Please advise me choose a GPU upgrade

[craighazan]

Hi Craig - have you got any sort of power measurement capabilities on your mac? This is from a pc and the XFX rx580 in mine I can only get to 149 Watts measured with HWmonitor - I will dig out the electrical measuring thingy and see what it says at the plug.

Hi Nick, Yes I have HWmonitor on Windows, I've attached screenshots from it along with a photo of what the plug says. On the left is when it's idle and the right with Overwatch on Epic graphic setting playing in the background. Below that is what HWmonitorSMC2 on Catalina is telling me, though to be honest the fans on the graphic card rarely spin up when in Catalina.

 

[nicksoph]

Thanks Craig - Ill do a similar as soon as I can find the meter. Suspect the mac has to be pushed quite hard to get it to max out with its gpu. My card shows a Max of 150 watts on the box but even OC'ing it to 1400Mhz for GPU and 2000Mhz for memory, it only comes in at 147 Watts. Suspect your card can get higher but your screenshot shows only 108. (I usePowermax for stressing it - https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/powermax.html).

I had bought the card thinking I might put it into the 7020 but as soon as you add a 2nd monitor the power usage trebles to 36Watts and I would rather not burn that much power doing text based work (which is all I do on the mac) when the HD4600 gives the same (text work) experience for about 3 watts, and it's silent.

 

[craighazan]

The only time the RX 580 gets pushed on the Mac side is when it's being benched. It handles TinkerCad really well, 3D objects are smooth to manipulate and construct. But the G5 is mostly for gaming on the Windows side, my newly built Mac mini gives me the same experience as your 7020, or my 9020, a tiny silent mac for writing and reading on.

 

[ratchet]

Hello,

Just purcahsed Sapphire RX 580 Pulse.
Thanks for the advices.

One quick question.
Which is recommended for macOS?

• Game mode
• Compute mode

 

[ratchet]

The choice is up to you. Both cards should work.

Personally I would choose the RX 580 since I would want to run a non-Catalina MacOS. The RX 580 supports MacOS Sierra 10.12.6 and later. Do you want or need to run a MacOS older than Catalina?

If you are currently running MacOS Sierra 10.12.6 or later you should be able to install the RX 580 and the system should boot up after the graphics card replacement. In the case of Sierra you will need the Lilu and WhateverGreen kexts for the card to work.

@Jamesbond007
Yes, I use Sierra 10.12.6
I just bought and I installed RX 580 Pulse.
Unfortunately my Sierra installations freeze during boot.
When the download line reaches 50%. How can I fix this?
Thanks in advance.

 

[jaymonkey]

One quick question ..Which is recommended for macOS?

• Game mode
• Compute mode

@ratchet,

I assume your talking about the small VBIOS mode switch towards the rear of the card ?
If so then you need to know that the VBIOS mode switch only works in Windoze and Linux ...

MacOS on a Hackintosh only uses an AMD dGPU's VBIOS during the initial booting phase, once MacOS has loaded it controls the dGPU directly through a low level API via the kext driver, which is why we are able to modify the performance and fan settings via software.

Set the switch for the mode you want to use the dGPU in Windoze (if you use it).

Cheers
Jay

 

[ratchet]

@ratchet,

...

Set the switch for the mode you want to use the dGPU in Windozes (if you use it).

Cheers
Jay

@jaymonkey
Thank you very much.

 

[ratchet]

I was able to partially fix the RX 580 under 10.12.6.
As @Jamesbond007 suggested with Lilu and WhateverGreen kexts.

The picture is OK via HDMI.
On a DVI connector, the image is shrunk horizontally by 50% and blinks.