Mac Mini with eGPU

General Discussion
1

Yep. Another Mac guy here.

My Surface Pro 7 keeps crashing in Zwift and the Zwift peeps tell me my on board GPU isn’t good enough.

So with the prices of Mac mini’s in free fall, what about putting the 1660Ti in an eGPU box and running it on a Mac Mini? Will this get me the ultra settings? Or at best, not crash all the time?

2
  1. They’re talking bollocks. Assuming you have a 10th gen CPU and the issue is Zwift freezing, here’s a bug with the game on your iGPU that can be worked around with the use of an older Intel driver.
  2. This would work, but I’m not sure why on earth you’d want to do it versus just putting the 1660 Ti in a PC for massively less money. Or getting an M1 version which gets High (albeit with broken rider shadows) without a separate GPU.
  3. You don’t need a 1660 Ti to get Ultra profile, not even close. They’re staggeringly expensive at present.
3

If you must use an eGPU with an older Mac Mini, use AMD and not Nvidia, especially if you are going to newer versions of macOS.

I cannot help with your surface Pro 7. I do have one but it’s a work computer so putting Zwift on it would be huge no-no.

All video cards are now very expensive second hand and new even more so.

4

10th/11th gen iGPU driver workaround instructions are here: Zwift Crashing/Freezing Mid ride - #378 by Peter_Gross

5

I’m using an old (2012) mini with an eGPU. It takes a bit of hacking to get that setup to work at all. Then I had to edit the basic profile b/c Zwift doesn’t seem to know what to do with a radeon rx 5500 xt. In the end the rather ancient cpu seems to be the limiting factor.
If you don’t have the gear already, it would be a pretty expensive and labor intensive solution. In my case, I had everything put together before I ever tried Zwift.

6

I don’t yet.

I have been running Zwift on my Surface Pro 7. Might try my 16” MBP, but that’s my “work” computer.

Then dove down the rabbit hole after getting an ad for Mac Mini’s.

I just want to not have crashed rides. Mine puked with 10k left in the Fondo Sunday morning.

7

Well I can say that I’ve had zero crashes — knock wood.