Frequently Asked Questions About NVIDIA PC (non-EFI) Graphics Cards

[Asgorath]

Originally Posted by skaneby

I have the Asus Geoforce GTX 6600

Is it possible get this running on a MacPro early 2008 v 3.1 8 core on 10.8.2 ? If so can you point me to a guide line? After reading the post thought the card would work OOB. But no. I have installed the Nvidia drivers I could find.

Or is this config not supported at all?

The GTX 660 should work, but it's a pretty new card (compared to when 10.8.2 came out) and might not be fully supported by the driver. Do you have access to the 10.8.3 seed builds? I'd also check the system logs (/var/log/system.log) for any messages from the driver.

[MacVidCards]

For awhile I have gotten sporadic reports of 570 & 580 cards overheating & stopping Mac Pros. Over time I realized that it was ALWAYS a 2008 3,1 Mac Pro.

So, I got one of these.

While working on our new GTX580 that does NOT require external power I made some discoveries.


1. 580 3GB cards using reference design suffer this issue. This means that reference GTX570 are most likely affected as well. (Reference boards are typically the Dual DVI & Mini HDMI cards)

2. The 3 GB 580 from MSI is immune. As are the EVGA 580 Classified Ultra 3GB and the Gigabyte 580 3 GB that has 3 fans.

3. The EVGA 570 cards that use the non-reference board are also immune. This means the beloved 2.5GB cards and the 1.2 GB cards that have DP & HDMI in addition to Dual DVI are immune. Most of these immune 570s have fan centered in heatsink. The affected cards have fan at the END of the heatsink.

4. GTX680 reference board immune as are GTX480.

So basically so far it just seems that the original design for GTX570 & GTX580 can NOT be used in a 3,1 in lowest slot. This stinks for people trying to use multiple slots as moving 570/580 to Slot 2 solves problem but wastes slot 1 and covers up slot 3.

[skaneby]

Originally Posted by Asgorath

The GTX 660 should work, but it's a pretty new card (compared to when 10.8.2 came out) and might not be fully supported by the driver. Do you have access to the 10.8.3 seed builds? I'd also check the system logs (/var/log/system.log) for any messages from the driver.

this log is pretty full of info . any particular search I can do here? I was under the impression that the GTX660 in fact was supported according to your initial post:


Cards that are known to work include:
GTX 460 (GF104)
GTX 470 (GF100)
GTX 480 (GF100) *
GT 520 (GF119) - 1
GTX 560 and GTX 560 Ti (GF114) - 1
GTX 570 (GF110) - 1
GTX 580 (GF110) * - 1
GT 640 (GK107)
GTX 650 (GK107)
GTX 660 (GK106) <------------------
GTX 660 Ti (GK104)
GTX 670 (GK104)
GTX 680 (GK104) - 1


Would you expect me to have any 2 GB issues with this card? Also I have read in other forumts that there are special drivers by apple for GTX 660 shipped with 10.8.2 when installing on imac that actually as these graphics cards. Do you know if this can be a solution here?

mny tnx

[skaneby]

Originally Posted by Asgorath

The GTX 660 should work, but it's a pretty new card (compared to when 10.8.2 came out) and might not be fully supported by the driver. Do you have access to the 10.8.3 seed builds? I'd also check the system logs (/var/log/system.log) for any messages from the driver.

its a bit un clear - but do I need to add any power cables after installing the cared? my screen never powers up. its black

[MacVidCards]

Originally Posted by skaneby

its a bit un clear - but do I need to add any power cables after installing the cared? my screen never powers up. its black

This isn't brain surgery

If your card requires a power cable then IT REQUIRES A POWER CABLE

Look at it.

Does it need one?

There is your answer.

[skaneby]

Originally Posted by MacVidCards

This isn't brain surgery

If your card requires a power cable then IT REQUIRES A POWER CABLE

Look at it.

Does it need one?

There is your answer.

