Questions and
Answers Part
II
I need a low cost, low profile graphics card for the SFF Optiplex. What are my choices ?
Most people have chosen the Nvidia GT 710 card in the past. Support has ended as of macOS 12 Monterey. It's not a very powerful card, i.e. the performance is not much better than the HD4600 iGPU. Worse yet, prices have gone up a lot lately. The GB 5 Metal score for the GT 710 is just over 1,100. It is over 12,700 for the WX 2100 card.
So if you have the SFF and want to edit photos and videos the best budget choice is the
AMD Radeon Pro WX 2100. I've attached a working iMac17,1 EFI folder below. It has the
specific Device-ID spoof so the
WX 2100 will work with either Big Sur or Monterey. Don't use it with any other GPU. Set Video -> Primary Display in your BIOS to AMD Radeon and then your HD4600 iGPU will run headless and be used for compute only. Perfect for video rendering using Intel QuickSync. No matter what AMD card you use, if you choose an iMac SMBIOS like 17,1 you can run the iGPU headless.
DON'T FORGET As with the other EFI folders, add your SmUUID to the config.plist first before booting the USB installer.
Generate your System UUID
View attachment 553429
Radeon Pro WX 2100 OpenCL and Metal Scores in GeekBench
View attachment 553438 View attachment 553439
I'd like to use a full size AMD dedicated card like the Radeon RX 580. Can I use the EFI folder for that ?
The Macmini 7,1 (Late 2014) was never capable of discrete graphics so it's not a perfect fit. The best option is to use iMac15,1 and Big Sur if you want to utilize a full size AMD GPU. I use Big Sur with my RX 570 installed for video editing and it works great. You can also use the iMac17,1 EFI and Monterey and run the iGPU headless to speed up video rendering in iMovie, Final Cut or Premiere Pro.
The 15,1 iMacs used the Haswell i7-4790K in one version so if you have the i7-4790 CPU it's practically a perfect fit for CPU function too. If you must have Monterey and an AMD GPU, then the best option is iMac17,1 which used a Skylake CPU.
That being said you could use Macmini7,1 and the GPU will work if you disable
Legacy Option ROMs. I tried it with my 570 and it was recognized. I did need to leave Video -> Primary Display set to Auto for it to work. Here's a few screen shots:
View attachment 548173 View attachment 548174
The downside to using an AMD card and disabling Legacy Option ROMs is that
wake from
sleep will not work. You'll always get a black screen after trying to wake your OptiMac and need to reboot to remedy this every time.
If you do want the best AMD option right now, it would have to be the Radeon RX 6600 XT. Requires a PSU upgrade and the Mini-Tower Dell Optiplex form factor to accommodate it. Prices have come down to around 400 USD lately. It has native support in Monterey but not in Big Sur. Perfect for use with Final Cut Pro or iMovie.
https://www.newegg.com/sapphire-radeon-rx-6600-xt-11309-03-20g/p/N82E16814202406
Here's a high quality DP to HDMI adapter:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086QQT48Y/?tag=tonymacx86com-20
For a more powerful low profile card that fits in the SFF form factor case, try the Visiontek RX560 2GB card. These have only mini-DP outputs, not full size. 4GB version is usually over $200 new. The Radeon Pro WX 4100 looks better and runs quieter but will cost more money. A good investment if you can afford one.