Getting a Nvidia card to work with eGPU dock GDC EXP Beast

[Cybermancer]

Hi everyone,

I recently bought a GDC EXP Beast, which is an external graphics card dock that is connected via an ExpressCard slot.

I use a GTX 750, it works fine under Linux Mint after installing the Nvidia drivers via driver-manager. I launched Uningine Heaven benchmark to ensure that I was getting the proper performances, and I got around 40 FPS with the i7 640M in my Thinkpad T410.

The issue is that I don't use Linux Mint as my daily driver, I currently use Debian Stretch 9.6 with Cinnamon.

The graphics card is detected properly, using the command lspci lists it at the bus address 5:0:0.

So I installed the proprietary driver with the method described on the Debian wiki, but after reboot Cinnamon crashes right away, and refuses to restart. Using nvidia-xconfig only made things worse, as it prevented Light DM from running. I tried to add BusID "5:0:0;" under the Device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but it didn't change anything.

I tried quite a few other methods I found online, but none worked, all resulted to the same Cinnamon crash.

Then I tried to enable Optimus as described on the Debian wiki, as my i7 640M has an integrated graphics chip. And after installing bumblebee and primus, Cinnamon runs fine, but the graphics card is still unusable.

Running optirun nvidia-settings -c :8 display the Nvidia control panel with the GTX 750 listed, which means the card is detected. But running Uningine Heaven benchmark via the command optirun ./heaven resulted in performances around 10 FPS, and it didn't seem to recognize the card, as its name wasn't displayed on screen as usual, and Heaven's terminal output listed it as "Unknow". I also tried glxgears -info, which resulted in the exact same performances being run with or without optirun, but this time it seemed to detect the GTX 750, as it listed it in its terminal output.

I then installing virtualgl as recommended by some people, but optirun -b virtualgl ./heaven resulted in the same performances.

Running nvidia-xconfig and specifying BusID in /etc/X11/xorg.conf still resulted in Light DM crashing.

I've been trying to get this working for two days, and I'm out of ideas. If anyone could help me with this please, I would be glad, as I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Thank you and have a nice day.