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Pci expansion wanted

B

Blackey Cole

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 5, 2017
38
4
well I bought a 2012 Mac Pro 5,1 that had four 2tb wd red drive , 64 gb ram, it's a 3.33 12 core machine when it arrive it had a standard nvidia gpu pci card, a USB 3 pci card and the by was disabled and a USB but device installed. I added a Sata dual drive pci card and two 1tb wd ssd drive in striped raid, a wifi/bt4 pci card abd replace the standard nvidia gpu with a pc nvidia GeForce 680gtx gpu connected to three acer 24" flat screens circa late 2012 plus hooked up my Wacom cintiq, added a webcam and mic and speakers.

That the race horse I have now. Oh one more thing was added a esata raid enclosure with four wd red 4tb drives in raid 5 iirc.

I'm wanting to add some more pci cards but the machine is out of slots I looked on the net and found that you can go pci out to a pci enclosure but he'll they wanted 3 grand for the one I saw. Looked on eBay same thing no used ones out there where do you find a used pci enclosure they got be around as it appeared to be the thing before the Mac Pro cylinder was released to add more to your Pro. I'm sure those that jumped on the poorly designed new Mac Pro sold theirs and regrets it now. So where are they now used?
 
You got me to the right error but from my understanding that is for gpu cards only I'm not sure if I'm going yo add any more as I have four connection now with my gtx680 I need room to spread out my usb3 card from my wifi I think but want additional slots for other reasons beside gpu,
 
My understanding PCIe slot is just PCIe slot, cannot be for GPU only. But in most case, GPU is the most demanding PCIe card (x16 connection, high power draw, etc). So if the slot is good enough for GPU, it's basically good for everything (e.g. SATA card / USB 3.0 card).
 
The pcie 2.2 1X speed is actually very much decent. In the octane render benchmark with 1080 Ti. It reachs 90% of the computing power comparing to 16X pcie 2.0 in Mac Pro 5.1.
 
Prince134 said:
The pcie 2.2 1X speed is actually very much decent. In the octane render benchmark with 1080 Ti. It reachs 90% of the computing power comparing to 16X pcie 2.0 in Mac Pro 5.1.
Click to expand...

...which is fine if you are more compute-constrained than bandwidth-constrained (as in the case you mention), but if I'm going to invest hundreds of $$ in a PCIe expansion solution, I'm going to want to make sure it isn't unnecessarily bottlenecked, such as if I wanted add'l storage connected to it. Good to know about the Octane render benchmark regardless though.
 
Yes, agreed. Tested SM951 PCIE SSD for example reduced to 400MB/s if using 1x lane. In 4X it's 1400MB/s. But you know that's still indifferent to a real SATA III spead.
 
I am a bit confuse why you need to spend hundreds $$$ for a PCIe expansion enclosure.

What you really want to achieve?

You mentioned you now have a GTX 680 (by the way, there is no standard Nvidia GPU for 2012 Mac Pro. The GT120 is the standard for 2009 Mac Pro, not 2012).

A USB 3.0 card

A SATA card

A Wifi / BT card.

If you want more slots, why not upgrade the Wifi / BT in the decent way (use the delicated slot), and free up once of those 4 PCIe slot?

Also, how many card you actually want to add? What are they? If mainly for storage. You already spend 2 slots on storage (I assume USB 3.0 is mainly for storage, because USB 2.0 is already avail for low bandwidth stuff), why want more card? You can put a single card in there in order to have BOTH eSATA and USB 3.0.

There are 6 SATA ports inside the cMP, which can support at least 8TB each (I am quite sure the 10TB HDD can also work, but I didn't test it myself yet). If you RAID them all together, you can easily get a +40TB ~800MB/s storage. With some help from the eSATA / USB 3.0 card, it's not that hard to achieve +100TB storage.

If you want fast storage, and ready to spend $$$, why not get a Amfeltec card which can RAID 4x PCIe SSD together? That only need a single slot, and can provide a up to ~6000MB/s bootable storage solution.

So, if you do it properly.

Slot 1 - GPU
Slot 2 - Amfeltec PCIe SSD adaptor
Slot 3 - eSATA + USB 3.0

Slot 4 - free at this moment for your extra card

Wifi ac + BT 4.0 on its own delicated slot.

40TB HDD in RAID 0 with just the native SATA port (5x8TB).

Super drive still in there.

Is that good enough for you? Without knowing what you really want to achieve and why. It's hard to give you a suitable solution.
 
I might wish to add another gpu along with additional usb3. I don't like being limited that's why I bought the Mac pro
 
Blackey Cole said:
I might wish to add another gpu along with additional usb3. I don't like being limited that's why I bought the Mac pro
Click to expand...

Then what's wrong with the others suggestion? They are orientated.

So, you just need 2 slots for 2 GPU. And 1 slots for USB 3.0. And 1 slot for SSD. Total 4 slots.

I know you don't like being limited, but everything has its own limit. Mac Pro is just a machine, won't give you unlimited possibilities. Of course you can go for PCIe expansion box, but I really can't see why you should spend your money on there at this moment.
 
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