Difference between Nvidia 980 cards

[ehuijs]

Hi all,

Late last year I decided it was a good time to sell my well equipped iMac (late 2013). I had a good windows PC (self built) and a macbook and figured I'd make my PC into a dualboot machine running Win 10 / macOS.

Installing it (armed with a guide found here) was a breeze... (Later I found out that all components I have were perfect for building a good functioning Hackintosh. All the parts I have are on the 'buy guide'). Except the GFX card. The PC I built had a 780ti and worked like a charm. Until I upgraded to a 4K monitor... The 780ti's two main ports were DVI-ports, I needed display port and so I needed an upgrade for it.

I looked online but the 980 / 980ti's were a bit harder to get... however I managed to find one: 980, brand: Inno3D. Booting the system with this new card caused a kernel panic (even with a new install...) and so I figured I put the 780ti in the machine for booting and the 980 as the main card running the 4K display. That works, yay, however the 980 causes glitches in software that uses 3d rendering where the 780ti ran (and runs) stuff without any problems. At first I thought the 4K resolution was 'too much' for the card to handle... but hooking up an older low-res screen produces the same glitches on the card.

Question: will buying another brand 980 (like the one from the buying guide) cause less problems or is it a chipset related problem? I don't want to spend more on a (2nd hand) 980 EVGA card to find out it performs the exact same way my Inno3D card already does...

 

[pastrychef]

I suspect something may be wrong with your GTX 980. I have been using a reference design GTX 980 for a long time with macOS and a 4K monitor and have never had a problem. You just have to make sure the Nvidia web drivers are installed.

 

[Fl0r!an]

All GTX 9xx should work equally well, so unless your specific model is somehow broken (e.g. some defective VRAM) I wouldn't expect any other 980 to behave differently.

Which OS are you using? Latest WebDrivers require Sierra, so that's what I'd suggest to use.

 

[ehuijs]

Hey Pastrychef and Flor!an, thanks for your reply.

I'm using the latest vNidia WebDrivers (367.15.10.35f01) on (Sierra) macOS 10.12.3

At first I thought about something wrong with the card as well... however, it runs smoothly without any glitch under Windows 10... I'd guess that if there would be a hardware problem, the card would cause problems on both macOS and win10...?

 

[pastrychef]

I'd guess that if there would be a hardware problem, the card would cause problems on both macOS and win10...?

Yes. Which version of macOS were you trying to use the GTX 980 on?

 

[ehuijs]

Both the GTX 780ti and the GTX 980 are running on vNidia WebDrivers (367.15.10.35f01) on (Sierra) macOS 10.12.3

 

[pastrychef]

Sierra is fine. It should not cause a kernel panic.

 

[ehuijs]

Agree... I noticed that a difference in booting between the GTX780ti (reference design) and the GTX980 is that the GTX980 briefly shows it's own 'boot'-screen during startup showing the chipset and the amount of memory on the card.