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Honestly I think VII is a beast considering architecture, raw power, VRam bandwidth etc. but is a fact that Apple doesn't support it officially like you can see on their official Mac Pro website page. They state the cards officially supported in Mac Pro are the same supported in egpus (basically 470/570 480/580 WX7100 for Polaris | Vega 56 and 64 + Frontier and WX9100 for Vega and 5700 (XT) for Navi). I was using VII since Mojave and never had any issue with it until 11.1 came out and broke USB audio, and I wouldn't have considered swapping otherwise. Now, probably Apple will fix this in 11.3 or later and I'll miss my VII but the unofficial support puts the VII in an uncomfortable position of being incline to unsolved bugs given Apple isn't obliged to keep the X5000 driver updated and, since the VII performance is comparable to the 3K $ Vega II MPX (same Vega 20 GPU), I think Apple is nerfing VII on purpose. So, at the moment our choice is between less support | more power for VII or better support | less power for 5700, what do you think? the blower anyway is painful, I can clearly hear it while the VII is totally silent! But I can buy an aftermarket air cooler (Raijintek Morpheus + 2 x Noctuas 120mm = 100 €) and probably solve the blower fan issue. I don't want to water-cool anything 'cause I hate pumps rattling, my Noctua D15S + 2 x A12x25 is plenty adequate and ultra silent.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.
Honestly you're probably better off just selling the VII right now since it has great market value and keeping the 5700XT. Is there a triple fan version of the 5700XT (I think Sapphire Nitro is one)? Was never a fan of modding with big ugly coolers like the Morpheus etc. But it may be a decent solution for now if you are willing to live with how much space it takes. The reference 5700XT looks like it has an inadequate cooler (single fan?).
I am also not sure what your workload looks like, maybe the 5700XT is more than enough.
Another option would be when (if?) the RDNA2 GPUs are ever supported in Big Sur (11.5?) you can get a 6700XT/6800XT (if you can find one that is) and enjoy great power for a while. Those appear to have similar to VII coolers with triple fans. I have a feeling Apple is going to drop eGPU support completely, but most likely RDNA2 will be the last arch Apple supports and the Mac Pro 2021 will be the last one to support it. It wouldn't make sense for them to keep the Vega Pro Duo in the 2021 version since that arch is discontinued. So we're kind of limited with options here.
Personally I have had zero issues with the VII even tho it's not "officially supported" ever since I got it a while ago (I think it's been more than 15 months now). Previous card was a Vega Frontier Edition, where I had the audio issues similar to yours. I use this Hack daily for actual work, I jump between all Adobe apps including Premiere with Metal and have had no issues whatsoever. I've had other issues recently, but they were never related to the GPU.
I want to avoid these 1st generation M1 Mac issues, but I am definitely looking forward to seeing how an M1X iMac 27" performs. I would imagine they will kick butt considering how good the M1 Mac Mini (or MBP/MBA) perform. I don't like all in one's but if it looks like an XDR display I may reconsider then maybe in 2022 an actual Mac Pro with Apple Silicon. My big concern is software, and tbh I think we are about a year away from pro apps being fully there with M-silicone. I am not willing to use Intel apps through Rosetta translation layer right now, it is going to be buggy in real world usage.
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