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What's occupying your PCI-e slots?

UPDATE:

Mac Pro 2010
PCIe 1: NVIDIA GTX 1070 FE
PCIe 2: Intel X540-T1 10 GbE (Flashed to Small Tree)
PCIe 3: Samsung SM951 512GB SSD
PCIe 4: Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.0

Mac Pro 2010
PCIe 1: NVIDIA GTX 1080 FE
PCIe 2: Amfeltec Squid + 3x Samsung XP941 512GB SSD
PCIe 3: Intel X540-T1 10 GbE (Flashed to Small Tree)
PCIe 4: Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.0
 
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4 & HDD bay 3/4 - RX 480

3 - Single slot 1070/Katana

2 - Unused for now

1 - Squid w/ expander kit
- 1.1 Myricom 10G NIC
- 1.2 USB 3.1 card
- 1.3 Kingston PCIe SSD
- 1.4 Marvell M.2 HW RAID adapter w/ 2 480G SSDs
 
1. ATI 5770 1GB (PC)
2. nVidia GT120 512MB
3. Lycom DT120 (holding Samsung 256MB AHCI drive)
4. SSL MadiXtreme 64 (audio card)

Most of the reason I want more slots is simply to keep up to date... USB3, eSata, SATAIII card, keeping GT120 for boot screen... I suppose I might have bought a UAD-2, but I'm OK without one...

Hopefully I can replace both GFX cards with an AMD 560-580, gaining boot screens as well as much improved performance... in the next few months
 
Sharky II said:
1. ATI 5770 1GB (PC)
2. nVidia GT120 512MB
3. Lycom DT120 (holding Samsung 256MB AHCI drive)
4. SSL MadiXtreme 64 (audio card)

Most of the reason I want more slots is simply to keep up to date... USB3, eSata, SATAIII card, keeping GT120 for boot screen... I suppose I might have bought a UAD-2, but I'm OK without one...

Hopefully I can replace both GFX cards with an AMD 560-580, gaining boot screens as well as much improved performance... in the next few months
Click to expand...

Even never say never, but you better forget about boot screen on RX500 series card. The chance is so slim. Anyway, why you need boot screen?
 
Sonnet USB 3 (x5 separate port model thing)
Sonnet 2xssd card Pro
Blank
Amd r9 380 4gb - will stick a vega card in, 16gb one in the iMac sounds beefy
 
In my (4,1) flashed to (5,1):
1: GT120
2: Toshiba OCZ RD400 256Gb SSD in a SYBA adapter
3: Inatek KT4004 USB3
4: empty

I was going to upgrade the GT120 to something supporting 4K, but then I ended up with a BenQ BL3200 monitor that isn't 4K and it's perfectly satisfactory. So I just stuck with the GT120. I don't do anything graphics intensive.
 
Running a 2009 (4.1) ->2010 (5.1) Mac Pro with OSX Yosemite:

Slot 1: AMD Radeon 7950
Slot 2: Addonics Quad mSata SSD adapter
Slot 3: Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.0
Slot 4: Soon - Startech 10Gbe NIC
 
pci.jpg


"GP102" == GTX 1080Ti
"NVM Express Controller" == 1.6 TB PCIe x4 NVMe SSD
 
That's a fun thread, love it!

Here's mine, 2009 with 3.46Ghz dual procs:
- Slot 1: flashed GTX 980 Ti
- Slot 2 : Caldigit FASTA 6GU3-Pro with internal Sata III for the boot drive (SSD in optical bay)
- Slot 3 : Avid Nitris DX Host (though currently it has original nVidia GT120 for tests)
- Slot 4 : Sonnet USB3 x4 (the one with one controller per USB socket)
 
Very interesting thread.

Mac Pro 5.1 (personal)
PCIe 1: AMD RX 580 8GB
PCIe 2: Amfeltec Squid + 2 x Samsung EVO 960 + 2 x HyperX Predator
PCIe 3: Caldigit FASTA 6GU3-Pro
PCIe 4: AMD RX 580 8GB
 
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itdk92 said:
Very interesting thread.

