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AMD Radeon RX Vega Plug-and-Play in 10.13
- Thread starter theitsage
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At this moment, I personally believe Vega 56 is better choice. It may not as powerful as Pascal, but OOTB is already proved. Also, it seems the driver perform quite well.
And since Vega will be on iMac Pro, Apple should spend quite a bit of their resources to optimise the driver / software for Vega or bug fix. Which will eventually benefit the cMP users as well.
now if it was possible to actually buy one..
Newegg has had them regularly in stock since launch. You just have to keep an eye on it. It's only been available as the Radeon Red Pack for $499, but it includes 2 games that normally sell for $60 each, so it's not a bad deal. The Radeon packs are only going through the end of the month so after that it should be easier to find one standalone. However, I just noticed Newegg has raised the price of all of them to $649 today!
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Hashcat gurus have been warning for years of AMD playing loose with PCIe power specifications at load and frying motherboards.
Just bear in mind they never fixed some terrible bugs with the D series and as far as we can see they still haven't even enabled Polaris HEVC decode/encode.
But it's still the "best" bet. Doesn't mean that is flawless or even good enough, just a relatively good choice under MacOS (if we prefer to keep this OS for whatever reason).
I really think we need someone else with an RX 580 to test this out and confirm this isn't a freak result.
This impacts a lot of us with RX 580 pre-orders, which should perhaps be changed to Vega56 pre-orders asap.
Please could someone with an RX 580 run the iStat test again and confirm these results? It'll be a different card, different cable and different cMP which should eliminate all variables.
Many of us would be very grateful.
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Yep, we need this tested on not only an RX 580 but also a Vega56 to get a true sense of whether either card is really suited to the cMP.
[doublepost=1504956252][/doublepost]
So, RX 580 in Furmark:
AUX A: 0W
AUX B: 82.5W
PCIe: 82.5W
Ouch. No spontaneous shutdowns Kris?
I'd be very keen to see the results of this on Vega56 also. Max draw in real usage could be very different to the reported spec sheet and the distribution of it very much matters when used in a cMP.
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I can't say I paid much attention to the recent AMD GPU releases. But this may explain why in between the happiness about the price/performance ratio there was shock at the wattage.
A quick google search seems to imply that rx vega 64 has 2 8 pin connectors and may draw 295 watts. I even read that the liquid cooled version of vega 64 pulls 345 watts.
I have no proof of this, its only speculation on my part. But it seems high wattage draw to be a known thing among these new cards.
As I said I'm no expert. People would have to test this to find out. I tried looking on the card manufacturers website but they seem to leave the power consumption section blank on their spec sheets.
[doublepost=1504957591][/doublepost]Just checked AMD site, they say RX580 requires "Typical board power: 185 Watts". I am not sure whether that means the slot or the slot and power connector.
AMD spec sheet lists vega 56 at 210 watts "Typical board power.
http://products.amd.com/en-us/searc.../Radeon™-RX-Vega-Series/Radeon™-RX-Vega-56/92
AMD lists typical board power of vega 64 at 295 watts
http://products.amd.com/en-us/searc.../Radeon™-RX-Vega-Series/Radeon™-RX-Vega-64/93
Vega 64 liquid cooled 345 watts
http://products.amd.com/en-us/searc...ga-Series/Radeon™-RX-Vega-64-Liquid-Cooled/91
Vega frontier edition 300 watts
http://products.amd.com/en-us/searc...on™-Vega-Frontier-Edition/Frontier-Edition/90
[doublepost=1504958579][/doublepost]On an interesting note, with the recent shortage of AMD cards due to miners. I heard that while nobody is really talking about it there has also been a massive shortage of 1000+ wattage power supples to go a long with it. Miners are buying those as well.
A quick google search seems to imply that rx vega 64 has 2 8 pin connectors and may draw 295 watts. I even read that the liquid cooled version of vega 64 pulls 345 watts.
I have no proof of this, its only speculation on my part. But it seems high wattage draw to be a known thing among these new cards.
As I said I'm no expert. People would have to test this to find out. I tried looking on the card manufacturers website but they seem to leave the power consumption section blank on their spec sheets.
[doublepost=1504957591][/doublepost]Just checked AMD site, they say RX580 requires "Typical board power: 185 Watts". I am not sure whether that means the slot or the slot and power connector.
AMD spec sheet lists vega 56 at 210 watts "Typical board power.
http://products.amd.com/en-us/searc.../Radeon™-RX-Vega-Series/Radeon™-RX-Vega-56/92
AMD lists typical board power of vega 64 at 295 watts
http://products.amd.com/en-us/searc.../Radeon™-RX-Vega-Series/Radeon™-RX-Vega-64/93
Vega 64 liquid cooled 345 watts
http://products.amd.com/en-us/searc...ga-Series/Radeon™-RX-Vega-64-Liquid-Cooled/91
Vega frontier edition 300 watts
http://products.amd.com/en-us/searc...on™-Vega-Frontier-Edition/Frontier-Edition/90
[doublepost=1504958579][/doublepost]On an interesting note, with the recent shortage of AMD cards due to miners. I heard that while nobody is really talking about it there has also been a massive shortage of 1000+ wattage power supples to go a long with it. Miners are buying those as well.
