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Mac Pro power supply for PCIe - Upgradable?

D

Darkfire

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Basically what the title says:
Can one replace the power supply (frankenstein, anyone?) with a bigger one to get around the 300 watt limit?
Three 4870's and three 30s is just awesome.
~
 
1. You can't FIT three 4870s at all. You can run three 30" Cinema Displays with two GT 120, for crying out loud.
2. The power supply is not the problem, the PCIe bus is.
3. You can't change the bus.
4. You would need an entirely different logic board because the power supply has nothing to do with connecting external power for graphics cards in a Mac, but the number of 6-pin molex connectors on the logic board does.

Build a Hackintosh if you need three for whatever incorrect reason.
 
The first slot has extra space above it to accommodate the double height video card, so it only takes up one slot. Putting another 4870 in the 2nd slot will block the 3rd slot and there isn't a space above the 4th slot to fit anything but a single height card.
 
Im curious about the same thing to setup 2 4870's in crossfire on the mac pro 2008 model. I was thinking of using a 5.25" psu with 2 pci-e 6 pin to power it. FPS provide a 300w model which would be perfect. There are 2 16x PCI-E slots available so no bottleneck. It would work theoretically.
 
300w is what the PCIe bus is limited to, not the card itself. You'll have to find out what each card consumes from the bus to determine if it can support 2.
 
matthew.russo said:
Im curious about the same thing to setup 2 4870's in crossfire on the mac pro 2008 model. I was thinking of using a 5.25" psu with 2 pci-e 6 pin to power it. FPS provide a 300w model which would be perfect. There are 2 16x PCI-E slots available so no bottleneck. It would work theoretically.
Click to expand...

Two work with either external power or power split from the optical drive bay.
 
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