High Sierra Second Public Beta is Here

by Rian

Second public beta of High Sierra with rather grim news. Aside from obvious bug fixes, eGPU.io confirmed High Sierra is more confining than that Sierra is and was. The drivers aside from Radeon RX 470/480/570/580 definitely exists in High Sierra and can be found rather easily. My testing showed High Sierra was able to “grab” the RX 560, but could not actually utilize it. Currently Apple is not allowing the use of other graphics card as eGPU.

Which brings me to the next point, with cryptocurrency and any other various reasons to spike the prices for high-end GPUs, Apple’s selection of few high-end GPU made the eGPU experience much more vulnerable to outside force than before. The metal dev kit is now priced at $599, but RX 580, which is included in the kit, is now priced around $400-600. And who is to say the price will ever come down?

On Sierra, however, you can easily use any other eGPUs with a code provided by goalque. The development is ceased, but it’s still doable. On High Sierra, we are yet to find out if and when eGPU support is ever guaranteed. I can only hope, –considering what is now available– that the price of those 4 GPUs to drop by the time High Sierra is officially released.

Next up is obviously APFS. I have finally managed to install APFS on 1TB fusion drive without getting constant kernel panic. It is a long waited bug fix, but I still wouldn’t recommend installing second beta on any main workstation. Perhaps third beta would be more reliable.