Thanks for all the help mate, got it working, see update.

oh bugger. The results were underwhelming to the say the least. NOTHING happens. I was expecting I might have trouble getting things working right away but I must say I wasn’t expecting literally nothing to happen.

I have the card in the PCIe slot on the chassis, the ATX PSU screwed in place and the cables from the PSU plugged in to the chassis 24 pin and 4 pin slots. I turned on the chassis’ own switch, the PSU’s switch and also plugged the thunderbolt cable in and nothing. No fans whirring, no smell of anything frying, no sound indicating I’d just broken 3 expensive pieces of equipment at once, just nothing. Any ideas? The chassis in question is this thing https://peladn.com/products/graphics-card-docking-station-1 and the PCIe card is this thing https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/au/products/decklink/techspecs/W-DLK-32 .

It’s all hooked up like this https://imgur.com/a/nothing-happens-PftKNUk

Thanks so much, this is very encouraging. The eGPU chassis has it’s own little built in power switch. It also has a 24 pin socket that it needs to power itself so hopefully I don’t need to do anything complicated like simulating anything as I’m a little lost by that idea. The power supply itself has a power on/off switch as well.

In the interests of brevity I may have given the wrong idea of the setup. I’m trying to make use of an old Blackmagic Decklink mini-monitor 4k pcie device. I now use a laptop with TB4 ports, rather than the PC this card used to sit it. This card is actually not a GPU, which this eGPU enclosure is supposed to be for, but I’m hoping it will work just the same. It’s a TB4 eGPU chassis that takes an ATX power supply and has a single PCIe 16x slot. The card is actually a 4x slot but I think it should work. Anyway there’s only the one power supply, this old 600w PSU that I’ve cannibalised from my old PC.

The manual, entirely in Chinese and only a couple of pages long, says to connect the enclosure to the PSU and the PSU to the GPU. That’s all. Although even if it were a more rigorous manual I don’t know if they could really provide much guidance here. It’s designed for you to use whatever PSU you want, either ATX or SFX and just hook it up.

I’m just asking because I haven’t done a lot of PC building before and am not familiar with the ins and outs of types of PSU connectors. In this case, I’m unsure why the PSU manufacturer group these 2 connectors together but gave the customer the option to separate them.

I need it to dual purpose as central storage for editing though. That has no chance of working wirelessly. Whether NAS or DAS it’ll have to be connected directly to the lappy to ever work for editing, but the N part of being NAS could be handy for the wireless streaming of compressed media for entertainment purposes. I can do that with DAS and using the laptop as the server part of the operation, but it might prove to be smarter to directly attach a NAS by cable to the lappy for editing and let it connect to wifi itself for serving up media to watch in the rest of the house. In that second scenario I guess I’d have the NAS running jellyfin or emby or whatever and running that NAS 24/7. Just not sure on which arrangement makes more sense and is most efficient and cost effective.

The laptop can definitely handle it, both on paper and in practice in the actual scenario we’re describing as well as for more demanding editing tasks, it does this task absolutely flawlessly as one might expect, I’m just unsure if I want to keep it running 24/7 for the home media streaming hence the possibility of a NAS or your router suggestion. But I can’t picture a router having the resources to handle transcoding or really running much of anything. Granted though, it just serving up files to me without any kind of server software is tempting in it’s simplicity.

hmm. That is an interesting idea. I guess the router wouldn’t have the juice to do anything other than serve up the file though? No running of jellyfin or transcoding on the fly for chromecast or anything like that?

That’s what I was thinking. My biggest home project are only a 1-2 TB max, and most are more in the order of 200-400GB. The type of DAS options I’m thinking of would be RAID systems. I’m fond of the LaCie ones just because of familiarity and relative reliability, but I do think they’re overpriced and they went through a period a few years ago, of a pretty major quality dip. I haven’t dealt with them much since but I think they seemed to have pulled themselves back up from that.

