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kwikdeth

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 25, 2003
1,203
1,951
Tempe, AZ
Hey everyone,

After many many years of running Hackintoshes and finding that I could not easily move past Monterey with a dual CPU setup, I bit the bullet and got a great deal on a Mac Pro 7,1.
However, I found out later concerning the somewhat limited setup concerning the RX580 they came with by default, and the lack of thunderbolt ports on the card and only HDMI. I use a ton of peripherals including USB devices (IT by day, musician by night) and I prefer to have dedicated USB busses for midi and audio devices (i have two pcie x4 USB cards installed for this reason) I also have a ton of thunderbolt peripherals that I would like to separate out into different busses to provide as much bandwidth to each as they can get. This includes NVMe drives, 10GBe NICs, and Universal Audio audio interface and dsp accelerator.

My previous hackintosh (HP Z820 with 2x E5-2667 v2) put out enough heat to warm several neighborhood homes, and also ate a ton of power, routinely 3A or more thanks to it being stuffed with peripherals (including nvme raid, which I can no longer boot off of on the 7,1 :( )

I'm currently trying to decide on what GPU to upgrade to on this machine, and Im having a ton of difficulty finding real world results and data from how much power and heat these various options put out. I've found maximum load and heat details, but very little in terms of everyday usage consumption and heat.

I'm well aware that the W5700x is the winner in the total TDP category at only 205w, but w5700xs are hard to find and generally go for more than they are honestly worth in my opinion in 2025 for the GPU power and VRAM they have.

I do see a fair amount of Vega II and Vega II Duos for sale at similar prices, and I'm curious of people's opinions on these cards and how much heat they put out under every day usage. I literally have no current use case besides some 3d modeling for printing stuff that would take advantage of the power of these GPUs, but given the w5700x second-hand prices I may need to consider it.

Do these Vega II and Vega II Duos put out a ton of heat under every day use? Do they consume a lot of power when they are not under heavy load? Same for heat?
Would love to hear some real-world info from users out there. Thank you!
 
Congrats on the 7,1 it’s the best Mac Pro out there.

I do have a W6800x Duo on mine and it’s silent and personally I don’t have a bad temperature experience with it. I’m always looking to get another one and saw they were going for 1500 on eBay the other day wich is a fair price considering their original tag of 5k.

The 6800x Duo is an excellent card since it’s versatile and it has tons of computing power. I’m not sure about its tdp though but I’d never had heat issues with it.
 
I suggest to look for a W6800X MPX or better GPU. I have W6900X in mine. Temperature always seems good. The 7,1 has excellent airflow. The Duo uses more power than the single GPU cards.
 
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Hey everyone,

After many many years of running Hackintoshes and finding that I could not easily move past Monterey with a dual CPU setup, I bit the bullet and got a great deal on a Mac Pro 7,1.
However, I found out later concerning the somewhat limited setup concerning the RX580 they came with by default, and the lack of thunderbolt ports on the card and only HDMI. I use a ton of peripherals including USB devices (IT by day, musician by night) and I prefer to have dedicated USB busses for midi and audio devices (i have two pcie x4 USB cards installed for this reason) I also have a ton of thunderbolt peripherals that I would like to separate out into different busses to provide as much bandwidth to each as they can get. This includes NVMe drives, 10GBe NICs, and Universal Audio audio interface and dsp accelerator.

My previous hackintosh (HP Z820 with 2x E5-2667 v2) put out enough heat to warm several neighborhood homes, and also ate a ton of power, routinely 3A or more thanks to it being stuffed with peripherals (including nvme raid, which I can no longer boot off of on the 7,1 :( )

I'm currently trying to decide on what GPU to upgrade to on this machine, and Im having a ton of difficulty finding real world results and data from how much power and heat these various options put out. I've found maximum load and heat details, but very little in terms of everyday usage consumption and heat.

I'm well aware that the W5700x is the winner in the total TDP category at only 205w, but w5700xs are hard to find and generally go for more than they are honestly worth in my opinion in 2025 for the GPU power and VRAM they have.

I do see a fair amount of Vega II and Vega II Duos for sale at similar prices, and I'm curious of people's opinions on these cards and how much heat they put out under every day usage. I literally have no current use case besides some 3d modeling for printing stuff that would take advantage of the power of these GPUs, but given the w5700x second-hand prices I may need to consider it.

Do these Vega II and Vega II Duos put out a ton of heat under every day use? Do they consume a lot of power when they are not under heavy load? Same for heat?
Would love to hear some real-world info from users out there. Thank you!
I don't have a 7,1, but all Intel Mac with AMD GPU are pretty much the same.