Mac Pro 5.1 (personal)
PCIe 1: AMD RX 580 8GB
PCIe 2: Amfeltec Squid + 2 x Samsung EVO 960 + 2 x HyperX Predator
PCIe 3: Caldigit FASTA 6GU3-Pro
PCIe 4: AMD RX 580 8GB
Click to expand...
TWO RX 580s! That's just plain greedy :p
Mine is still on pre-order after more than a month!

Are your NVMe 960s running with native drivers (no hacking) in High Sierra btw? Presumably the HyperXs are your boot drive. RAID 0?
 
Cool Thread.

Slot 1: MSI GTX 960 4GB
Slot 2: Radeon 5770
Slot 3: N/A
Slot 4: SM951 AHCI on Lycom DT120

Also i've noticed a lot of people on here running awesome GPU setups like triple RX 4/580's ,and dual Titan's So cool!
 
ActionableMango said:
Unusual combo!
Click to expand...
Indeed! 5770 is for boot screen/drive 23in ACD and 960 is for the Samsung 28' 4k. I would like to upgrade the 960 to an RX 580 or 570 but they're currently being snatched up by miners. As for the 5770, I would like to replace it with a GT 120 single slot card and put the 5770 away in storage.
 
Synchro3 said:
4. USB 3.0 & eSATA (Caldigit Fasta-6GU3 Pro)
3. USB 3.0 (Caldigit Fasta-6GU3)
2. Apple PCI-E SSD
1. GTX Titan X Maxwell
Click to expand...

Do you know if the CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro works in macOS Sierra/High Sierra? I'm interested in this card since all my PCIE slots are taken, and I like that it has 6 ports on it.

I just remember reading somewhere that it had an issue with certain OS revisions, but I can't find that thread.
 
PowerMike G5 said:
Do you know if the CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro works in macOS Sierra/High Sierra? I'm interested in this card since all my PCIE slots are taken, and I like that it has 6 ports on it.

I just remember reading somewhere that it had an issue with certain OS revisions, but I can't find that thread.
Click to expand...

The CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro works flawlessly with Sierra/High Sierra, all SATA/eSATA ports bootable, including option boot etc. My best and most reliable USB/eSATA card ever. But this card is now difficult to find. For powering the two internal SATA drives I've done this workaround: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/motherboard-to-pcie-sata-power.1712884/#post-18855446

The USB ports of the CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 (Non-Pro/Non-Plus) do not work since OS X Yosemite, no approved drivers. However eSATA (incl. booting) always works, because no drivers needed. In Windows USB ports still working.
 
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Synchro3 said:
The CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro works flawlessly with Sierra/High Sierra, all SATA/eSATA ports bootable, including option boot etc. My best and most reliable USB/eSATA card ever. But this card is now difficult to find. For powering the two internal SATA drives I've done this workaround: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/motherboard-to-pcie-sata-power.1712884/#post-18855446

The USB ports of the CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 (Non-Pro/Non-Plus) do not work since OS X Yosemite, no approved drivers. However eSATA (incl. booting) always works, because no drivers needed. In Windows USB ports still working.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the clarification! I'm most interested in using this card because it has those 2 added internal SATA ports. Using those 2 ports + 2 ports internally in a RAID 0 should surpass the 550MB/s RAID limit imposed by using the internal sata ports only in the cMP, while keeping external usb 3/esata all on one card. Now if I can find one!
 
PowerMike G5 said:
Thank you for the clarification! I'm most interested in using this card because it has those 2 added internal SATA ports. Using those 2 ports + 2 ports internally in a RAID 0 should surpass the 550MB/s RAID limit imposed by using the internal sata ports only in the cMP, while keeping external usb 3/esata all on one card. Now if I can find one!
Click to expand...

It is a fine and reliable card, but for RAID it might not be optimal:

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...classic-mac-pro.1501482/page-49#post-20550447

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/usb-3-x-pcie-cards-for-classic-mac-pro.1501482/
 
Synchro3 said:
It is a fine and reliable card, but for RAID it might not be optimal:

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...classic-mac-pro.1501482/page-49#post-20550447

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/usb-3-x-pcie-cards-for-classic-mac-pro.1501482/
Click to expand...

Thanks for this info. Seems a bit more limited than I thought (I'm used to my current USB card which has independent controllers for each port). I'm curious though if this would still be ok in my situation and if you have any insight on such.

