MP 1,1-5,1 Single 6pin RX580 on Mac Pro ?

[DamnTrain]

Recently I come across an RX580 that has only one 6pin power input rather than dual 6 / single 8. Checked out that is the so-called "reference RX 580" as that card is OEMed for HP workstations.
I didn't find anything like a dual 6pin male to single 6pin male cable online. Is it safe to use this card in a Mac Pro 5,1 with just one 6pin without overloading the PSU/socket ?
P.S. I am not exactly sure about how much power this card draws. The only thing I know about is it's not factory OCed like some gaming cards.

 

[tsialex]

While these cards work, the Dell and HP cards with just a 6-pin PCIe power connector are not safe to use with a Mac Pro and several people that had one now have PCIe slots that don't work correctly anymore or even dead backplanes.

You've been warned, these cards are known to use more power from the PCIe slot than what the Mac Pro backplane can provide and will damage your backplane.

 

[mikas]

Many (maybe not all) HP workstation are set to higher specs for 6-pin PCIe cables and connectors inside them. You can use HP 6-pin connector one to one for an 8-pin socket in a GPU. They sell their own adapters for that (pricey, like 50$€).

In this light, you could make an assumption that HP dedicated OEM card could have been manufactured with a dedicated 6-pin socket for 150W power delivery. But that's just an assumption of mine. I do have several of those kind of HP machines and have found out the specs, and used the 6-pin to 8-pin cables / sockets inside of them succesfully.

If I guessed right about tha GPU, you would not want to use only one 6-pin for that card. I think you can probably assemble a cable monster from 2x 6-pins to 6-pin with a couple of suitable cables. Like 2x mini 6-pins to 8-pin, 8-pin to 6-pin. Or 2 pieces of mini 6-pin to 6-pin cables and couple those two as one 6-pin. Or something, really a mess isn't it.

You could also put an EVGA powerlink in between, but not sure if that helps a lot.

Or make it yourself if you are in to it. MODDiy will surely sell the parts for cheap enough.

 

[tsialex]

The problem is not the excessive 6-pin power draw, the backplane have enough tolerance for it, but the PCIe slot power draw out of spec. Dell and HP had motherboards that safely provided enough power, it's not the case with Mac the Pro backplane.

 

[bensurachoke]

The problem is not the excessive 6-pin power draw, the backplane have enough tolerance for it, but the PCIe slot power draw out of spec. Dell and HP had motherboards that safely provided enough power, it's not the case with Mac the Pro backplane.

Thanks for your information.

May I ask further about the other RX580 card with only 6pins power: the OCPC RX580?

RX 580 8GB | OCPC Gaming USA, Inc

The Radeon RX 580 is a performance-segment graphics card by AMD, launched on April 18th, 2017. Built on the 14 nm process, and based on the Polaris 20 graphics processor, in its Polaris 20 XTX variant, the card supports DirectX 12. This ensures that all modern games will run on Radeon RX 580.

www.ocpcgaming.com

In their website, the TDP for this card is 150w. Would it be possible to connect only one 6pin mini from the cMP board to the card where 75w will be drawn and the other 75w may be drawn from the pcie slot.

 

[mikas]

It seems a rebranded RX570 to a RX580 (2048SP).

Search for 2048SP from this forum
A few first hits will give you an idea if you still want to go that route, and flashing it to a usable MacOS RX570..