Result with the Aoostar AG02 dock plus RTX 3070
I was excited to add an egpu to my rog ally x for ff7 rebirth. I picked up an rtx 3070 founders edition; this was the first dgpu I'd purchased ever.
The hardware installation was pretty straightforward. Aoostar provided the necessary usb4 and power cables. The card plugged in easily.
However the software setup was tedious, and I wouldn't have succeeded without the helpful comments in this subreddit. Here are some tips:
- Disable windows bitlocker disk encryption and secure boot. Booting sometimes with sometimes and without an egpu may prompt for password.
- On initial boot, I didn't see Microsoft Basic Adapter. Needed to unplug and connect the usb cable to the egpu dock.
- Installing nvidia drivers seemed to have succeeded, but it was in an odd state. 3070 showed up in device manager, but the card didn't actually work. It didn't show error 43 either. The trick was to use the fix error 43 script, but remove line 130 and 131 to force the script to proceed. This fixed the driver issue.
- It's important to boot the machine with a specific order. Dock first, then computer. So far I haven't managed to wake up from sleep, but i need to experiment with this more.
The dock performance is good. cuda-z reports 3660MB/s of bandwidth. For usb4, this is basically the same performance as the ut3g dock. 3070 isn't the most powerful gpu, but in some games I saw 3x the fps compared to the z1 extreme 780m igpu.
The fan of the power supply in AG02 is pretty quiet and not intrusive. When not in use, the 3070 fans don't spin. When they do they are relatively quiet as well.
The space gray color of ag02 matches the founders edition card!