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Break through the gloom! Kepler comes to Mac Pro...GTX680!

mac666er said:
Even the GTX 680 works out of the box. No modification necessary at all with Mountain Lion 10.8 (see attachment).

I use maya 2012 and the funny thing is that I first installed Mountain Lion to actually start using the drivers (I did not want to experiment with hacked drivers in Lion) and my AMD 5870 was FASTER with maya. The viewport handled faster and it was just not an impression. The Frames per Second (FPS) marker was increased while I used maya normally (which uses OpenGL drivers).

After I put in the 680, the Mac was faster still. Now, when I use it with boot camp it is just faster than a 7870 I had lying around and used only now and then. This is for both maya and playing Starcraft. Meaning performance in Mac OS X OpenGL is still behind Windows 7 Direct X AND OpenGL, if that comparison seems appropriate at all to you. (To me it is a little unfair, but it gives an idea where things stand).

As mentioned in multiple messages, we can actually look forward to drivers getting better! :D

My only complaint: The Mac Pro CAN'T use a Card that draws more juice than a reference 680. You need to start hacking another power supply for it. Oh well, can't have it all!

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention and it is a little annoying but expected. The hackers of videocards in other forums had advised that the new drivers would only support 2 screens in any configuration you can use. I sadly confirmed this as in Windows I could use three ports: (DVI, DVI and DisplayPort) and when I switched back to Mountain Lion, only one DVI and DisplayPort were active. I disconnected the DisplayPort and the second DVI came back to life. As I said, this, I believe is to be expected, as it is my understanding the driver only supports 2 screens at any one time. Which is annoying since the card can support them :(
Click to expand...

Thanks for the update. I will probably be getting the 670 soon after mountain lion is released. Do the fans behave properly under osx? meaning that they run at normal speed and will speed up if pushed. Also, are they just as quiet as the 5870 or 5770?
 
mac666er said:
My only complaint: The Mac Pro CAN'T use a Card that draws more juice than a reference 680. You need to start hacking another power supply for it. Oh well, can't have it all!
(
Click to expand...

Are you saying the eVGA 680 Classified won't work in a 4.1 Mac Pro without an additional power supply? Lots of folks seem to have the 570 up and running, and according to various comparative reviews, the 680 draws around 30 watts less than the 570 under load.
 
xav8tor said:
Are you saying the eVGA 680 Classified won't work in a 4.1 Mac Pro without an additional power supply? Lots of folks seem to have the 570 up and running, and according to various comparative reviews, the 680 draws around 30 watts less than the 570 under load.
Click to expand...

This image:

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1586778&mpage=1

shows 2 8-pin power connectors on this heavily overclocked board. A stock GTX 680 (or even a slightly overclocked one) will fit easily in the 225W budget, but this particular card probably won't work. If I remember correctly, a stock GTX 680 has a TDP in the 190W range, so there's plenty of room at reference clocks.
 
Login screen?

Hi guys,

if I install a generic gtx 5../6.. graphics card that works but doesn't show a boot screen in OS X Lion / Mountain Lion, what happens if I have a login screen at startup? Is that still part of the boot process and I can't see it, or will I by then get a display and be able to login?

Thanks for any clarification and for all the valuable information you share here!

:)

Gandalf
 
gandalf99 said:
Hi guys,

if I install a generic gtx 5../6.. graphics card that works but doesn't show a boot screen in OS X Lion / Mountain Lion, what happens if I have a login screen at startup? Is that still part of the boot process and I can't see it, or will I by then get a display and be able to login?

Thanks for any clarification and for all the valuable information you share here!

:)

Gandalf
Click to expand...

If you meant efi login screen as if when you have firevault2 enabled then no, you will not see it.

If you meant osx login screen, where you type password when change active user Then yes.
 
Login screen is post boot, all that you won't see is anything with the white background boot process.
 
