In theory, populating the NA255A should be as easy as dropping in graphics cards, connecting their power leads, and hooking the external enclosure up to the host PC's PCI Express card. The TurboBox is designed to extend standardized interfaces, so no software driver should be necessary. In the real world, though, setup isn't quite that easy.
We encountered a couple of snags along the way. First, I initially didn't realize that the PCIe-based interface cards have specific I/Os. If you look closely, one port on each card is etched with a x16 and the other is etched with a x8. I accidentally hooked the x16 up to the x8 and vice versa. The mistake was easy to reverse, but it doesn't appear to be mentioned anywhere in Netstor's documentation.

The second hang-up was a little more worrisome. Mainly, I couldn't get the TurboBox working at PCI Express 3.0 signaling rates. First- and second-gen PCI Express worked fine. But when the jumped was set to PCIe 3.0, the enclosure stopped recognizing the graphics cards I was plugging in. Netstor helped us work through the issue, which involved reconfiguring switches on the interface cards. This solved our issue.
Our third issue wasn't the TurboBox's fault at all. During our first round of benchmarks, we saw odd performance drops with three Radeon HD 7970s installed. Much troubleshooting revealed that some of our Tahiti-based boards weren't working together the way they should have. It turned out that boards from different vendors shipped with incompatible firmware, which hampered multi-card configurations (even though this should have been fine). Mixing and matching products, even those from the same family, is asking for trouble. Fortunately, we worked around the problem with a different card combo.

Finally, we weren't able to test four Radeon HD 7970s at the same time. Again, this wasn't Netstor's fault, however. The TurboBox is absolutely able to accommodate a quartet of dual-slot boards. But because some of the 7970s in our lab are a little larger, they don't fit into the strict space limitations of two expansion slots. As a result, we're testing with three Radeon HD 7970s. It all works out, though: the ASRock X79 Extreme9 motherboard I'm using only has room for three 7970s anyway, so that's our hard limit for comparing native on-board connectivity to the performance of Netstor's device.
- Netstor TurboBox NA255A: Space For Up To Four GPUs, Externally
- Setup And Overcoming Issues
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Results: General-Purpose GPU
- Results: Medal Of Honor Warfighter
- Results: Crysis 2
- Results: DiRT Showdown
- Results: Metro 2033
- Power And Heat
- Our Benchmarks Prove Its Efficacy, But At What Cost?
Or you could use the $2000 to ditch your mac pro that is years out of date and use the money to buy a pc that is better in pretty much every way.
There are some external GPU cases.
The only issue is that the cheapest is somewhere slightly less than $400.
Please explain to me how an aluminum box, a micro-PSU, and a Thunderbolt-to-PCIE adapter adds up to even $200...
$400-$500 for a slightly longer box with a slightly more capable PSU.
Or you could use the $2000 to ditch your mac pro that is years out of date and use the money to buy a pc that is better in pretty much every way.
Mac/Apple users either don't care about or don't under price/performance . My guess, they won't care about the price, just that it doesn't come in pretty colors.
What additional conclusions could be drawn concerning internal vs external throughput?
Apple users are a select group of users, alot of high school kids and girls use them. Not trying to be funny just an observation. If you buy into the Apple thing you have to do things their way and on their terms. Apple has always been cost prohibitive and too restrictive for me personally.
My sister's thoughts when buying a 13" Macbook:
"If it's light, not battery draining, durable, and works, then it's good enough."
ViDock 4 Plus Overdrive (Two 6-Pin/320W/329mm) $279US Plus $30US Worldwide Shipping
http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock
Unboxing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymYbE3JawLk
7990 x 2?
Still have one PCI slot open for my phone modem card
$13,800? Check your math- I think you forgot a few titans.
4x NA255A @ $2200 = $8800
16x Titan @ $1000 = $16000
4x Seasonic 1000 @ $230 = $920
Total of $25,720 before adding the custom water loops.
the PLX chips are being used in motherboards long ago , and the whole motherboard with PLX chip is 300$ only .. as a matter of fact the PLX chip is 50$ only
add 50$ for case and power and 50$ for board and cables and 50$ profit
what 2200$ ?
I hope Asrock or Asus make such boxs soon for 200$ and with SLI option as well. ...
who needs a stupid useless Thunderbolt when u can have native external PCIe 16 ?
next stop add that port to a notebook .. one to one PCI 16 x no PLX chip... and notebooks will be desktops