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tsialex

Contributor
Jun 13, 2016
13,455
13,602
It's not a fitment problem per se, it's just 2mm more than the standard length-wise and you can always relocate the PCIe fan, the main problem is no drivers for macOS at all and how to power it since it uses the new 12 pin power connector. Btw, most models, if not all, will completely block the PCIe slot-2 since the cards are 3-slots wide.

You will have to find a way to power the card, needs to be feed by a dual Pixla's mod, and it will only run Windows 10 or Linux (when the drivers are released for Linux).

Btw, did you ever thought about the bottleneck that the Westmere Xeon and PCIe 2.0 will be to run such a card? For sure, someone will make it work with a MP5,1 running Windows 10 overcoming the oversize and the 350W power requirement, but it will make any real sense at all?
 
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joevt

macrumors 604
Jun 21, 2012
6,968
4,262
If you want to spend $1400 on a GPU, consider spending money on an external PCIe expansion box that has enough room and power to use it.
Here's some examples:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...13:pci-express,fct_application_2314:gpu-ready

The minimum in that list that can give near max performance for this purpose is the Netstor NA255A because it's the least expensive with a x16 host interface and each slot is PCIe 3.0 x8 which nearly fills the bandwidth of a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot of the MacPro5,1. It has 1200W so you could install two 3090. They have a 1500W version also.
 

ArPe

macrumors 65816
May 31, 2020
1,281
3,325
Most of the RTX partner cards are standard lengths and use dual 8 pin power. A couple have triple 8 pin power because they are OC.

You just wont get the full benefit of using them with a bottlenecked slow CPU, slow RAM and slow PCIE bus. The games that take advantage of this massive amount of power are now going to be over 100GB install and each level multi gigabytes. It’s not 2011 anymore. It’s not even 2018 anymore. It’s scary how big the titles are getting.

These new cards will be working with Microsoft’s new APIs to bypass some bottlenecks by sending game data direct to GPU memory, but I don’t know if a 10 years old chipset will gain much from that.
 
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