It’s not a major concern that I’d spend a lot of money on, but the idea of self-hosting a little mini home netflix seems fun and I guess for that I’d want things to be always on. Ideally there’d be one piece of hardware for each purpose given it’s a little unprofessional to host my home viewing content on the same storage as professional media, and I guess if the drives are always spinning then they’d wear faster just so they can be ready at a moment’s notice for me to watch TV but I don’t really have the space or money to buy dedicated equipment for each so I’m hoping to dual purpose here. There’s always the option to buy a cheap ‘passport’ drive that’s always connected to the laptop as the ‘media server’ for my jellyfin content and have the laptop be running the jellyfin server as it is now, it’s just, I guess I wondered if that made less sense because I’ll need more editing storage eventually anyway, and maybe running my very expensive laptop 24/7 would cost more in the long run than running a NAS.

Well, it was never implied that God was supposed to be subject to the same commandments. The whole religion kind of requires holding God above one’s self and others as well, as do many religions with creator gods. It doesn’t really work if God is supposed to equal to us and subject to the same constraints, they’re supposed by design to be omniscient and omnipotent and perfect and that’s why we’re supposed to trust in them and all their dictates if we want to ‘saved’.

It’s not a particularly remarkable insight or cutting blow to point out that God doesn’t follow their own rules since everybody knows that including the devout and they think it’s a good thing. I’d hazard a guess that the ability to accept this so readily probably explains a lot about overlap between strength of religious belief and embrace of dictators who also don’t model their own edicts.

I think the trouble is this decklink device is not ejectable. It’s not storage. I can always be sure to power down the laptop before disconnect the enclosure perhaps.

Oh this is an interesting thing I might have missed. So, to be clear, when I want to use this device (thankfully not an all the time thing), I need to turn off the laptop, turn on the enclosure, hook up the laptop then power the laptop on? Is that about right? Or can I connect the enclosure to the laptop at any point laptop on or not, but if I want to physically power off the enclosure then I need to power off the laptop to first?

What typically happens if you don’t follow best practice in these types of situations? Do you physically damage components or just crash the computer? Bit worried about busting my laptop because I did this wrong or a cat brushed a cable or something. Not the end of the world if I break the card or the enclosure I guess, but the laptop would be a painfully expensive lesson.

Nice. I like what I hear. What’s the best way to deal with this hotplugging situation? Power on the enclosure with the device plugged in first and then attach to the lappy via thunderbolt? Or something else? What happens if you mess that up, does anything physically break? Or just a crash that I can reboot from?

One last thing. One of the 2 products I’m looking at, the better of the 2 because it also comes with an m.2 slot and some extra ports, has instructions in a youtube video about connecting power supply cables to the GPU itself as well as the enclosure. My card only consumes 10w of power and doesn’t take external power. If I connect a power supply to the enclosure and plug in the card, it should just draw power from the PCIe slot right?

Good contender on a number of points and the memory is obviously hazy but I’m fairly sure the incident I’m thinking of specifically was caused by a landslide. If I saw an example of a landslide that jogged my memory enough to plausibly be it, but the example wasn’t preceded by an earthquake I’d be willing to accept I probably misremembered about the earthquake, but not the other way around.

What’s all the stuff do?

What are dailies? Like I know this term in a film context but what is it in gaming?

I’d be quite miffed at both but way too British to make a scene or likely even say anything.

I love the tonal shift to the casully offensive put-down of “weeb shit” at the end.

Ah. I’ve gotten so used to Newpipe that the few times I used the real YouTube app it just pissed me off

How’s revanced compare to Newpipe?

Even if it was possible to feel at ease and not in a work mindset while hanging with them, it’s just wise not to get that close, it makes it harder in future to be selective in what you divulge about your private life which can give your boss leverage over you. Sometimes you may need a “sick” day and it’s just better if they don’t know enough personal information to be able to determine how sick you are and make everything awkward.

That might seem dishonest, but there’s reasons why you might need to the employer to know only what they need to know and they aren’t necessarily laziness or incompetence. It’s a shame because it’s nice that your boss wanted to be friends but unfortunately there’s always going to be that fact that they’re your boss which gets in the way of that and everyone is better off keeping things arm’s length