CMP 5,1 with 980Ti - Upgrade to High Sierra or Not ?

[AlexMaximus]

Hi folks,

As the title mentions it, - I really think about the upgrade route to High Sierra lately. All my machines are running fine on El Capitan without a single hiccup. However as time progresses, software support will dwindle down for older OSX versions. We are not there yet, but we will be there sooner or later.
Here is a question for any CMP 5,1 with Nvidia mod cards & modded WiFi&Bluetooth cards for Handoff&Cont:

Is it risky to upgrade to Sierra or High Sierra regarding the supposidly skittish Web Driver from Nvidia on 980Ti cards with Sierra or High Sierra? -> I am worried that I might loose my rock solid machine with El Capitan to a less supported, "more bound to crash machine" with Sierra or High Sierra. That would be a bitter trade off that I would like to pass. Officially High Sierra is supported on the 5,1 - but that is only the case for not modded rigs. Whats the situation with mod cards like mine?
I think I would not have any problems to freeze my machines to the current ELCapitan and revisit in about a year from now. Would you upgrade to High Sierra or not, what is your experience on a 5,1 with HS ?
I am itching to test the new file system with the hope of squeezing another 2% speed out of it....

Thanks!

Alex

 

[Dr. Stealth]

I'd say install it on a spare drive and test it out for yourself. That's what I did. Test all the apps you rely on. The OS and the web drivers have improved a lot in the past few weeks and I'm having no issues. HS seems to run very smooth and most of my benchmarks have improved to some degree using HS over Sierra. Run it and play around until you feel comfortable to switch. I'm getting close to making HS my main OS. I'm running out of reasons not to. Everything has been very stable.

I did a clean install on a fresh SSD and have been adding my apps one at a time and testing them. I'm still using my Sierra drive as my main work drive but the switch is coming soon.

 

[AlexMaximus]

I'd say install it on a spare drive and test it out for yourself. That's what I did. Test all the apps you rely on. The OS and the web drivers have improved a lot in the past few weeks and I'm having no issues. HS seems to run very smooth and most of my benchmarks have improved to some degree using HS over Sierra. Run it and play around until you feel comfortable to switch. I'm getting close to making HS my main OS. I'm running out of reasons not to. Everything has been very stable.

I did a clean install on a fresh SSD and have been adding my apps one at a time and testing them. I'm still using my Sierra drive as my main work drive but the switch is coming soon.

Perfect! Thank you so much for your response. Now there is one more question I have regarding SSD technology.
My main and current SSD drive is a 2,5 SATA and sits on a PCIe card (Accelsior S) to have more bandwidth. However, as you know even that is considered slow for todays standard. My second SSD, a SM951 is faster, but I use it only to speed up my VR content. It is not used for a start up drive, because its too small size wise. What I would like to do is this:
Go for a Predator Hyper X Pcie card and use that one for a start up disk. It should be faster then SATA and it is bigger then the SM951 because it comes with 960 GB. However, since I use also Bootcamp with Win7, I have heard the PCIe card does not work with bootcamp. Is this true?

 

[Dr. Stealth]

Perfect! Thank you so much for your response. Now there is one more question I have regarding SSD technology.
My main and current SSD drive is a 2,5 SATA and sits on a PCIe card (Accelsior S) to have more bandwidth. However, as you know even that is considered slow for todays standard. My second SSD, a SM951 is faster, but I use it only to speed up my VR content. It is not used for a start up drive, because its too small size wise. What I would like to do is this:
Go for a Predator Hyper X Pcie card and use that one for a start up disk. It should be faster then SATA and it is bigger then the SM951 because it comes with 960 GB. However, since I use also Bootcamp with Win7, I have heard the PCIe card does not work with bootcamp. Is this true?

I'm not sure about the Predator Hyper X Pcie card but I'm sure someone with more knowledge than me will chime in.

I'm running an Amfeltec PCIe board with (4) SM951 512GB AHCI SSD's. It's quite fast and the SM951's are bootable with both macOS & Windows. I like to keep my macOS and Windows 10 on separate volumes. So, I have one 512GB blade with High Sierra and one 512GB blade with Win 10 pro. Both work very well and very fast. I even played around with RAIDing two blades (raid 0) and installed and ran some tests in macOS. Apple RAID won't work for windows though. In fact the raid volume won't even be visible in Windows.

Anyway, here's a Blackmagic test for a single 512GB blade....

And here's two blades in RAID 0 ( 1TB+ )....