Ok, When I put in the card - I can see the fans are starting, so this is why I assumed there is no need for power. The card also has two additional connectors, but for me it is not clear if that is power, or something else like SLI . There where no extra cables in the box anyway

[MacVidCards]

Originally Posted by skaneby

Ok, When I put in the card - I can see the fans are starting, so this is why I assumed there is no need for power. The card also has two additional connectors, but for me it is not clear if that is power, or something else like SLI . There where no extra cables in the box anyway

Critical thinking, an endangered species. Have a cup (or three) of coffee. THINK. If that doesn't work, try Google. And a few more cups of coffee. If you can't think for yourself, hire someone to do it for you.

[skaneby]

Originally Posted by MacVidCards

Critical thinking, an endangered species. Have a cup (or three) of coffee. THINK. If that doesn't work, try Google. And a few more cups of coffee. If you can't think for yourself, hire someone to do it for you.

I am pretty convinced this a forum where people send in questions, gets answers and have general discussions. Graphics card not my area, I have other areas of expertise where I am more than happy to help out people, even if the questions are a bit basic. I have never seen a card like this before, it looks like it is powering up, fans are spinning. - So yes I assume it does not need a power cable like the 660 TI ( I infact googled that ) . But since there are two additional connectors and I dont what they are for , or if they should be used - I need to post this simple questions. But if you dont know , or get offended by the question I am of course sorry for that.

[MacVidCards]

Originally Posted by skaneby

I am pretty convinced this a forum where people send in questions, gets answers and have general discussions. Graphics card not my area, I have other areas of expertise where I am more than happy to help out people, even if the questions are a bit basic. I have never seen a card like this before, it looks like it is powering up, fans are spinning. - So yes I assume it does not need a power cable like the 660 TI ( I infact googled that ) . But since there are two additional connectors and I dont what they are for , or if they should be used - I need to post this simple questions. But if you dont know , or get offended by the question I am of course sorry for that.

I'm sorry this is so difficult for you.

If I buy a toaster and it has a place to plug in power, I eventually figure out that it won't work until I plug it in. It's how things work. Electricity requires wires, at least for now.

Macs have used the same EXACT power cables to plug in video cards since 2004 or so, better part of a decade. Not exactly a "startling new development". Try googling "mac g5 pcie power cable" and you will see.

[skaneby]

Originally Posted by MacVidCards

I'm sorry this is so difficult for you.

If I buy a toaster and it has a place to plug in power, I eventually figure out that it won't work until I plug it in. It's how things work. Electricity requires wires, at least for now.

Ok - so what you are trying to tell me is that even if the toaster appears to be running , with lights and fans in this case - it still needs to be feed power through this 6 pin connector . Very good - tnx

[MacVidCards]

Originally Posted by skaneby

Ok - so what you are trying to tell me is that even if the toaster appears to be running , with lights and fans in this case - it still needs to be feed power through this 6 pin connector . Very good - tnx

Here is some reference material for people.

IF YOUR VIDEO CARD HAS A POWER PLUG, IT REQUIRES A POWER CABLE.

IF YOUR VIDEO CARD HAS TWO POWER PLUGS, IT REQUIRES 2 POWER CABLES.

YOU MUST PLUG IN THE POWER BEFORE THE CARD WILL WORK.

Let me know if anything is still hard to understand. You will find the cards work better and your toast is crunchier if you plug them in.

[flowrider]

Originally Posted by MacVidCards

For awhile I have gotten sporadic reports of 570 & 580 cards overheating & stopping Mac Pros. Over time I realized that it was ALWAYS a 2008 3,1 Mac Pro.

So, I got one of these.

While working on our new GTX580 that does NOT require external power I made some discoveries.


