About to buy a new graphics card

[Ethosik]

I am thinking about getting: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130787

I have always had good luck with EVGA stuff. Is there anything I need to do, or is it just plug it in and go? I think somebody mentioned changing the power output of the power supply before? If I have to do that, I do not want to get a card that will require me to do so.

 

[El Awesome]

If the card has 2x 6pin connectors, plug it in and it will work.
2x 8pin require lots of fiddling and the risk of frying your motherboard.

 

[Ethosik]

If the card has 2x 6pin connectors, plug it in and it will work.
2x 8pin require lots of fiddling and the risk of frying your motherboard.

Newegg says in the details page:

Power Connector - 2 x 6 Pin. So I just need to plug it in and it will work without any modifications? What about drivers going from AMD to NVidia?

Minimum of a 500 Watt power supply. (Minimum recommended power supply with +12 Volt current rating of 30 Amps.)

Does the 2010 1x 6-Core Mac Pro have that?

 

[El Awesome]

500w are nothing. Pretty much every computer has it.
The 670 is a very efficient card.

Click yourself through this thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1385329/

Drivers to make it work are already there, as soon as you installed the GPU, update to the newest drivers. Here is the link to that:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx...?ClickID=araa0pol5ll0avzr9sktslykrw0op05zosks

Have fun!

 

[ActionableMango]

The power cables pictured on Newegg are not the right ones for a Mac Pro. You will need two of these cables.

No, it will not "just work". Read this FAQ.

 

[quarlie]

I have that card in a 2010 4-core Mac Pro with 10.8.2. For me, it did just work. I've had no problems with it whatsoever.

 

[El Awesome]

The power cables pictured on Newegg are not the right ones for a Mac Pro. You will need two of these cables.

No, it will not "just work". Read this FAQ.

If 10.8 is installed, it will "just work". No boot screen though, but it works.

 

[ActionableMango]

I have that card in a 2010 4-core Mac Pro with 10.8.2. For me, it did just work. I've had no problems with it whatsoever.

No problems whatsoever? Like seeing your boot screens? That's interesting.


IT JUST WORKS*

* You need the right power cables because the card won't come with them. Boot screens don't work, period. Must be on 10.7.5 or higher. Sometimes slot 1 won't work and you need to use slot 2, which will also block slot 3. OpenCL needs to be enabled with a hack. CUDA support for Adobe requires modification of a config file.


Reminds me of those magazine advertisements:

FREE SUNGLASSES*

* Shipping and handling costs $30.

 

[quarlie]

No problems whatsoever? Like seeing your boot screens? That's interesting.

The boot screen does not appear. This behavior is well documented on this forum and others, so I expected it. It hasn't been a problem for me, but if you depend on the boot screen for some reason, this would indeed be a problem.

You need the right power cables because the card won't come with them. Boot screens don't work, period. Must be on 10.7.5 or higher. Sometimes slot 1 won't work and you need to use slot 2, which will also block slot 3. OpenCL needs to be enabled with a hack. CUDA support for Adobe requires modification of a config file.

OpenCL doesn't need a hack for a 2GB card.

The power cables may or may not be an issue. In my case, I was replacing a Radeon 5870 so I used the cables that were already there.

I don't know anything about the slot 1 or CUDA issues. My 670 is in slot 1 and working fine.

 

[Ethosik]

What is so important about not seeing the boot screen? Are you referring to the white background with the apple logo at the beginning?I only see that for 4 seconds anyway since I have a SSD.

So since I have the ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB that came with it, do I already have the right cables?

 

[quarlie]

So since I have the ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB that came with it, do I already have the right cables?

Yes - if you're taking out the 5870, you can use its cables with the 670.

 

[Asgorath]

What is so important about not seeing the boot screen?

Some people use it to switch into their Boot Camp installation, for example. I talk about this in the FAQ thread, and give alternatives for this case in particular.

Personally, I've been using a non-EFI card since February or whenever the first NVIDIA driver that enabled it came out, and have needed a boot screen exactly two times:

1) I screwed something up and needed to restore from backup, which involved booting to the recovery partition.

2) I upgraded to an SSD on my boot volume, so did a disk restore from the recovery partition.

In both cases, I simply swapped my GT 120 back in, and it was fine.

 

[ActionableMango]

What is so important about not seeing the boot screen?

Whether it is important or not is a personal thing I suppose. Nevertheless, the boot screen enables you to select alternative booting on startup such as for a Windows partition, system recovery partition, bootable external drive, or bootable CD.

Also boot screen is helpful for booting up in verbose mode for troubleshooting purposes.