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Apart from power issues... any reason why Vega 64 shouldn't be plug and play?
After some quick research it seems both flavours have the same device ID: 1002 687F
So it seems it should be good. If anyone is of a different opinion, don't hesitate to speak up....
After some quick research it seems both flavours have the same device ID: 1002 687F
So it seems it should be good. If anyone is of a different opinion, don't hesitate to speak up....
'Were buying'
Someone would have to have very low IQ or mental disorder to buy mining hardware now. The fastest rising cryptocurrencies now are using Proof of Stake, and Ethereum is moving to that too.
Just have to make sure you don't fall for crypto scams that sell coins but don't really have any software developers or long term project.
Yes, from memory, it's something like the EFI is now stored inside the Mac's firmware, but not the GPU's firmware. So, it's not quite possible to extract only the GPU's EFI part from a Mac's firmware, and then create a Mac EFI GPU ROM image.
Yeah I don't know much about the whole mining thing. HAvent really paid much attention to it
You'd have to use the sense pin as 3rd ground to have as many power lines as an 8pin connector. I wouldn't recommend to do this, the corresponding trace on the mainboard could be smaller (as it isn't meant to transfer any power).
The 7950 Mac Edition had dual 6pins, limiting the power to 75W on each booster. Thanks to its 8pin connectors, the Vega 56 could draw all its needed power from the booster cables, skipping the PCIE slot (and consequently exceeding the Mac Pros specs).
Two reasons:
- It's still easily possible to extract the EFI video driver on newer Macs, e.g. using an UEFI shell. They can't be used by the cMP though, since Apple has switched to GOP video drivers many years ago. Most likely this isn't the only problem, Apple's EFI implementation has always been proprietary, so I'd assume they changed more details.
- MVC's / netkas' EFI magic can enable the boot screen on cards which have never seen an official Mac Edition (Maxwell/Pascal). I'm sure this can easily be adapted to work with AMD cards. There's a big problem though: Most recent AMD cards will boot to a black screen when they've been init'ed during boot phase (hackintosh users knows this issue). This has recently been solved by an additional kernel extension (WhateverGreen), which has to be installed in macOS. Requiring users to install a 3rd party hack doesn't sound like a good idea for commercial upgrades like MVC's cards. (Besides that I don't even know if the Hack works on genuine Macs).
No shutdowns; the RX 580 PULSE has been absolutely stable for me. However, the only way to get it beyond 75 watts on slot power was with FurMark and I only ran that for a few minutes.
The Vega 56 seems to pull much less from the slot and should be comparable to a GTX 1080 Ti in total power draw, so I believe it would work with the cMP's internal power supply even when stressed. I should be able to do some testing tomorrow.
I'd love to play with the Vega's voltage settings, but AFAIK there's no way to do that under macOS. Also, it seems that starting with Vega, flashing requires the BIOS to be signed be AMD, so no more editing that either.
Okay, I understand. So perhaps it would be more safe to power one of the 8 pin connectors from both the mini 6 pins and the other from 2 SATA connectors? Is it likely that the card would request more than 108W from one of the connectors?
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Macvidcards did a blog post about powering the 1080ti basically you have to give it what it wants. No compromising and hoping for luck so no single 6 pin to 8 pin. He said he had to feed it power from a sata port.
http://www.macvidcards.com/blog/the-pesky-power-issue-with-pascal-1080ti-and-titan
However some of the new AMD cards are more power thirsty then the 1080ti.
http://www.macvidcards.com/blog/the-pesky-power-issue-with-pascal-1080ti-and-titan
However some of the new AMD cards are more power thirsty then the 1080ti.
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Okay, I think I've figured out how I'm going to power this so it's within specs just to be on the safe side. I'll run the 2 mini 6-pins to power 1 of the 8 pin connectors on the GPU and then use 3 SATA ports to power the other 8-pin connector, which should provide 150w and 162w, respectively. How does that sound?
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is there a reason you're doing all that, rather than doing the pixlas mod to the power lines, given the number of drive bays you're giving up?
Yeah, that's probably not a good idea to use the SATA ports for powering the GPU. I agree the pixlas mod is a better idea, so that's what I'll do. I'll power the card directly from the PSU. I plan to wire a single 8-pin connector to the PSU using 1.5 mm² wire and then a splitter to the GPU (18 AWG/0.75 mm² each).
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sorry was trying to delete post as suddenly thought it may not be a good idea. If using an external power supply do you have to turn it off when the computer is off? or will the video card only draw what it needs?
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It will draw only has much as it needs and doesn't need to be shut off.
Barefeats reports the Vega64 is unstable in cMP and they use a second PSU, maybe the card is drawing too much from the PCIE slot.
vega 64 is a super high wattage card, even more then a titan xp or quadro p6000. That card may be a no go.