MP 7,1 Cuda rendering machine

[gabrielefx]

Hi all,

the Mac Pro 7.1 works like a charm with 2 internal RTX2080Ti + one external GTX1080Ti on tb3 bus (Bootcamp Windows 10 Pro)
I tested this configuration with various programs: Blender, Vray RT and Fstorm (3ds Max)
Also I overclocked the 3 gpus with the MSI Afterburner utility and used custom curves for the fans.
The main monitor is plugged to the Radeon Pro 580X then it can coexist with Nvidia gpus (only on Windows 10)

Best regards,
Gabriele

 

[profdraper]

the Mac Pro 7.1 works like a charm with 2 internal RTX2080Ti + one external GTX1080Ti on tb3 bus (Bootcamp Windows 10 Pro)

Curious - I run two workstations, the other being a Dell T7910 24 dual core Xeon with RTX 2080Ti. This certainly outperforms my MacPro in terms of film production, rendering etc but the (10 fan, water cooled) system is certainly louder than the mac. Conversely, I can see with various tools (iStats, Sensi) that the mac is not really working that hard in terms of GPU /CPU usage & as usual, it tends to throttle everything for a 'nice' experience and also as per usual with Apple, they do not let the user configure this in any way. The Dell on the other hand, running Windows 10 Pro For Workstations, lets me ramp everything up and I can see from the task manager that all 24 cores are running at 100% if I want, ditto for the GPU. Translates: eg, fast render times that I cannot get of the mc pro, not even close (at least for now and perhaps awaiting future soft- /firmware optimisations).

In any case, my question to you is this: I can only assume that in boot camp that the same principles apply? ie, Windows overrides the mac os throttling & 'kiddes' management behaviour, perhaps indeed allowing the thing to become noisy if one chooses to do so? Interested to know more and that perhaps Windows might make far better use of (my) 16 core Xeon-W & Vega II 32GB. Beyond that, yes, could also throw in the 2080Ti for (say) DaVinci Resolve compute.

For now will stay with the two workstations because unlike bootcamp, I can run both systems at the same time, sync up timecode, transfer etc while working. But still, interested in how the mac hardware might better perform under windows.

 

[darthaddie]

Curious to know if the MP has any issues when booted into Catalina. There have been reports of freezes while rebooting and random crashes even though Catalina ignores the RTX GPUs.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

Just gonna throw in a mention of why bare-metal MacOS virtualization is about to come on like gangbusters. Pumped up HP Z840 / Lenovo P920 competes with iMac Pro & Mac Pro (especially multi core) performance at a fraction of the cost. GPU passthrough, too.

 

[gabrielefx]

Curious to know if the MP has any issues when booted into Catalina. There have been reports of freezes while rebooting and random crashes even though Catalina ignores the RTX GPUs.

Catalina ignores the Nvidia gpus but I haven’t had any crashes