Radeon Rx 5700 Xt - EGPU Stability

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Level 1

4 points

Radeon Rx 5700 Xt - EGPU Stability

I have a Razer Core X Chroma with a MSI Gaming Radeon Rx 5700 Xt connected to a 16" MacBook Pro and I am having serious stability issues with the setup.

Every 1-2 days, I hit an issue where the machine basically locks up. It usually happens when I have either video or audio (playing through a USB audio device connected to one of the ports on the Razer Core X) playing. The audio will continue playing, but the OS become almost entirely unresponsive. If I click on a window, for example, nothing will happen for 5-10 seconds...then the window will come active, but quickly will be unresponsive. It's almost like the system is responsive for like 1 out of every 10 seconds.

The only 'fix' is to unplug to the EGPU and open the laptop. When I do that, MacOS is responsive again and I can connect the EGPU and things seem to work fine.

I just tired a clean install of MaxOS (Catalina 10.15.4) to see if that made a difference, but frustratingly, I just had the same thing happen after about 3 hours of using the machine.

Is anyone else having the problem? I'm going to try moving the USB audio device (AudioQuest DragonFly Black) off the Core X to see if that helps..

MacBook Pro 16", macOS 10.15

Posted on May 14, 2020 11:34 AM

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Answer 1

temka

Level 1

5 points

May 23, 2020 7:00 AM in response to jonrausch

I have totally the same issue! My MBP16 (10.15.3) + Razer Core Chroma + RX 5700 XT. Every time I start up my MBP, it starts freezing right during the loading, with those freezes taking about 4-5 seconds, followed by unfreezing for a 1-2 seconds, then freeze again -- with this cycle continuously looped again and again until I force restart the MBP16. It only helps to startup without eGPU attached, wait for the startup to complete and connect the eGPU after that. Never happened (yet) during regular work - only on startups. According to Reddit and eGPU.io this is a common issue, and it is getting even worse in 10.15.4, with 10.15.5 (beta) not solving it either.

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Answer 2

Jul 3, 2020 7:46 AM in response to jonrausch

I've recently acquired the same eGPU setup (Razer Core X Chroma + MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT) and have been using it with a 16" mbp for about a month when at some point the image in the connected display (eGPU DisplayPort) started switching off and back on, then the mac froze up and rebooted. After this, if I connect the eGPU to the mac at any time, it freezes up immediately and reboots. I tried connecting it in macOS, bootcamp, in the boot menu, even cold booting with it plugged in. Panics every time. I even connected it to a Dell XPS - it worked for a few minutes, started to stutter and blue-screened.

When I removed the gpu itself, the enclosure seemed to work fine, no problem.

Still need to plug the gpu into a pc and see if I can reproduce the issue on that, so I still can't say for sure where the issue might be localized, if it's not something composite.

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Radeon Rx 5700 Xt - EGPU Stability

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