MP 7,1 The future Mac Pro has a problem…RTX 4090

[Matty_TypeR]

Its smaller in length than a 3090ti but slightly wider, I didn't hook up to internal power as my 6900xt is using 3 X 8 pin belkin power cables and there are only 4 on the logic board. So i used an external corsair SF750 with the corsair flat 12 pin cable coming through a PCI slot on the rear to power the 4090. when in Mac OSX i can turn the 4090 off completely via the PSU remote switch. (very Green you might say)

 

[LEOMODE]

Its smaller in length than a 3090ti but slightly wider, I didn't hook up to internal power as my 6900xt is using 3 X 8 pin belkin power cables and there are only 4 on the logic board. So i used an external corsair SF750 with the corsair flat 12 pin cable coming through a PCI slot on the rear to power the 4090. when in Mac OSX i can turn the 4090 off completely via the PSU remote switch. (very Green you might say)

Oh wow I'm using AMD 6900XT and it's only using 2 8pins I believe and is sufficient with 2 ports. Would Nvidia RTX4090 Founder's Edition also be sufficient with just using 2 ports using Belkin's cables? Also do you think if I put my 6900XT on the bottom (Slot 1 on the PCIE) and 4090FE above it (Slot 3 on PCIE) it won't fit? Currently they both (3090FE & 6900XT) fit fine on mine, only except 3090FE is squeezing it horizontally to Mac Pro's system fan a bit.

 

[Matty_TypeR]

Well i have it up and running, and here is a screen shot of furmark at 4k and results.

 

[Matty_TypeR]

Oh wow I'm using AMD 6900XT and it's only using 2 8pins I believe and is sufficient with 2 ports. Would Nvidia RTX4090 Founder's Edition also be sufficient with just using 2 ports using Belkin's cables? Also do you think if I put my 6900XT on the bottom (Slot 1 on the PCIE) and 4090FE above it (Slot 3 on PCIE) it won't fit? Currently they both (3090FE & 6900XT) fit fine on mine, only except 3090FE is squeezing it horizontally to Mac Pro's system fan a bit.

the 4090 needs 4 X 8 pin connections, max 600w so 2 X 8 pin is no good. running the above bench in 4k it was drawing 500w and 97% GPU usage. but it runs silent. i moved it up one slot to the 3rd from bottom 16X PCIe slot above where my install picture shows to give the 6900xt PCIe in slot 1 as more room to breath below it.

It run's fine on the external power supply SF750 watt as its the only thing it's running. the power cable is 68cm long so comes out of rear pci slot cover, to PSU under back of desk. you wouldn't know it was there looking at it.

So far very impressed by the 4090, it is a beast of a caard, a shame Apple refuse to suport Nvidia, but hey how the 6900xt also does well in OSX.

 

[Lefteous]

In a real Mac Pro an Apple m2 ultra would do the basic stuff and pci-Express graphic cards could be added as additional cards to do the advanced stuff. There is no other way. Just an m-system-on-chip will never be enough for the heavy stuff like playing GTA 6 at 8K.

 

[LEOMODE]

the 4090 needs 4 X 8 pin connections, max 600w so 2 X 8 pin is no good. running the above bench in 4k it was drawing 500w and 97% GPU usage. but it runs silent. i moved it up one slot to the 3rd from bottom 16X PCIe slot above where my install picture shows to give the 6900xt PCIe in slot 1 as more room to breath below it.

It run's fine on the external power supply SF750 watt as its the only thing it's running. the power cable is 68cm long so comes out of rear pci slot cover, to PSU under back of desk. you wouldn't know it was there looking at it.

So far very impressed by the 4090, it is a beast of a caard, a shame Apple refuse to suport Nvidia, but hey how the 6900xt also does well in OSX.

Thanks for the information. Wow requires 4 ports??? but doesn't Mac Pro have 6 ports anyway, so I guess I can still use 4090 FE and 6900XT or AMD 7900XTX/XT as AMD 7900 series require the same power as 6900XT anyway.

Yes I know these days GPUs run quiet/silent and sometimes fans don't even run in minor tasks (I was able to see it visually by putting my cards in Razer Core once). And I should definitely consider external PSU, and I guess what you're saying is you just open up the PCI slot by removing the Apple PCI slot cover and connect the power cable through there and hook up the 4090.

And yeah just by looking at the benchmark and reviews, it looks like it's something like:

4090 >>>>>>> 7900XTX > 7900XT > 4080 >>>> 3090 >>>> 3080.

 

[LEOMODE]

In a real Mac Pro an Apple m2 ultra would do the basic stuff and pci-Express graphic cards could be added as additional cards to do the advanced stuff. There is no other way. Just an m-system-on-chip will never be enough for the heavy stuff like playing GTA 6 at 8K.

