with the little ribbon cable is plugged into well rather right here ribbon cable plugs into this adapter so the ribbon cable is extending out into the X1 adapter which is the desktop style X1 and this is the mini PCI Express X1 this was using the this was using this Wi-Fi card in that slot so this Wi-Fi card in there just like that and uh uninstalled that removed that and then I went ahead and put this adapter in there so here's the front of where the uh the mining rig adapter is going to be plugging in so this is the adapter I just mentioned and this is the mining rig adapter and cabling so it's going to go ahead and just plug right into that cable runs over here to the x16 adapter and that's where the graphics card is going to sit power supply is going to power that and hopefully everything runs well all right so uh Moment of Truth so here we go so the graphics card being used is a 2 GB Asus direct cu2 GeForce 770 it's still pretty capable for most games today at least in medium to high settings at 1080p anything lower it would it would perform even better so it looks like the laptop doesn't really want to boot just a black screen okay let's keep trying stuff sometimes laptops like these have a whitel list they want to see the exact chip that's supposed to be in that mini PCI Express Port and uh Well's definitely not seeing it so you got to sort of trick it by turning on the graphics card at a certain point in the boot up process before Windows loads so I'm going to turn it off and see what happens okay so now it's booting up and I could probably turn it on now and let's see what what happens from here I had it on before Windows loaded so that should have bypassed it all right so no luck yet device manager doesn't see the graphics card but there is one thing that I didn't do and that's plug in power to the mini PCI E to PCI ex1 adapter I was thinking maybe it didn't need its own power because the graphics cards adapter The Binding rig adapter had its own power as well so uh let's plug that in and see if anything changes so I plugged that in and still nothing come on so I'm going to shut the computer down and give it a try another way so still nothing so the weird part to me is that if I have all of this on before I press the power button on the laptop it doesn't want to boot so it's certainly seeing that there's something there so I'm starting to think that this unit um had a white list um and the Whit list probably just prevents things that aren't supposed to be in that uh in that connector from from activating so if it doesn't sense the proper thing in there it's not going to even turn on the mini PCI at least that's the impression I have so far so I'm going to turn it off turn it back on with the Wi-Fi card and see if it detects it and then see if I can try to Nagle something from there okay so I got the Wi-Fi adapter back online on the computer took me a couple of tries with it but it it's it's reading the card now so it is looking to me like at some point during a boot up process that it's if it doesn't detect that cardart in there it seems to shut off the port so uh some more finagling now all right so that was the trick needed um it's reading now as Microsoft basic display adapter I got to get to driver installations and uh let's see where it goes from from here okay so the Nvidia driver is checking for Network compatibility right now rather system compatibility come on cross my fingers oh okay it's letting me continue all right I got it success so now device manager is seeing the GTX 770 um but it's asking for a reboot so now things are going to get complicated again because I have to reboot it pause it at a point in the reboot plug the Wi-Fi card back in and uh and then swap them out so um yeah so so needless will say this isn't this isn't going to be very feasible for like on the go or anything this is just proof of concept crap so uh that didn't work out I've reached the end point because somehow the card got fried you see the little burn mark there yeah the laptop got it too well I was close I got it to recognize well my card burnt up and that's and that's that I was so close I had that recognizing in Windows it to it all it needed was a reboot and I did manage to do one reboot with the uh with the adapter plugged in and recognizing but it asked for another reboot and then after that my uh my adapter card uh got burnt up and the computer no longer wanted to boot after that so uh I tried and I tried but uh it was a nogo when I was said and done and uh well that was close that's all I can say I was really close if I had another adapter I'd give it another try but uh I don't feel like dropping another $20 on that so it is what it is I think that as a proof of concept this actually could have worked you know with some better luck I think I could have been here benchmarking some games with the uh with the 770 but that wasn't my luck today but uh you know I got pretty far in this process so I'm pretty happy with with the end result regardless but oh well anyways if you guys like this video click that like button if you dislike it click that dislike button and uh subscribe for more there's always more coming see you guys in the next onehey everybody this is Chris with Coalition gaming and today going to be doing a little bit of a probably longer video but I'm going to be going over a extremely budget extremely alternative Against the Grain DIY laptop external graphics card setup so I've had the idea to mess around with external graphics card now for a while a friend of mine named Joseph he got me into the idea back when he was trying to Game On The Go more with his old M uh 2012 MacBook Pro it has a good processor in it it's an i an i7 ivybridge HQ model so it's a quad core hyperthreading up to 3.3 GHz um still pretty powerful but the graphics card GeForce GTX 650 is outdated in it now it can't really run most of most new games or anything like that uh it's only a gig card some games have a limitation that they won't work under certain amount of vram um and you know he's not the only person out there like that there are plenty of other people there out there that bought a gaming laptop the processor is still strong and powerful but the graphics card has gotten outdated and it can no longer run things the way you want it to so that's where the idea of an external graphics card comes in handy uh another example of when it might come in handy is let's say you're somebody that's on the go a lot and uh you have a powerful work laptop that that you serves its own function with its own special features well let's say you you're out and you're staying at a you know for work in a hotel for you know a couple of weeks two 3 weeks whatever and you want a game but you don't want a big Hefty gaming laptop carrying around well the idea of carrying an external graphics card is already kind of bulky which is fine but if you use it as a dock then you only got to carry it to the place once and then once you're there you can plug your laptop into it use it as a dock game at the end of your day and when it's time to work you dock go to work pretty simple pretty straightforward right plenty of people have a use for something like this and I'm going to go ultimate DIY ultimate budget with this because plenty of DIY Solutions have existed using either an Express card slot or uh the