Modern AMD GPU only draw about 10-15W in desktop environment, but this is only true for single monitor (per GPU) setup.

Once multi monitor connected to a single AMD GPU, the VRAM will be forced to stay at high clock speed, which cause increase the power draw to around 50W.

This is not that significant for a production machine. The GPU itself may be 15-20°C warmer (for the same idle / low fan speed). And the user shouldn't feel any difference.

But once you stress it, then it's a difference story.

I am not sure how you use it when doing 3D modelling. But to stay on the safe side, let's assume you can push it to limit. Then the TDP is pretty much what you can expect. However, for normal high work load environment, the power consumption usually only around 80% of the TDP, won't really stay at that limit 24/7.
 
In perspective, my system with dual W5700x (3 displays connected to one card, none on the other), Afterburner, 96GB ram, 2x SATA SSD, Highpoint 1104f with 2x Samsung 990 Pro idles around 215 watts (that's just the Mac Pro box itself).

It draws 24 watts during sleep - it was 16 watts before I added the Highpoint and moved boot to the Samsung SSD.
 
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Just a further laugh in terms of power consumptions, on my system the "Ventura" screensaver on its own uses about 30 watts (about 100 watts for a few seconds just starting the screensaver up).

So far Flurry remains the lowest power use screensaver, consuming about 7 watts above baseline.
 
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Hey everyone,

After many many years of running Hackintoshes and finding that I could not easily move past Monterey with a dual CPU setup, I bit the bullet and got a great deal on a Mac Pro 7,1.
However, I found out later concerning the somewhat limited setup concerning the RX580 they came with by default, and the lack of thunderbolt ports on the card and only HDMI. I use a ton of peripherals including USB devices (IT by day, musician by night) and I prefer to have dedicated USB busses for midi and audio devices (i have two pcie x4 USB cards installed for this reason) I also have a ton of thunderbolt peripherals that I would like to separate out into different busses to provide as much bandwidth to each as they can get. This includes NVMe drives, 10GBe NICs, and Universal Audio audio interface and dsp accelerator.

My previous hackintosh (HP Z820 with 2x E5-2667 v2) put out enough heat to warm several neighborhood homes, and also ate a ton of power, routinely 3A or more thanks to it being stuffed with peripherals (including nvme raid, which I can no longer boot off of on the 7,1 :( )

I'm currently trying to decide on what GPU to upgrade to on this machine, and Im having a ton of difficulty finding real world results and data from how much power and heat these various options put out. I've found maximum load and heat details, but very little in terms of everyday usage consumption and heat.

I'm well aware that the W5700x is the winner in the total TDP category at only 205w, but w5700xs are hard to find and generally go for more than they are honestly worth in my opinion in 2025 for the GPU power and VRAM they have.

I do see a fair amount of Vega II and Vega II Duos for sale at similar prices, and I'm curious of people's opinions on these cards and how much heat they put out under every day usage. I literally have no current use case besides some 3d modeling for printing stuff that would take advantage of the power of these GPUs, but given the w5700x second-hand prices I may need to consider it.

Do these Vega II and Vega II Duos put out a ton of heat under every day use? Do they consume a lot of power when they are not under heavy load? Same for heat?
Would love to hear some real-world info from users out there. Thank you!
FWIW, I did this back when I bought the 7,1 new for recording studio & ended up installing 2 x Vega IIs (vs 1 x Vega Duo). This provides reasonable GPU grunt for video production in my DaVinci Resolve Studio while also providing a far greater number of ports for the mac, incl many TB & HDMI ports, driving three displays etc. Even so, my stiudio still needs & adds separate USB 2 and USB 3 hubs given all the peripherals, dongles, devices etc.

All continues to work very well albeit vastly over-priced for these Apple-AMD cards (hopefully may be far better priced these days) and we're not allowed to use NVidia of course. As part of that, I found the Sensi app to be best for monitoring what the mac was doing at any point in time under load (CPU, GPUs, temps etc) & especailly in relation to video rendering & where the grunt really shows up. In fact, this is where I decided to add a second Vega II from experience in DaVinci Resolve & the second card did the trick. https://thesweetbits.com/best-mac-system-monitor/#sensei

Re. heat & power questions: have never found heat or noise to be an issue even under heavy rendering loads. This is pretty much a non-issue in audio apps & the only thing needed there really is CPUs and RAM. Power usage can be high, for sure, but again, mostly with big video rendering tasks & not so much wioth audio /VIs /plugins etc.
 
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I have two 7,1 Mac Pros, they never make much noise but if I keep the door shut they efficiently warm up the room.

Nice in winter but bad in summer. If you stress them they still make very little noise but they pour out heat.
 
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