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rc3105

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 30, 2019
79
23
I have a 2008 mac pro 3,1, 16gig of ram, various ssd drives and several video cards to choose from including pc Geforce GT 640 and Geforce GTX 770. Everything works perfectly in El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra and even Catalina thx to doddude1's installers. The fans/heatsinks are all recently cleaned so it's not thermal throttling.

Boot camp only succeded in trashing the drive so I started from scratch with just the dvdrom, 120gig ssd and Geforce GT120 (from a mac pro 4,1)

With only a blank ssd connected it booted from the dvd and installed win10pro 1803.

Here's the issue, right click for task manager or display settings menus may take 30 seconds to respond. The initial boot screen takes 2-3 mins. Double clicking on an app is also slow to load. Actually it seems like it takes a while to notice the click, then loads as it should.

Once the app loads, for example fusion360 or cinebench15, the cpu and graphics benchmarks are just about right. Same behavior with bare windows generic drivers or Nvidia drivers installed.

If this were a regular pc I'd swear it was a chipset driver issue, but I've installed the drivers downloaded from apple and they didn't help.

I've tried five different video cards which all work fine under High Sierra or in a hackintosh. No apps or updates loading in the background. With/without a swap file, fixed size or system managed...



Anybody know what I'm missing here???

Is win10 just a no-go for the 3,1?
 
I tried running win10 in a VM on my 3,1. It performed terribly.
I think it Came down to win10 running hyperV under the covers to support the Linux subsytem.
I didn’t mess with it too much. but maybe try looking to disable that feature or look to enable the magic to get hyperV supported on the 3,1. Supposedly you can enable some feature for this via refind but I’m really not confident on that.
Going from vague bits of memory here.
 
Anybody know what I'm missing here???

Is win10 just a no-go for the 3,1?

I'm curious if there are any clues in Event Viewer?

And you said you installed the drivers from Apple, but can you be more specific about what you installed and where you obtained it from? Also, are any devices showing up in Device Manager that either don't have drivers or that are showing problems?

Did you try build 1903?
 
I haven't installed the w10 linux subsystem and the w10 drive works fine under virtualbox or in a real pc/laptop.


I'm going to start from scratch with El Capitan / win7 on the 3,1 and see if w10 works as an upgrade...


edit: Holy cow it took like 2 hours for boot camp assistant to fetch the 690meg WindowsSupport folder. This time boot camp assistant was able to create a 32 gig partition, w7 installed, bootcamp assistant and apple drivers installed via setup.exe in WindowsSupport, overall it seems responsive enough, currently installing updates...
 
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Installing WindowsSupport/Drivers/Apple/AppleNullDriver.exe made a HUGE difference in responsivity under win10. (I read somewhere that it's the AHCP driver.)

Unfortunately W10 is still too slow to really be usable whereas w7 is a little sluggish but adequate. (The win7->10 upgraded drive performs the same.)


Anybody have suggestions on how to speed up w10? The apps seem ok it just feels like the gui lags.
 
Pc Geforce GTX770 and GT 640, mac Geforce GT 120 and Radeon HD 2600 XT.

Mac cards running drivers from the bootcamp support files, pc cards running latest drivers from the Nvidia website.
 
So all 4 of your PCIe slots are occupied with ancient GPUs running a modern OS?
I don't recall windows having a good time ever with mixing AMD and Nvidia cards in a single install.
 
No, I've tried all the software variants with each of the 4 cards individually.

As I mentioned earlier, the cards all work fine in MacOS capitan/sierra/hs and win7, it's just w10 that seems to have issues. What's really weird is that the w10 drives work fine w/o the crazy hesitation even running an old Atom based dell laptop. It's slow but the gui responds promptly.
 
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