Graphics card recommendations please

[worldcitizen]

My son's Customac (the Customac I have listed in my profile) is about 5 years old now. I recently updated the system from Mavericks to Sierra, as I don't have a copy of High Sierra and as I was afraid I would have trouble getting the NVIDIA graphics (GTX 660 OC) card to work under Mojave.

My son uses his Customac mainly for gaming and would like to upgrade the graphics card. The display he uses has a resolution of 2560x1440 px. If we want to move on to Mojave in the near future, I guess NVIDIA cards are out of the question right now, so what would you recommend?

Would it be an AMD Radeon Vega 64 based card? - or would that be overkill, considering the other (older) components of his system?
How about a Vega 56? - would that be more suitable?

 

[trs96]

Would it be an AMD Radeon Vega 64 based card? - or would that be overkill, considering the other (older) components of his system?
How about a Vega 56? - would that be more suitable?

For Windows and macOS use the Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX580 with 8GB of vram. That is the best choice right now. They are very affordable and will work for 1440p gaming too. You can choose other brands like MSI or Gigabyte if you prefer those.

 

[worldcitizen]

Thanks trs96! We'll look into that line of cards...

 

[worldcitizen]

Here's a little update. After some more research, we were looking at the following graphics cards:

.............................................Relative Score....Relative Price
Sapphire Nitro+ RX Vega 56 8GB....................130%..............144%
Sapphire Nitro+ RX590 Special Edition 8GB.........106%..............115%
Sapphire Nitro+ RX580 8GB.........................100%..............100%

The relative score is calculated from Toms Hardware ranking of video cards and both the relative scores and relative prices are calculated in relation to the Sapphire RX580. The relative prices are based on the best we could find in the European market right now, including shipping to our country of residence. The offer on the RX Vega 56 card was exceptional (only one unit). Normally, that card would be considerably more than 44% more expensive than the RX580, so we decided to order the Sapphire Nitro+ RX Vega 56. We are still paying a premium for the higher spec'ed card (44% more for a 30% increase in performance), but figured it would be the better choice in the long run.

We'll receive the card in about a week. I just hope I won't run into too much trouble installing it and getting it to play nicely with my son's Customac.

 

[worldcitizen]

We'll receive the card in about a week. I just hope I won't run into too much trouble installing it and getting it to play nicely with my son's Customac.

Got the graphics card today. Made a clean install of Mojave 10.14.2 on an empty hard disk, first running on internal graphics, then switching over to the VEGA in BIOS and it just worked! (Internal graphics is still on, but graphics card set up as "first" at startup). Nothing additional graphics related had to be installed with MultiBeast ! ! !

 

[bendelaurence]

Did you not encounter the fan/cooling issues people talk about?

 

[worldcitizen]

Did you not encounter the fan/cooling issues people talk about?

Last time I wrote, we had not yet stressed the system with heavy-duty graphic duties, and had not encountered any problems with noisy fans - in fact this card seemed less noisy than my son's previous graphics card, a Gigabyte Geforce GTX 660. However, I told my son to be on the look-out for strange fan behaviour.

Today he tried some extreme shading options in Minecraft. Strangely, he achieved better FPS with higher quality settings than with lower quality settings, but also the graphics card seemed to overheat - and once it caused a sudden, otherwise unprovoked, restart of the system. He wisely chose not to push the envelope any further and turned off the computer to let it cool off.

So, unfortunately (but also predictably), like everyone else using these Vega cards in a Hackintosh (without all kinds of hacks described here), we do experience some heat/fan issues.

Another thing we notice is that it almost seems there is a delay in the revving up of the fans - sometimes they seem to rev up _after_ you've stopped the heavy-duty graphic stuff.

Edit: about the "sudden, otherwise unprovoked, restart of the system" - it could also be due to the fact that the Power Supply Unit is only 500W (Corsair CX500M). Sapphire recommends 750W. I did use this tool to calculate system energy consumption and it came up with a load wattage of 428W and a recommended PSU wattage of 478W...

 

[bendelaurence]

thank for replying, I think I might stick with my 1070ti and high Sierra for a while as it seems to work fairly flawlessly.

For your system, there are a lot of threads on here about this problem. It seems quite easily fixed, especially on a clean install like yours. There are many stories of the fans working in reverse - ie. slow under load, and fast at idle. Sounds like exactly what you're suffering with.

PSU - For what is costs, I think its always worth going bigger. Ive had the same 1200w corsair power supply for nearly ten years. I don't think I've ever needed that much power. Once maybe when I was running 3 GPU's. But my point is, for a little more money, you will never have to think about it again. Just my view

 

[nib01]

Hey guys, what do you recommend for mid-range motherboards to use for this Graphics card? Thanks.

 

[nib01]

Ive found a motherboard that I want to use for my new build. I chose ASUS mobo because of its popularity.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HCXT591/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

Now, what do you recommend for Graphics card that works with this version of motherboard? (Video editing, digital audio workstation, not so much on gaming)