Big Sur Allows Booting from eGPU on 2018 Mac mini

This post can be entirely summed up in the title. Yes, at long last, Big Sur fixes a major flaw that went unaddressed in Catalina. I have tested three simultaneous displays, plugged directly into my Radeon 580x (which is housed inside a Sonnet Breakaway Box eGPU) with Big Sur and my 2018 Mac mini. Powered from a cold boot, the Mac polls the devices connected to it, displays the Apple logo on one of the displays, and proceeds to bring up the macOS login screen.

My configuration is as follows: Two displays are connected to the Radeon 580x via HDMI, while the third (my Wacom Cintiq 27QHD) is connected via DisplayPort. I’m running macOS Big Sur 11.1 on a Mac mini equipped with 32GB of RAM.

I’ve read about some issues users are having with the eGPU when performing system updates. I have yet to test that, but will report back when I do.

-Krishna