I meant the OS X login screen, wasn't aware of any efi login screens.
(I guess I just outed myself as a newbie ;) )

You guys are great! Thanks for the fast reply! :)
 
Asgorath said:
This image:

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1586778&mpage=1

shows 2 8-pin power connectors on this heavily overclocked board. A stock GTX 680 (or even a slightly overclocked one) will fit easily in the 225W budget, but this particular card probably won't work. If I remember correctly, a stock GTX 680 has a TDP in the 190W range, so there's plenty of room at reference clocks.
Click to expand...


You are correct. Sadly, that one goes back. Only the 2 GB stock 680 from eVGA takes a double six. However, an OC'd 670 with 4 GB also works with two six pins and has about the same performance and power consumption.
 
Well I have my EVGA GTX-680 SC installed, and it has 2 6pin connectors and is also a super clocked card.

card specs below, its so nice to have this card working in my mac pro:D


Specification:-
- Core Clock: 1058MHz (GK104)
- Core Boost Clock: 1113MHz
- Innovative thermal design: Vapour Chamber (Quieter & Cooler than previous generation)
- Memory: 2048MB GDDR5
- Memory Clock: 6208MHz (Effective)
- Memory Interface: 256-Bit
- Processing Cores: 1536
- Shader Clock: 2116MHz
- Bus Type: PCI-Express GEN 3.0 (Backwards compatible)
- Display Connectors: 2x Dual-Link DVI-I, 1x HDMI 1.4a & 1x Displayport
- SLI Ready (Upto 3-Way SLI Supported)
- HDCP Capable
- DirectX 11 Support
- OpenGL 4.0 Support
- PhysX Enabled
- CUDA Enabled
- 3D Vision Enabled
- NVIDIA Surround Enabled
- Lower power consumption (Maximum consumption 195 watts at stock speed)
- 2x 6-Pin PCI-E Connectors required
- Card Dimensions: 270*111.15*38.75 mm
- Warranty: 3 Years (Register within 30 days to extend your warranty upto 10 years for a small charge)


It says 195w at stock speeds, this card is fast enough for me! nice one nvidia.
 
Hey Vapor,
Can you confirm if your gtx 680 is using 2.5 GT/s or 5.0 GT/s via the pcie2.0?

...and what version of OSX are you using?

Thanks,
Lonnie
 
mamasboy said:
Hey Vapor,
Can you confirm if your gtx 680 is using 2.5 GT/s or 5.0 GT/s via the pcie2.0?

...and what version of OSX are you using?

Thanks,
Lonnie
Click to expand...

I never mentioned what exact 680 model I had and I have this one exactly.

The model is EVGA SuperClocked 02G-P4-2682-KR. And is sold here:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130769

The first thing I did after firing Mountain Lion with the card is check system profiler, but the System Profiler returns an error on the PCI panel section and does NOT show the speed that the card is running. In fact it does not show any PCI card info for any card installed, and I have several PCI cards.

Hopefully this will be fixed in a software update?
 
mac666er said:
The first thing I did after firing Mountain Lion with the card is check system profiler, but the System Profiler returns an error on the PCI panel section and does NOT show the speed that the card is running. In fact it does not show any PCI card info for any card installed, and I have several PCI cards.

Hopefully this will be fixed in a software update?
Click to expand...

I believe this is a general problem with non-EFI cards, happens on both AMD and NVIDIA from what I understand. I don't think it's a driver issue, it's just that System Profiler doesn't know what to do with the card or something. As such, I doubt it'll ever be fixed (since Apple has no reason to care about non-EFI cards).
 
MacVidCards said:
2.5 gt/s

cuda-z will show you
Click to expand...

Please forgive my ignorance, but what does the 2.5 gt/s figure actually means performance wise? Does it mean the card is running at half the speed of the PCIe 2.0 spec? i.e x8 lanes or something else?. I know proper EFI cards run at 5GT/s i.e. full x16 lanes for the PCIe bus. But would like to get confirmation from the savvy members of this forum before jumping in and getting a GTX 680. I recall reading that x8 or even x4 PCIe lanes are more than enough for even SLI configurations with benchmarks showing less than 1% performance penalty from the less than full speed configurations.
 
