Wonkeydonkey's Reboot Build - Steambox Pro MkII - Z87E-ITX - Core i7 4790K - AMD R9 380 Compact ITX

[WonkeyDonkey]

Can you test your 380 with Unigine Heaven and Cinebench? Thanks.

Attached. Not sure how these compare since Im not a graphics expert nor a gamer. I let both run at default.

Currently connected to 1080p screen with no graphics tweaking other than whats described in the build description.

 

[Azimuth1]

Thats where you are getting into single and multi streaming (SST and MST). 2 x mDP definitely do work here, I have it running on a cinema display (2560x1440) and a Dell display that does 1920x1200.

A little bit about MST and SST can be found in this translation.

Thanks for the link!
I guess you get the whole point here.

That's why my current UHD monitor is SST (Dell P2415Q) and it's working great with GTX 750 Ti. SST is definitely hassle free. But all the 5K monitors have to be MST due to actual bandwidth limitations of DP 1.2a specs.

On Nvidia cards (at least Clover based) there is a specific boot arg, which is nv_spanmodepolicy=1 , that takes care of "pasting together" two streams in a single image displayed on the monitor.

I'm wondering what is telling AMD cards to do the same... the radeon kext? the proper personality (frame buffer)? What? Beside the proper monitor EDID , of course.

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

Thanks for the link!
I guess you get the whole point here.

That's why my current UHD monitor is SST (Dell P2415Q) and it's working great with GTX 750 Ti. SST is definitely hassle free. But all the 5K monitors have to be MST due to actual bandwidth limitations of DP 1.2a specs.

On Nvidia cards (at least Clover based) there is a specific boot arg, which is nv_spanmodepolicy=1 , that takes care of "pasting together" two streams in a single image displayed on the monitor.

I'm wondering what is telling AMD cards to do the same... the radeon kext? the proper personality (frame buffer)? What? Beside the proper monitor EDID , of course.

I can't answer that, I've never had a large format monitor here so no way of testing/checking I'm afraid.

 

[budafilms]

As your test it´s 20% under 280X, exactly like an nvidia 770 4gb.
I was waiting this card, for the price are good numbers. I hope 390x works in Capitan or Yosemite.

Congrats!

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

As your test it´s 20% under 280X, exactly like an nvidia 770 4gb.
I was waiting this card, for the price are good numbers. I hope 390x works in Capitan or Yosemite.

Congrats!

Thanks. Only consideration for this card is if you want more than 2 monitors. The framebuffers dont correctly enable more than any 2 ports right now.

 

[Azimuth1]

As your test it´s 20% under 280X, exactly like an nvidia 770 4gb.
I was waiting this card, for the price are good numbers. I hope 390x works in Capitan or Yosemite.

Congrats!

If I don't remember wrong 280x is OOB and capable of driving at least 3 monitors at the same time, right?

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

If I don't remember wrong 280x is OOB and capable of driving at least 3 monitors at the same time, right?

You would have to do a forum search for that. I cant confirm it.

 

[TpwUK]

Curiosity has the better of me now ... I have looked in the Buyers Guide and can only see Nvidia cards - Is there another list somewhere that list AMD/ATI Cards that are happy OOB with OS X. I do use a GT660ti which seems to be happy but it would be nice to have another card handy in case of problems.

Martin

 

[Stork]

Curiosity has the better of me now ... I have looked in the Buyers Guide and can only see Nvidia cards - Is there another list somewhere that list AMD/ATI Cards that are happy OOB with OS X. I do use a GT660ti which seems to be happy but it would be nice to have another card handy in case of problems.

The reason the Buyer's Guide has nVidia cards is, because with the nVidia Web drivers, they work very well in Yosemite. (The GT 740 card is a rebadged 600 Kelper chipset and is equivalent to the GT640 for all intensive purposes.) So, if you're running Yosemite, the nVidia 750, 750 Ti and 900 series Maxwell chipset cards are fully supported by nVidia with their drivers.

Newer R9 AMD cards, on the other hand, are stuck using the older 7900 & 57/5800 Apple OS X drivers. Apple has not added new graphics cards drivers since 10.8.5, only updating the drivers for those 5770, 5850 and 7950 cards which Apple marketed with their Mac Pros. So, you're at the mercy of the AMD R9 200/300 series graphics card manufactures to stay as close to those Apple "Reference Design" cards. If you are only driving a single monitor, you can probably have a fully working AMD R9 280 card - see the User Builds and Yosemite Desktop Guides forum sections for successful stories. Using multiple monitors is a different story. Wonkey Donkey is reporting success with his Sapphaire R9 380 Compact ITX card with dual monitors, but not with more monitors. His card has the same port layout as the Apple HD 7950 card. So, in summary, stay tune for further support in either Apple's updating in El Capitan .

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

Curiosity has the better of me now ... I have looked in the Buyers Guide and can only see Nvidia cards - Is there another list somewhere that list AMD/ATI Cards that are happy OOB with OS X. I do use a GT660ti which seems to be happy but it would be nice to have another card handy in case of problems.

Martin

No there is just the one current recommended list. The advantage with nVidia is that they produce regular updates to their own driver package hence we can use cards that Apple have never used. With AMD, we need something that is reasonably compatible, and may also need to do some graphics injection to get full capability; the procedure for that can be a little more invovled. Remember with AMD we can only use the graphics 'personalities' that already exist in OSX, since there are no driver packages that go beyond them.

The only reason I went AMD this time is because the system most closely associated with my build also uses AMD; that is the Retina iMac.