Mac compatible PCI cards Thunderbolt OK?

adagio · May 9, 2013

I'm on an iMac but would like to make use of a PCI card via a Thunderbolt chassis. The card is Mac compatible, but I've read conflicting reports on whether a mac compatible card can be used in this way. Drivers might not be Thunderbolt compatible. Seems odd, as if not what's the point of selling a chassis?

I've read a bit more, seems I've missed an important bit of relevant info, it's a video card I want to use the GPU on.

FreakinEurekan · May 9, 2013

There's really a hardware limitation there. Thunderbolt is fast, but not THAT fast. Basically you get 4X PCIe performance from a Thunderbolt PCIe chassis - and while that's fast enough for a lot of stuff, video isn't one of them.

Giuly · May 9, 2013

adagio said:
I've read a bit more, seems I've missed an important bit of relevant info, it's a video card I want to use the GPU on.

Unfortunately, those chassis support all PCIe cards except for graphics cards.

FreakinEurekan said:
There's really a hardware limitation there. Thunderbolt is fast, but not THAT fast. Basically you get 4X PCIe performance from a Thunderbolt PCIe chassis - and while that's fast enough for a lot of stuff, video isn't one of them.

There are lots of problems with Thunderbolt-attached graphics, but bandwidth isn't a major one.

(That's a Radeon HD5970 on a Hexa-Core CPU)

adagio · May 11, 2013

I'm interesting in bitmining, so throughput speed might not be such an issue but it does appear that there is an absence of thunderbolt aware drivers, even for Mac compatible cards.

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Mac compatible PCI cards Thunderbolt OK?

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