Executor said:
Please forgive my ignorance, but what does the 2.5 gt/s figure actually means performance wise? Does it mean the card is running at half the speed of the PCIe 2.0 spec? i.e x8 lanes or something else?. I know proper EFI cards run at 5GT/s i.e. full x16 lanes for the PCIe bus. But would like to get confirmation from the savvy members of this forum before jumping in and getting a GTX 680. I recall reading that x8 or even x4 PCIe lanes are more than enough for even SLI configurations with benchmarks showing less than 1% performance penalty from the less than full speed configurations.
Click to expand...

The cards currently run at 16 lanes of PCIe 1.0, which is a theoretical max of around 4GB/sec (though I think in practice it's more like 2.5GB/sec). EFI cards run at 16 lanes of PCIe 2.0, which has double the throughput of PCIe 1.0, so a theoretical maximum of around 8GB/sec.

This shouldn't make much of a difference at all for many workloads (including games) but might show up in certain GPGPU workloads. It's not like the GPU core is running at half clocks or anything, it's just a limitation in the bandwidth from the CPU down to the GPU.
 
Vapor matt said:
Well I have my EVGA GTX-680 SC installed, and it has 2 6pin connectors and is also a super clocked card.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I wasn't too clear on that. I was focusing on 4 gig cards. For a new series, EVGA sure has a ton of models already out. Their tech support people are even confused. They are the ones who told me only the stock 680 took two 6 pins.
 
Help!!!

Removed 4870 and installed EVGA 670 SC. Connected to iMac in Target Display Mode via Displayport to MiniDisplayport cable. It powers up. I get the chime, hear the disks spinning, but that's it. CMD + F2 should take me into the Pro but I am stuck on the iMac.

Troubleshooting suggestions please!

Update: HDMI works, just not MDP via TDM to iMac.

Update: It works! Bad Star Tech cable. Glad I bought two! I should have suspected it. The first one didn't have caps on the plugs, so probably a return they put back on the shelf.
 
Last edited:
I'll boast my ignorance because I'm sure xav8tor's experiment has significance... but what? I mean besides the obvious invention of the imacpro!

;)
 
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mamasboy said:
I'll boast my ignorance because I'm sure xav8tor's experiment has significance... but what? I mean besides the obvious invention of the imacpro!

;)
Click to expand...

LOL. Not really an experiment. Just excited that I too have a Mac Pro now running a GTX 600 series card with no fuss. After installing it, boot up, and presto, the card works. I just had a bad (new) DP to MDP cable. HDMI to a second monitor (HDTV) worked right off the bat. My primary monitor isn't a monitor per se, but a 27" iMac. All you have to do is press CMD and F2 to switch between whatever you are running on the iMac, and whatever you have on the Pro. It is called Target Display Mode, not to be confused with Target Disk Mode. It is a well documented feature of iMacs. The MDP port on the rear works as both a video input and output. In TDM, it works as a video input for another Mac. As an output, it feeds a second monitor for the iMac itself. My fear was that there was something lacking in the new drivers that failed to send the proper signal from the GTX to the iMac for TDM to work, but it's there. Like I said, the initial failure was due to a bad cable.

For more info:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3924
 
Ahhhh... thanks for the marvelous details. And you have a MacPro with an unflashed GTX6xx working with 2 screens - pretty cool. (...out of curiousity - what version of OSX are you running?)

And by all the thread readings: as the drivers and hacks mature, that card is only going to get better and better too!!

Congrats xav8tor!
 
mamasboy said:
Ahhhh... thanks for the marvelous details. And you have a MacPro with an unflashed GTX6xx working with 2 screens - pretty cool. (...out of curiousity - what version of OSX are you running?)

And by all the thread readings: as the drivers and hacks mature, that card is only going to get better and better too!!

Congrats xav8tor!
Click to expand...

Thanks. Ref which OS? Umm, maybe about the 25th we can talk about it.
 
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