Well, just did my first install of a new graphics card, since I put a Nubus GPU in a powermac 7100 24 years ago. That one had 4mb of memory, and cost ~AU$1200. This one has 8gb, and cost ~AU$450.
Put the card in slot 1, moved the gt120 to slot 3, to give everything some space.
Oddities - plugged the GT120 into one of the alternate inputs of one of my two displays, so the 580 was plugged into both, the 120 into only one, set the 120's input to active on the display. Weirdly, the system (sierra) reported that there were 2 displays plugged into the 120, and only 1 plugged into the 580.
*edit* this was from memory - not quite correct.Then again, sierra seems to get things weird when rotating displays - it rotates the opposite display to the one you choose in the monitors prefpane (i.e. rotate the non-menubar display, and your menubar display rotates).
Anyway, powering off, and unplugging the display cable from the gt120 saw it boot with the displays correctly set up as they were before installing the 580, the boot process on an SSD is so fast you'd blink and miss the lack of bootscreen (kinda miss my verbose boot text, but i only reboot the machine every couple of weeks, so not a big loss).
However - the noise - oh god, my silence is ruined, pulled the side panel and saw the 580s fans were still, it's the PCI fan issue I've seen mentioned here. Though that would be a bummer, involving some sort of post boot auto stress app, but after about 2 minutes, the fan dropped back down from 2000 to 800rpm, and it's back to being dead quiet. I can live with that.
I'm not seeing any temps reported by iStat for the 580's temperature. I don't know if it was the dustout of the processor heatsinks, but i'm now 2 degrees cooler on the io hub tdiode (75c).
Anything else I should check power / termperature-wise?
All in all, a successful bit of surgery
*edit* fun quirk - previously, on the gt120 going into expose, iTunes podcast list view would have coloured artefacting for all the text & UI in content area. That doesn't manifest with the 580, which I assume is just down to the built-in Nvidia driver being a bit janky.
*edit* the rotation issue is still present - so I have my dock on the left side of my left display, which also has the menubar. Rotating the right display into portrait shifts the dock onto the right display, and swaps their arrangement so now the portrait display is "left" of the landscape one when trying to move the mouse between them. Putting the dock on the bottom of the left display results in it staying on the left display when rotating the right, but the swapping position thing still happens. Bizarre.
Put the card in slot 1, moved the gt120 to slot 3, to give everything some space.
Oddities - plugged the GT120 into one of the alternate inputs of one of my two displays, so the 580 was plugged into both, the 120 into only one, set the 120's input to active on the display. Weirdly, the system (sierra) reported that there were 2 displays plugged into the 120, and only 1 plugged into the 580.
*edit* this was from memory - not quite correct.
Anyway, powering off, and unplugging the display cable from the gt120 saw it boot with the displays correctly set up as they were before installing the 580, the boot process on an SSD is so fast you'd blink and miss the lack of bootscreen (kinda miss my verbose boot text, but i only reboot the machine every couple of weeks, so not a big loss).
However - the noise - oh god, my silence is ruined, pulled the side panel and saw the 580s fans were still, it's the PCI fan issue I've seen mentioned here. Though that would be a bummer, involving some sort of post boot auto stress app, but after about 2 minutes, the fan dropped back down from 2000 to 800rpm, and it's back to being dead quiet. I can live with that.
I'm not seeing any temps reported by iStat for the 580's temperature. I don't know if it was the dustout of the processor heatsinks, but i'm now 2 degrees cooler on the io hub tdiode (75c).
Anything else I should check power / termperature-wise?
All in all, a successful bit of surgery
*edit* fun quirk - previously, on the gt120 going into expose, iTunes podcast list view would have coloured artefacting for all the text & UI in content area. That doesn't manifest with the 580, which I assume is just down to the built-in Nvidia driver being a bit janky.
*edit* the rotation issue is still present - so I have my dock on the left side of my left display, which also has the menubar. Rotating the right display into portrait shifts the dock onto the right display, and swaps their arrangement so now the portrait display is "left" of the landscape one when trying to move the mouse between them. Putting the dock on the bottom of the left display results in it staying on the left display when rotating the right, but the swapping position thing still happens. Bizarre.
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