GT 1030 in Advanced Dock?

[ko]

I've just bought an Advanced Dock for my T60 yesterday, and was looking for a decent graphics card that would fit in it. The GT 1030 looks like it would fit in it, and has a power draw of less than 50W, so I'm pretty sure it would work. Question is, has anyone else tried this? If so, did it work?

[theterminator93]

It should work as long as the heatsink isn't too big, but performance may be negatively impacted since the newer GPUs expect a PCI-E x16 3.0 slot, and the one in the dock is only 1.0. I've also read that while it is the full length 16 lane slot, there are only 8 lanes...

Take a look here for some useful info, Pay close attention to posts 29 and later onto the second page - the dock really isn't conducive to getting big performance gains from higher end GPUs due to the limitations in the bus: viewtopic.php?f=58&t=113724

Also beware of a potential limitation in RAM which may prevent you from using the combo you are eyeing, see some details about that here: viewtopic.php?p=747077

[dr_st]

It should work as long as the heatsink isn't too big, but performance may be negatively impacted since the newer GPUs expect a PCI-E x16 3.0 slot, and the one in the dock is only 1.0. I've also read that while it is the full length 16 lane slot, there are only 8 lanes...

Try one lane. It's really electrically a PCI-E 1.0 x1 slot.

[theterminator93]

Ouch!

Definitely not conducive to performance graphics in that case!

[TPFanatic]

How does performance through the Advanced Dock compare to an Expresscard or PCIE EGPU solution?

Also isn't there an issue with the dock where the laptop cannot boot with the GPU if it has more than 2GB of RAM installed, as well as whitelisting?

[dr_st]

Both the ExpressCard and the Advanced Dock are PCIe x1 slots; performance should be similar.

Configuration limitations in theory should also be similar, but in practice, there may be differences, because BIOS may treat ExpressCard and dock PCI-E differently during resource allocation / reservatoin.

[N33dF0rSp33dFan]

I read that someone tried a GT1030 in a 2503 dock but shows only as a Microsoft Basic Display. After the drivers have been installed, in device manager, the card is being recognized as a Geforce 1030, but stopped due to error 43.

[p.art]

I own the dock and the card and have not yet got it to work in Windows 7. It shows a picture, but I wasn't able to get past the error 43 and other known virtual memory addressing space errors. I'm not done yet, but it is not a plug and play installation. I've tried it both with T61 X3100 and NVS 140M T61 variant. The project is on hold now due to other priorities, but I let you guys know if I move any further.