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United States of America, Springfield
1 Level
709 Review
48 Karma

Review on πŸ–₯️ Mac-compatible Sonnet Breakaway Puck Radeon RX 5500 XT eGPU by Duane Hayes

Revainrating 4 out of 5

HDMI flickering on 2018 Mac mini and fan noise

Just bought it, connected to my 2018 Mac mini with the latest version 11.2.3 Big Sur. I have an LG 5k on a T3 eGPU port and a Dell 4k on an HDMI eGPU port. The HDMI-based display has a very fast, all-white, full-frame flash that occurs at random intervals, apparently every few minutes, but sometimes once or twice a minute. This only happened with the addition of the eGPU, and since the Mini doesn't have a GPU, I certainly added one to greatly improve the graphical performance of even the main window manager. The noise level isn't overly loud, but if you're used to the almost always quiet Mini, you'll notice this device, particularly that it turns on and off as the temperature changes. I would almost prefer it to stay low all the time rather than on/off as that makes it more visible. In any case, I'll be contacting Sonnet about the flickering as I don't anticipate such issues at this time. Price, and would probably prefer to go back to slow screen redraws rather than flashing that distracts my attention from my main 5k display. Edit: Support didn't help much, just suggested cable issues or try downgrading to 30MHz from the usual 60MHz. . I've tried pre-pin cables and borrowed an 8k HDMI cable which works fine between my Xbox and a 120mhz gaming display, no change. Also not interested in running at 30Mhz, although I tried and the problem remained. Anyway, I had a DisplayPort to Mini DP cable lying around and my monitor supports it too, so I switched to DP and the problem went away. I'll go ahead and give four stars, but if you only have an HDMI display and it's flickering, it doesn't look like there's much you can do unless it's a cable issue since the drivers are built into the OS and I don't see a way to apply firmware updates to the GPU if such a concept exists. Edit 2: Have been using this device for a few months now; I have regular system crashes after upgrading to Big Sur 11.3. I'll most likely give up Catalina as I can't stay on the old Big Sur for safety reasons. It seems completely unstable on Big Sur 11.3 and 11.4 as I just crashed with that version too. On 2/11 it was fine.

Pros
  • Great job
Cons
  • Fade out