1. 580 3GB cards using reference design suffer this issue. This means that reference GTX570 are most likely affected as well. (Reference boards are typically the Dual DVI & Mini HDMI cards)

2. The 3 GB 580 from MSI is immune. As are the EVGA 580 Classified Ultra 3GB and the Gigabyte 580 3 GB that has 3 fans.

3. The EVGA 570 cards that use the non-reference board are also immune. This means the beloved 2.5GB cards and the 1.2 GB cards that have DP & HDMI in addition to Dual DVI are immune. Most of these immune 570s have fan centered in heatsink. The affected cards have fan at the END of the heatsink.

4. GTX680 reference board immune as are GTX480.

So basically so far it just seems that the original design for GTX570 & GTX580 can NOT be used in a 3,1 in lowest slot. This stinks for people trying to use multiple slots as moving 570/580 to Slot 2 solves problem but wastes slot 1 and covers up slot 3.

I have a GTX 570 MacVidCards modified card in my Mac Pro 3,1. It is a Gigabyte OC non-reference 3 fan card with 1.25GB of Ram, dual DVIs, HDMI and Display Port (however only the DVI and DP are active). My card was further accelerated by MacVidCards during the ROM modification. I can attest that this card is working great in my machine in the bottom slot. The card runs fast and cool and has been in use for 5 months. I commend MacVidCards for doing this research. My hat's off to you.

Lou

[Anderton]

Originally Posted by MacVidCards

Here is some reference material for people.

IF YOUR VIDEO CARD HAS A POWER PLUG, IT REQUIRES A POWER CABLE.

IF YOUR VIDEO CARD HAS TWO POWER PLUGS, IT REQUIRES 2 POWER CABLES.

YOU MUST PLUG IN THE POWER BEFORE THE CARD WILL WORK.

Let me know if anything is still hard to understand. You will find the cards work better and your toast is crunchier if you plug them in.

I think he actually he gets it. But in the area of Skanebys expertise (Try Google for Telestream) he works with hardware that sometimes actually have power cables that are not used on some systems (onboard power). I think an answer like ”Yes, you need this cable -LINK-”. You always been very nice on the boards and kept up at professional tone, even if questions already has been answered 100 times before.

But i guess everyone can have a bad day (i had a couple of them myself).

Cheers

[ashurao]

Hello Asgorath,

I have not seen if this information has already been given, but the GT640 OTB works very well in a mac pro running OS 10.8.2.
I bought this model.

http://eu.evga.com/products/moreInfo...0Family&uc=EUR

And everything seems to work

[_dob_]

Originally Posted by Asgorath

If you care more about gaming and have an unlimited budget, get a GTX 680.
If you care more about compute (CUDA/OpenCL) and have an unlimited budget, get a GTX 570.

I'm relatively new to the Nvidia CUDA world, so I'm wondering why the GTX 570 with 480 cores is recommended over the GTX 680 with 1536 cores? Even the 660 Ti has 1344 cores. What am I missing here?

[MacVidCards]

Originally Posted by _dob_

I'm relatively new to the Nvidia CUDA world, so I'm wondering why the GTX 570 with 480 cores is recommended over the GTX 680 with 1536 cores? Even the 660 Ti has 1344 cores. What am I missing here?

Research is key.

Start with Google

[_dob_]

Originally Posted by MacVidCards

Research is key.

Start with Google

Between the CUDA wiki, Nvidia website and several GTX 570 reviews (which mostly discuss games), nothing is glaringly obvious to me. Higher 384-bit bandwidth memory?

I also figured a FAQ that makes a recommendation for a good OpenCL/CUDA card would be a good place to ask, but instead I get accused of being lazy.

Where do I find Google?

[Dillo2]

Originally Posted by Dillo2

Thanks for the response.

Do you have the original card installed in another slot or are you running with just the GTX 660 Ti?

I think my problem is related to an earlier failed attempt to make a GT 440 work on Snow Leopard, but I don't have a clue how to fix the problem. I am presuming one of the kext files I altered (without keeping a record of what I did) is the problem. My system is also a 2009 8-core Mac Pro.

Over the weekend, I will be installing the same card in a friend's Mac Pro so perhaps I can review the process on his system.

