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ScottishCaptain

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 4, 2008
871
474
So I just got an eVGA 680 GTX Mac Edition card for my 2010 Mac Pro.

The card works well, I've got no complaints there. However, my Mac Pro is now emitting excessive noise from the PCI-e fan, which appears to have revved up in response to the new video card.

What seems to happen (with either the OS X or NVIDIA drivers) is that the PCI-e fan revs up to nearly full speed during boot, then slowly throttles down to maybe 50% speed after login.

It will (annoyingly) stay there for quite some time (sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes an hour) until something changes and the system basically goes dead silent (at this point, the computer is definitely quieter then when I had my 5870 installed). After that happens, even if I launch something ridiculously graphically crazy like SC2, the system remains quiet and the PCI-e fan only marginally throttles up again (but to speeds nowhere near what it seems to sit at when I cold boot the computer).

Does anyone know why this is happening, or how I can fix it? I've already tried resetting the SMC and PRAM. Neither the Mac Pro nor the eVGA 680 GTX are modified in any way. This is all official hardware, so I could have sworn weird **** like this wasn't supposed to happen.

-SC
 

GP-SE

macrumors 6502
Feb 27, 2013
344
52
known issue with adding non apple video cards to the 2009-2012 Mac Pro. Even some people with the official Apple 5870 have had this issue. Best thing to do: download openGL Extension Viewer (from the mac app store) then hit run test, after that the fans will quiet down. This problem happens on a cold boot, once you "Stress" the video card the problem goes away, until you cold boot again.
Normal reboot and sleep won't cause the fans to spin up.
 
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