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Ok so I just took delivery of my lenovo GTX1050 graphics dock. It's bigger than i thought it would be, the photos normally make it look small, it's abvout 2/3 the footprint of my X1 Carbon (6th gen). Was a little bit gimmicky to get it working.
Here's what I did:
I downloaded the .exe driver file from the Lenovo site here first, and installed it, and restarted before the dock was plugged in:
Then I plugged the dock in, but the light was staying amber, despite me authorising the dock via the thunderbolt icon in the notification area.
I then reinstalled this file again with the dock connected (not sure if this was necessary, but I did it anyway). My X1 Carbon was already updated to the latest bios, my thunderbolt software reads NVM version 33.
Then I checked in device manager, and could see the display adaptor showing generic microsoft driver, with question mark. This was good, it meant that it was recognised.
I then went to Nvidia and downloaded and extracted the latest catalyst driver package. I didn't run this though.
I went back to device manager and then chose to manually update the driver selecting c:nvidia (location i extracted the above). After a minute, this was all installed. I think i reinstalled, and bang, the light went from amber to green!
Opened the nvidia icon in notifications, chose to show the desktop only on screen 2 (my 4k screen), and then changed the resolution to 4k. Looks great, much sharper (am on a cheap samsung monitor).
Plugged in the keyboard, mouse and speakers (via 3.5mm), and the monitor via Displayport (4k/60fps). all working perfectly. I can even close the lid on the laptop and the dock still works.
No doubt there will be some quirks, but for now am really pleased. TF2 is night and day difference, running at 4k or 2560.. with everything maxed out, it's super smooth (I know it's an old game and should run well anyway, but it's all I play and it's a big difference to the UHD on-board). I am a photographer, I set Lightroom classic (latest version) to use the GTX1050 for performance, and it was snappier, not ground breaking, but definitely more pleasing to use. It feels quicker now overall on my X1C6 dock, than say my old i7 4770k running at 3.9Ghz...
Temperatures on the X1C6 now seem to hover around 40-50 when before they were 60-70 (it's undervolted).
I'm not going to run any specific tests at the moment as busy with a book launch, just hoping to quash any rumours or concerns that people might have had before purchasing this dock.
Downsides:
USB ports on the front of the unit, when it would have been nice to have them on the back / hidden.
TB3 cable only 0.5m. Would have been nice to see 1m, but I hear people have issues with longer cables, so for now it's fine.
'foxy |
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2-12-2019 03:22:01