Yeah, I think for the GPU space, Apple is still not up to par with Nvidia/AMD, so I wonder how they will try to achieve for the professionals/pro-consumers for GPU-intensive asks. I would really love Apple to open up external GPU at least but since external GPU only gives you 20-50% of its original power, that's equivalent to Apple Silicon GPU power these days anyways. So perhaps Apple just wants to catch up in a couple of years and has some sort of master plan to overcome Nvidia/AMD in the near future if they will never implement external vendors on GPU.

 

[Matty_TypeR]

Apple will never support Nvidia cards, they might do drivers for the 7900xtx but with Apple wanting AS I doubt the 7900xtx will be supported. Plus you can’t natively boot windows with AS only VR so for my needs the 4090 offers the best in windows and 6900xt for OSX. Enough has been said in threads about AS already. Best wait and see what comes.

 

[LEOMODE]

Apple will never support Nvidia cards, they might do drivers for the 7900xtx but with Apple wanting AS I doubt the 7900xtx will be supported. Plus you can’t natively boot windows with AS only VR so for my needs the 4090 offers the best in windows and 6900xt for OSX. Enough has been said in threads about AS already. Best wait and see what comes.

Never say never. Noone also knew they were gonna ditch Nvidia, when they used to be the best partner

 

[ssgbryan]

Never say never. Noone also knew they were gonna ditch Nvidia, when they used to be the best partner

The last series of Nvidia drivers were for the 1000 series - that is now 3 generations back.

Apple has left the PC space. It is what it is.

 

[startergo]

Apple will never support Nvidia cards, they might do drivers for the 7900xtx but with Apple wanting AS I doubt the 7900xtx will be supported. Plus you can’t natively boot windows with AS only VR so for my needs the 4090 offers the best in windows and 6900xt for OSX. Enough has been said in threads about AS already. Best wait and see what comes.

Excuse my ignorance, but what is an AS and VR?

 

[ssgbryan]

AS - Apple Silicon
VR - Virtual (should be M) Machine

 

[Boil]

I like to use "ASi" for Apple silicon...

 

[startergo]

I like to use "ASi" for Apple silicon...

ASI may be a little bit ambiguous. ASI servers exist for a long time.

 

[Boil]

I like to use "ASi" for Apple silicon...

ASI may be a little bit ambiguous. ASI servers exist for a long time.

A for Apple...

Si (note the lower case "i") because it is the abbreviation used on the periodic table for silicon...

 

[Matty_TypeR]

Excuse my ignorance, but what is an AS and VR?

My Mistake, should be VM virtual machine. a typo sorry, it was late 😀

 

[Darksi08]

Well i have it up and running, and here is a screen shot of furmark at 4k and results. View attachment 2129402

Replying to this post for anyone wondering how much the 4090 is bottlenecked by the Xeon... The answer is, quite a bit! Here's my PC build with a 13900k and a base Zotac 4090, which is power-limited to 450w. Running this on my 34" ultrawide, so I had to run it in 4k windowed, vs 4k fullscreen, so not quite apples-to-apples, but it's rendering the exact same scene, at the exact same resolution.

A really important thing to note - the 4090 was a fantastic upgrade from the 3090 for me. Yes, it's faster, obviously, but I honestly wasn't aching for more speed, but what really surprised me is how quiet the thing is. It's the quietest air-cooled video card I've owned in decades, by a huge margin! Honestly quieter than most of the water-cooled cards I've used, as well. Overall, my desktop sitting on my floor, running at full-tilt, is quieter than my loaded Mac Studio doing the same - mostly because of the pitch of the noise. It does remain quiet regardless of what I do - I've not gotten it to be loud with gaming at all, and even running Furmark was surprisingly quiet. Overall VERY impressed.

I also ran it fullscreen at full resolution (3440x1440) to see the result:

 

[urbanman2004]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/what-to-expect-from-apple-in-2023-ar-vr-headset-iphone-15-pro-macbook-pro-mac-pro-and-more.2375331/page-12?post=31852081#post-31852081

 

[LEOMODE]

Its smaller in length than a 3090ti but slightly wider, I didn't hook up to internal power as my 6900xt is using 3 X 8 pin belkin power cables and there are only 4 on the logic board. So i used an external corsair SF750 with the corsair flat 12 pin cable coming through a PCI slot on the rear to power the 4090. when in Mac OSX i can turn the 4090 off completely via the PSU remote switch. (very Green you might say)

Hey there do you mind giving the external PSU part, how you turn off that switch manually, and the cable you hook it up to? I definitely want to use your method so I can run 4090 when on Windows and turn 4090 off when on Mac OS and run 6900XT only. I noticed on Mac OS if it's connected to a Nvidia card it always crashes and causes a sleep reboot. Thanks in advance!