Mac Pro (Early 2008) Graphic card upgrade

[skobonen]

Hi

I have heavily customized Mac Pro 3.1

With

2 x Quad Core Intel Xeons 2.8Ghz
8 GB of RAM
SSD... new Airport and bluetooth LE and so on...

I have used Clud3D HD5770 Craphics card but because AMD drivers suck I think its time to switch to Nvidia.

I have tried Asus 750 Ti and some older 6xx card but no picture on neither one.
Any suggestions which card to buy?

 

[VioletDragon]

with graphics cards such as a 760 if its not apple branded you won't have no splash screen don't know if that bothers you?

 

[skobonen]

with graphics cards such as a 760 if its not apple branded you won't have no splash screen don't know if that bothers you?

I know.... I have saved my old HD 2600 XT for troubleshooting and other stuff.
HD5770 is also not apple card (Club3D) and it works out of the box.
So I'm looking for newer card that would do the same.

 

[VioletDragon]

i think a 960 for an example will work you may need nvidia web drivers but you can try it

 

[Going Bald]

I know.... I have saved my old HD 2600 XT for troubleshooting and other stuff.
HD5770 is also not apple card (Club3D) and it works out of the box.
So I'm looking for newer card that would do the same.

R9 280X would be a good OoB upgrade for the HD5770.

nVidia GTX740 is latest card to work OoB from nVidia. All Maxwell cards like the 750Ti and the 9xx cards require the nVidia web drivers to work and are not natively supported by Apple - which means you cannot upgrade to next version of OS X until nVidia releases drivers for that version, which is sometimes months.

 

[skobonen]

R9 280X would be a good OoB upgrade for the HD5770.

nVidia GTX740 is latest card to work OoB from nVidia. All Maxwell cards like the 750Ti and the 9xx cards require the nVidia web drivers to work and are not natively supported by Apple - which means you cannot upgrade to next version of OS X until nVidia releases drivers for that version, which is sometimes months.

Manual drivers (web drivers) aren't problem. I have hackintosh beta machine for new releases.
I did take a look of R9 series but temperatures inside of the case are already too high so I would prefer lower TDP card.

Nvidia : 120W
AMD : 250W
Current: 260W

 

[Fl0r!an]

The 750Ti you tried should normally work, did you install the Web Drivers?

The MacPro should normally have no problems with the temperature of the PCIe cards as long as it can provide the neccessary power (a high TDP card such as R9 280X might need some small modifications because the TDP slightly exceeds the MacPros specification).
Besides that I'd recommend a AMD card, from my experience Nvidia drivers are even worse + you'd have to manually install them (in case of Maxwell).

Btw, if you want to go to high-end cards, keep in mind that neither AMD nor Nvidia will have PCIe 2.0 link speed without further modifications.

 

[skobonen]

The 750Ti you tried should normally work, did you install the Web Drivers?

The MacPro should normally have no problems with the temperature of the PCIe cards as long as it can provide the neccessary power (a high TDP card such as R9 280X might need some small modifications because the TDP slightly exceeds the MacPros specification).
Besides that I'd recommend a AMD card, from my experience Nvidia drivers are even worse + you'd have to manually install them (in case of Maxwell).

Btw, if you want to go to high-end cards, keep in mind that neither AMD nor Nvidia will have PCIe 2.0 link speed without further modifications.

Yes I tried with Web Drivers. No picture and reboot after 20 seconds from start so something was wrong.
I have had problems with AMD for long now. For some reason 5770 drains 200W from 12V rail on desktop.
This keeps my ambient temperature inside of the case over 45 degrees of celsius.

Power supply fan RPM is 800 on desktop and when I do something heavy (gaming) I have to stop after an hour because fear of a meltdown

I'm just looking for balance and reasonable power from GPU.

 

[jerdav2009]

A family member of mine has a Mac Pro 2008 as well and the video card recently died, I just picked up a EVGA GTX 740.

Didn't even need to install anything.

 

[rwillett]

Yes I tried with Web Drivers. No picture and reboot after 20 seconds from start so something was wrong.
I have had problems with AMD for long now. For some reason 5770 drains 200W from 12V rail on desktop.
This keeps my ambient temperature inside of the case over 45 degrees of celsius.

Power supply fan RPM is 800 on desktop and when I do something heavy (gaming) I have to stop after an hour because fear of a meltdown

I'm just looking for balance and reasonable power from GPU.

The 5770 draws a lot of power, 200W is a bit on the high side but 180W is about right.

I had a MacPro 1,1 with dual 5770 cards in and it worked fine though and I hammered that puppy. I worried about temperatures for a while but ignored them after a couple of weeks.

Its not clear what you want the extra GPU for. Whilst the 5770 cards aren't that fast, they are heavily optimised for Apple's products and still work remarkably well for what is almost technically an obsolete card. You can shove higher end cards in, the 7790/280X works well (no boot screen). I *believe* that the Mac Pro's can't handle dual 7790/280X cards due to motherboard limitations on the current (amperage) drawer. From my own benchmarks a single 7790/280X is worth about 1.8x a 5770.

I didn't find the lack of PCIe bus lanes in the Mac Pro a limiting factor at all. The Mac Pro 3,1 is actually better than the 1,1 which I had.

After saying all that, moving to a four core 4790K from an 2 x quad core Xeon (for eight cores) was a massive improvement. Anybody who tells you that the older Xeons are better than the new 4790 CPU's is smoking something. The 4790K is faster, cooler and is cheaper to keep going as it draws so much less current than the older Xeons.

Rob