I currently run 4 WD Blacks in a RAID 0, all on the internal SATA ports. Each individual drive does average 250MB/s. I'm hitting the ceiling limit for RAID 0 around 550MB/s currently. It's fine for the most part, but sometimes I'm exceeding that with any sort of multi-layer 4K editing. My OS, scratch disk, and media cache all run on separate drives on my Amfeltec/SM951 M.2 SSD setup. But all raw media lives on the HDD RAID as I'm working with 15TB+ of video.

I'm looking at this CalDigit card to help spread the workload... have 2 HDDs run off the card and the other 2 HDDs on the cMP internal ports. And have them all in the same RAID 0 configuration I have now. That should raise the ceiling limit to more like 800-900MB/s since I'm splitting the bandwidth between the cMP's native SATA ports and this one, running on its separate PCIe bandwidth.

Seems to make sense in theory. But do you see something that I may not be seeing in this kind of setup?
 
Just changed what's in my PCIe slots:

Slot 1 = GTX 980 Ti 6GB FTW (MVC)
Slot 2 = Areca 1880ix-16 2GB
Slot 3 = empty
Slot 4 = CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Plus
 
PowerMike G5 said:
I'm looking at this CalDigit card to help spread the workload... have 2 HDDs run off the card and the other 2 HDDs on the cMP internal ports. And have them all in the same RAID 0 configuration I have now. That should raise the ceiling limit to more like 800-900MB/s since I'm splitting the bandwidth between the cMP's native SATA ports and this one, running on its separate PCIe bandwidth.

Seems to make sense in theory. But do you see something that I may not be seeing in this kind of setup?
Click to expand...

People were benching 4-digit speeds I think as high as 1500MB/s for a single PCIe storage card and 5900MB/s for the Amfeltec adapter that held 4 cards, but these were synthetic benchmarks. In real life using real applications for real work it seems even with these very fast cards there are other limitations in the system that result in real bandwidth of about 500-600MB/s for write speeds. There are some real-world exceptions that can go faster, like single files with multi-gigabyte size in certain specialized applications, but these exceptions are rare.

So if you are already pushing 550MB/s you are already doing about as well as most real world uses can go and you might not be able to hit your 800-900MB/s goal except in a synthetic benchmark.

It's possible I'm wrong. You are doing a strange setup that I haven't seen performance tests for (RAID spread across SATA and PCIe), and maybe that spread will make a difference. Also my information is from older versions of OS X so perhaps the system bottleneck has been reduced or removed by some new feature, for example APFS.

If you do this, I hope you post the results for everyone. I wish you the best, but just in case, prepare yourself for the possibility of little real world difference.
 
Last edited:
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ActionableMango said:
People were benching 4-digit speeds I think as high as 1500MB/s for a single PCIe storage card and 5900MB/s for the Amfeltec adapter that held 4 cards, but these were synthetic benchmarks. In real life using real applications for real work it seems even with these very fast cards there are other limitations in the system that result in real bandwidth of about 500-600MB/s for write speeds. There are some real-world exceptions that can go faster, like single files with multi-gigabyte size in certain specialized applications, but these exceptions are rare.

So if you are already pushing 550MB/s you are already doing about as well as most real world uses can go and you might not be able to hit your 800-900MB/s goal except in a synthetic benchmark.

It's possible I'm wrong. You are doing a strange setup that I haven't seen performance tests for (RAID spread across SATA and PCIe), and maybe that spread will make a difference. Also my information is from older versions of OS X so perhaps the system bottleneck as been reduced or removed by some new feature, for example APFS.

If you do this, I hope you post the results for everyone. I wish you the best, but just in case prepare yourself for the possibility of little real world difference.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your thoughts. Yeah, this setup is a little strange, but it seems to be a 'clean' option to increase my HDD RAID speed, while still maintaining USB 3, all on one card. And keeping everything still internal in my machine. Having 2 HDDs on the native cMP SATA ports will saturate around 450-500MBs while the other 2 using the CalDigit should hopefully provide another 400MBs conservatively.

I will certainly post the results here. I fortunately found a version of this card for purchase. It may take me some time to get to this as I am in the middle of a critical project, so I cannot migrate the current RAID until I am completely done (and the project size is over 15TB).
 
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