I am happy to report that my GTX 660 Ti is now working great installed as the only video card in slot 1. I wanted to pass along my experience to help others who may have similar problems.

DPArt in the Mac Support Forum found that I had applied the Natit.kext which was intended only for the Hackintosh. I had applied (and forgotten that I had done so) this kext in my failed attempt to make my GT440 work on Snow Leopard. This is what was forcing the System Profiler to report that I had a GT440 card when in fact I was using the GT120 at the time.

All I had to do was remove Natit.kext and reboot. System Profiler now reported that I had a GT120 card. I replaced the GT120 with the GTX 660 Ti, plugged in the two power cables, and my early 2009 Mac Pro booted perfectly.

However, I could not get Premiere Pro CS6 to allow the Mercury Playback Engine to work in GPU mode. I next verified that the cuda_supported_cards.txt and the ray_tracer_supported cards.txt contained the string GTX 660 Ti. I verified that I had correctly patched the /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenCL.framework/Versions/A/OpenCL file to enable OpenCl.

I found another program to test Raytracing using OpenCL and it worked fine, so I decided to remove Premiere Pro and re-install. This, of course, required me to again edit cuda_supported_cards.txt and the ray_tracer_supported cards.txt to add the GTX 660 Ti and patch the OpenCL file.

Now the Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere Pro CS6 works as expected.

I want to thank everyone who helped on this issue.

[Asgorath]

Originally Posted by _dob_

Between the CUDA wiki, Nvidia website and several GTX 570 reviews (which mostly discuss games), nothing is glaringly obvious to me. Higher 384-bit bandwidth memory?

I also figured a FAQ that makes a recommendation for a good OpenCL/CUDA card would be a good place to ask, but instead I get accused of being lazy.

Where do I find Google?

This link has been posted many times already:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/n...x-680-review/2

I guess that qualifies it as deserving its own entry in the FAQ. I really need to update the OP, will try and get to that soon.

[Asgorath]

Updated the OP. Need to go through and update the list of cards that have been confirmed to work, will get to that ASAP.

[_dob_]

Originally Posted by Asgorath

This link has been posted many times already:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/n...x-680-review/2

I guess that qualifies it as deserving its own entry in the FAQ. I really need to update the OP, will try and get to that soon.

Thanks Asgorath.

So as I understand this ... with the shader clock gone in the 600 series, each CUDA core is half as powerful, and thus they had to double the count to achieve the same result. And then, another core doubling took place to give it an edge up on the 500 series?

But despite this, and because of the architectural ripple effect of dropping the shader clock, the 500 series still appears to be better for computational tasks?

In any case, I've made up my mind and placed an order for a cheap refurbished GTX 570. Can't wait to try it in Blender.

[colets]

Hi, I've just found this thread. First post here. I have a 2009 MacPro 4,1 with bootcamp and Windows 8 Pro 64 bits.
After I read this thread I decided to try this, and unplug an "old" GTX 460 from another PC. I needed two 6-pin power cables.
After some tries I finally got to get it working: had to place it in slot 2, leave the installed mac GT120, and then start the mac.
Later I removed the GT120, and things went fine, good performance in Mac and windows.
But that card had to go back to the PC, and it was quite noisy.
I bought an ASUS direct CU II GTX 660. I did nothing special this time, remove the GTX 460, remove one power cable (the GTX 660 uses just one) and install the GTX 660 with one power cable into slot 2.
Nice! Better performance and a very quiet card, you can hear it when more power is demanded (like PC-Gaming), but generally you don´t notice it. Windows 8 also running nice, just some problems with hard drive partition.

So, these are the two cards I´ve tested on my 4,1 MacPro:
eVGA GTX 460 768 MB
Asus DCUII GTX 660 2 GB
Regards

[funkahdafi]

Originally Posted by Pithism

This is a random question, but for some websites (specifically The Verge main page), the computer will freeze, and give me the spinning wheel of death and ill have to reboot.