um PCI a mini pcie in a laptop where the Wi-Fi card is usually plugged in and uh newer newer solutions they use Thunderbolt 3 and uh Thunderbolt 3 isn't exactly backwards compa with Windows computer so the those Solutions aren't exactly useful for everyone that already had an older gaming laptop but mini pcie is useful Express card is useful there are a few other ones but those are the two main ones um Thunderbolt one and two are usable with the right adapter but you still need more DIY stuff like with the kishio Thunder 2 um that's usually the really popular one but you still have to make modifications to the Thunder 2 in order to work so either way you go as DIY but this this is something something else what I'm doing is I'm taking a Bitcoin mining PCI E X1 to x16 and I'm plugging it in to a mini pcie to PCI X1 adapter from the laptop's mini PCI E port so there's going to be a lot to worry about here because there's so many interconnects between these it's probably only going to run at a pcie 1.0 one lane speeds which is going to be down to like 5 gbits a second which is f because the the mining rig pcie uh X1 to x16 adapter uses a USB 3.0 cable for its signaling well that's got a only Max of like 5 gbits per second so I would have been limited either way going this route however that adapter was only $7 the adapter to go from mini PCI X1 to pcie uh X1 you know it's a standard that was $20 so I'm looking at under $30 just for the adapters and let say you have the graphics card already let's say you have a gaming computer with a good graphics card in it that's not tied down by any sort of water cooling stuff and you're going to be moving around you can always pull that graphics card out stick it in the dock so that way you're not spending double the money on graphics cards keeping the cost low you have to have a spare power supply line around you can do the paperclip trick in order to get that going and so I'm going to get that set up we're going to we're going to get everything going so just uh bear with me and let's go for a ride so this is is where the Wi-Fi card was previously installed directly on that spot with the with the little ribbon cable is plugged into well rather right here ribbon cable plugs into this adapter so the ribbon cable is extending out into the X1 adapter which is the desktop style X1 and this is the mini PCI Express X1 this was using the this was using this Wi-Fi card in that slot so this Wi-Fi card in there just like that and uh uninstalled that removed that and then I went ahead and put this adapter in there so here's the front of where the uh the mining rig adapter is going to be plugging in so this is the adapter I just mentioned and this is the mining rig adapter and cabling so it's going to go ahead and just plug right into that cable runs over here to the x16 adapter and that's where the graphics card is going to sit power supply is going to power that and hopefully everything runs well all right so uh Moment of Truth so here we go so the graphics card being used is a 2 GB Asus direct cu2 GeForce 770 it's still pretty capable for most games today at least in medium to high settings at 1080p anything lower it would it would perform even better so it looks like the laptop doesn't really want to boot just a black screen okay let's keep trying stuff sometimes laptops like these have a whitel list they want to see the exact chip that's supposed to be in that mini PCI Express Port and uh Well's definitely not seeing it so you got to sort of trick it by turning on the graphics card at a certain point in the boot up process before Windows loads so I'm going to turn it off and see what happens okay so now it's booting up and I could probably turn it on now and let's see what what happens from here I had it on before Windows loaded so that should have bypassed it all right so no luck yet device manager doesn't see the graphics card but there is one thing that I didn't do and that's plug in power to the mini PCI E to PCI ex1 adapter I was thinking maybe it didn't need its own power because the graphics cards adapter The Binding rig adapter had its own power as well so uh let's plug that in and see if anything changes so I plugged that in and still nothing come on so I'm going to shut the computer down and give it a try another way so still nothing so the weird part to me is that if I have all of this on before I press the power button on the laptop it doesn't want to boot so it's certainly seeing that there's something there so I'm starting to think that this unit um had a white list um and the Whit list probably just prevents things that aren't supposed to be in that uh in that connector from from activating so if it doesn't sense the proper thing in there it's not going to even turn on the mini PCI at least that's the impression I have so far so I'm going to turn it off turn it back on with the Wi-Fi card and see if it detects it and then see if I can try to Nagle something from there okay so I got the Wi-Fi adapter back online on the computer took me a couple of tries with it but it it's it's reading the card now so it is looking to me like at some point during a boot up process that it's if it doesn't detect that cardart in there it seems to shut off the port so uh some more finagling now all right so that was the trick needed um it's reading now as Microsoft basic display adapter I got to get to driver installations and uh let's see where it goes from from here okay so the Nvidia driver is checking for Network compatibility right now rather system compatibility come on cross my fingers oh okay it's letting me continue all right I got it success so now device manager is seeing the GTX 770 um but it's asking for a reboot so now things are going to get complicated again because I have to reboot it pause it at a point in the reboot plug the Wi-Fi card back in and uh and then swap them out so um yeah so so needless will say this isn't this isn't going to be very feasible for like on the go or anything this is just proof of concept crap so uh that didn't work out I've reached the end point because somehow the card got fried you see the little burn mark there yeah the laptop got it too well I was close I got it to recognize well my card burnt up and that's and that's that I was so close I had that recognizing in Windows it to it all it needed was a reboot and I did manage to do one reboot with the uh with the adapter plugged in and recognizing but it asked for another reboot and then after that my uh my adapter card uh got burnt up and the computer no longer wanted to boot after that so uh I tried and I tried but uh it was a nogo when I was said and done and uh well that was close that's all I can say I was really close if I had another adapter I'd give it another try but uh I don't feel like dropping another $20 on that so it is what it is I think that as a proof of concept this actually could have worked you know with some better luck I think I could have been here benchmarking some games with the uh with the 770 but that wasn't my luck today but uh you know I got pretty far in this process so I'm pretty happy with with the end result regardless but oh well anyways if you guys like this video click that like button if you dislike it click that dislike button and uh subscribe for more there's always more coming see you guys in the next one\n"