is there an actual advantage to doing this? My understanding is that OS X can only utilize one of these cards at a time. I’d love to be wrong about that!!
Davinci Resolve, FCPX and other apps can utilize multiple GPUs.
And games in Windows too. But not all.
The Mac Pro Radeon VII Duo or whatever it's called has dual GPU dies linked together so macOS sees it as one GPU. In Windows via Bootcamp I believe it's seen as 2 separate GPUs.
I previously had a nzxt Kraken X62 280mm
It also created a lot of noise and did not cool the processor well
I gave up doing oc
For that reason the CPU Does not leave too much room in terms of degrees in Stock
But also for the reason that Final Cut Pro vs. Adobe Premiere Pro doesn't use the processor too much
So I'm happy right now because I have a super quiet system
But super strong!
I stand 29 degrees in idle
And at the peak it reaches 73 degrees in export
As much as I like air cooling, I will never go back to it.
As I recently upgraded the rads to slim rads, I can run fans at sub 800RPMs and even with all core OC the CPU barely its 75c on full load. The fans never ramp up and I don't hear it at all with a custom fan curve. And day to day the CPU for me is sometimes maxed out during AE renders via a python script.
The other upside with Watercooling is you can throw your GPUs and VRM in the loop if you'd like. The single Radeon VII I have only hits 54c on full load. We all know it's a hot card and the fans on the original cooler are loud as heck. The fact that it's a silent system is such a big plus for me and it made Watercooling all worth it. I also OC the GPU in Windows to hit higher framerates and since this whole system is WC, I can easily hit 2000+MHz on GPU and 1200MHz on RAM with just a click of a button. It surpasses RTX2080 perf.
Overclocking doesn't necessarily mean instability, it just means more heat. Skylake-X is very optimized in general and scales exponentially, and can eat up to 700w (but that's extreme overclocking which we don't need).
With my current OC, it is extremely stable and single core performance is much higher, which Adobe in general likes. Every single task from launching apps to flying through timelines in AE is so fast, and OC is worth it for me.
The fact that I get near the CPU performance of the 28c Mac Pro setup that costs like $25,000+ is great. And single core performance is much better on my end and I can tweak to my liking...
I'm not some overclocking enthusiast at all, but seeing as to how easy it is nowadays, it's not just about benchmarks, but squeezing as much perf as you can from your system so it lasts longer.