Is this the evga gtx 660 fault or something else? havent really found a solution for it. Im assuming ill need to reinstall mac osx or something, unless their is another idea. Im hoping its not the GPU, because its been running great besides the website issues.

NM its a google issues, just tried on firefox and no issues.

This is a known issue. Seems to be related to hardware accelerated (GPU) video decoding in the browser, specifically webkit based browsers (Chrome, Safari).

[rcook55]

I've read all 18 pages of this thread, Asgorath thank you for the time and information.

I have a 2006 1,1 MacPro currently running a 7300GT. I'm running 10.7.5 and don't plan to migrate to ML right now but always want to keep it as an option. My main reason to upgrade the video would be light gaming, Civ 5 and maybe SimCity 5.

From what I've read and from the OP: "a GTX 560 or GTX 560 Ti" would be a for sure plug and play card but I'm trying to be a bit more frugal. I've read in this thread that both a GT520 and GT610 are also plug and play, both of these cards being $50.

I guess I'd like to know of a for sure card under $80 that will let me play some games and potentially allow me to migrate to ML down the road. I don't mind not having the boot logo but it also sounds like if I leave the 7300 in the box that I'll still have the apple boot logo. How does that work anyway?

With a new card I think I'll have a Mac that will last me for quite a while now. I've already done a bit of upgrading, taking parts from retired servers and managed to spec it out quite nicely:

• 14Gb RAM
• 4x1Tb drives, 3 in a RAID as my storage and TM drives.
• Wifi card
• eSATA card
• USB Bluetooth

I also have 1x3GHz dual core xeon with another on the way from eBay for $12! So that should also make for a nice inexpensive upgrade as well.

[_dob_]

Originally Posted by rcook55

I've read all 18 pages of this thread, Asgorath thank you for the time and information.

I have a 2006 1,1 MacPro currently running a 7300GT. I'm running 10.7.5 and don't plan to migrate to ML right now but always want to keep it as an option. My main reason to upgrade the video would be light gaming, Civ 5 and maybe SimCity 5.

From what I've read and from the OP: "a GTX 560 or GTX 560 Ti" would be a for sure plug and play card but I'm trying to be a bit more frugal. I've read in this thread that both a GT520 and GT610 are also plug and play, both of these cards being $50.

I guess I'd like to know of a for sure card under $80 that will let me play some games and potentially allow me to migrate to ML down the road. I don't mind not having the boot logo but it also sounds like if I leave the 7300 in the box that I'll still have the apple boot logo. How does that work anyway?

With a new card I think I'll have a Mac that will last me for quite a while now. I've already done a bit of upgrading, taking parts from retired servers and managed to spec it out quite nicely:

• 14Gb RAM
• 4x1Tb drives, 3 in a RAID as my storage and TM drives.
• Wifi card
• eSATA card
• USB Bluetooth

I also have 1x3GHz dual core xeon with another on the way from eBay for $12! So that should also make for a nice inexpensive upgrade as well.

Currently, I am in a very similar situation as you. Going strong on a 2006 Mac Pro tricked out with RAM, an SSD, Radeon 5870 and ML.

One thing to keep in mind going ML, is that you'll be using Chameleon boot loader via the BIOS emulation to boot your startup disk. With my 5870, I am able to hold down Option, get a picture and select the "Windows" (BIOS emulation) drive and trigger Chameleon which in turn boots off my ML SDD. At least I believe that's how it works.

As I mentioned earlier, I placed an order for a GTX 570, and as I understand, I won't have picture till the ML Nvidia drivers load at the login screen. I'm assuming I will have to blindly navigate to select the "Windows" partition and hope I selected the right one. And unless I get a new PS, I cannot keep both graphics cards since both require the only two 6-pin power connectors I have.

This leads me to my question ... Does anybody know how to auto-boot into the Mac Pro BIOS emulator instead of having to hold down Option and selecting the "Windows" drive every single time I startup ?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!