How to install Akitio 3 and M6000 GPU to Mac Book air with High Sierra 10.13.02 through TB2

I was recently given an M6000 Nvidia GPU with an Akitio 3 box to work with my mac book air which is a mid 2013. My laptop was updated to the latest high Sierra Mac OSX 10.13.02.

The problem with my laptop and Akitio 3 is that my laptop has only a TB2 output. However, this can overcome by getting a USB-C (TB3) to TB2 adapter for mac. Thus I connected my Akitio egpu through my TB2 connection and the system was able to recognize the Akitio.

The next part was to install the drivers and software for the Akitio and GPU to work. This part is a little tricky since Nvidia still doesn't fully support all GPUs and people rely on third party software for this to work. Fortunately there is a good community that keeps the tools and forums up to date and make possible to figure out solutions for different systems.

After spending a large amount of time on different post and forums. I came across this page which made the difference.

https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/wip-nvidia-egpu-support-for-high-sierra/

It appears that some of the drivers need the egpu support tool described in this page. So I followed the steps in this page.

I first started with a fresh installation by removing all other drivers and cuda tools installed. I also didn’t have the egpu connected to the laptop until after all the software was installed.

I downloaded manually the drivers and cuda tools from nvidia. In my case I used

WebDriver-378.10.10.10.25.102.pkg

Cudadriver_387.99_macos.dmg

I did this by having System Integrity Protection (SIP) enable at first

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Security/Conceptual/System_Integrity_Protection_Guide/ConfiguringSystemIntegrityProtection/ConfiguringSystemIntegrityProtection.html

Then installed the drivers and cuda

I then disabled SIP by restarting while pressing command+ R

I used the terminal and type csrutil disable

I then installed the nvidia-egpu-v4.zip tool that correspond to my driver and my high Sierra version [17C88]

I then did a hot plug on the egpu and it was recognized by the driver but it still didn’t show on the system information profile. I did a restart and finally the Nvidia driver and gpu were finally working.

Good luck with this.

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