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Confirmed AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Running on Mac Pro

As I wrote in the other thread:
Look at the "electrical" position of the resistor, not the physical on the board which can easily change for different GPU models and revisions.
As far as I see it you just have to follow the pin of the crossfire connector...
 
Blah Results.

OK, I spent the money on the 7970 and put it in my new 3.06 12 core tower with 28GIGs of Ram and saw no benefit over the 5870 I already had. My main complaint before this card was the Events Browser in FCPX would be laggy on my second 30"Apple Monitor and I wanted to "fly" through my clips instead of bounce through them. I used the 6 pin to 8 pin adapter and everything fires up just fine. Boot time, identical. Cinebench, identical frame rates of 35.5 as previous card. Final Cut render and transcode and analize times, identical. STILL LAGGY Events Browser window with 250 clips open. Just can't scroll through them smoothly. I would say anyone running Final Cut X most of the time, this card is not worth it. Final Cut or MLion just doesn't use the card. I'm not a gamer, I just want a fast Mac with FCP but I guess not....... Sheeeesh! Any advice? I've tried new user, power reset, VRAM, all that good stuff. Thanks all!
 
As has been posted EXACTLY 10,000 times, CInebench for OSX is a SAD JOKE, and the GPU section is only useful for CPU testing. (ie, it is 100% CPU bound in it's current form)

Have a look at bare feats.com for actual useful tests.
 
Well, thank you for pointing out that I have not read these forums 10,000 times dad. Jeepers, why can't forums be for help instead of criticism?

Well, you failed to mention the other 80% of the ways I stated these cards aren't a good investment. Like for instance, nothing changed for me. Interface scrolling, boot times, render times, etc etc. I looked at Barefeets and most of it is for gaming and Windows and I said I'm not a gamer. For Final Cut it is a useless upgrade. Like I said, "any ideas?" I don't think I said, "how about a slap over the head if I put a foot wrong in your mighty forum space"
 
mclarenf1 said:
Well, thank you for pointing out that I have not read these forums 10,000 times dad. Jeepers, why can't forums be for help instead of criticism?

Well, you failed to mention the other 80% of the ways I stated these cards aren't a good investment. Like for instance, nothing changed for me. Interface scrolling, boot times, render times, etc etc. I looked at Barefeets and most of it is for gaming and Windows and I said I'm not a gamer. For Final Cut it is a useless upgrade. Like I said, "any ideas?" I don't think I said, "how about a slap over the head if I put a foot wrong in your mighty forum space"
Click to expand...

If those things are not GPU limited, then yes, buying a new GPU won't help improve them. However, recent Barefeats testing has shown the 7950 and GTX 680 class of GPUs do perform certain tasks in FCP and other similar software much faster than the 5870 for example:

http://barefeats.com/gpu7950c.html

When upgrading your system, it's really important to understand where the bottlenecks are for the tasks you're trying to do. If your main complaint is about the Events Browser, I'd guess that's a CPU limit in FCP itself (which is basically confirmed by the fact it didn't get any faster with a much faster GPU).
 
mclarenf1 said:
Well, thank you for pointing out that I have not read these forums 10,000 times dad. Jeepers, why can't forums be for help instead of criticism?

Well, you failed to mention the other 80% of the ways I stated these cards aren't a good investment. Like for instance, nothing changed for me. Interface scrolling, boot times, render times, etc etc. I looked at Barefeets and most of it is for gaming and Windows and I said I'm not a gamer. For Final Cut it is a useless upgrade. Like I said, "any ideas?" I don't think I said, "how about a slap over the head if I put a foot wrong in your mighty forum space"
Click to expand...

For your purposes, an SSD would be a better investment, and will give you the desired UI responsiveness as well as speed up loading times in Final Cut Pro.

In what ways was your 3,1 "dog slow?"

As an aside, the 3,1 Mac Pro is certainly not slow by any means. For my purposes, Distributed Computing (Einstein@home in particular), a single core from the 2.8GHz Harpertown completes a task in 35,000 seconds, whereas a single core from a Sandy Bridge-EP (3930k at 3.6GHz) completes the same computationally intensive task in 32,000 seconds. Not a big difference at all. In fact it's negligible at best. Oh, and Harpertown is not as power hungry as some seem to think. At least not with my purposes. So, no, its not dog slow.
 
Overheating?

I have the new Mac Edition 7950, and it seems to be overheating.

When running iTunes, after about 10 minutes, the screen goes black, the audio continues. No problems with the older card.

The card itself is very, very hot to the touch, it could burn a finger.

Hoping to hear from the board on this, thanks!
 
BacktoMacNJ said:
I have the new Mac Edition 7950, and it seems to be overheating.

When running iTunes, after about 10 minutes, the screen goes black, the audio continues. No problems with the older card.

The card itself is very, very hot to the touch, it could burn a finger.

Hoping to hear from the board on this, thanks!
Click to expand...

GPU's run hot in general. What is it that you're doing in iTunes that would stress the video card a lot? It's probably a software issue.
 
wonderspark said:
This thread reminds me of

rockem_sockem_robots.gif
Click to expand...

Hehe.. And all it would take to mellow things out would be a simple search. But I think certain patrons would rather the piss-fight. :D

http://old-macs.com/misc/MacProPCIePower.html

PciePower.jpeg
 
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Reactions: Zwhaler
Does OpenCL work correctly for the 7970 or is it hobbled due to sub par drivers?

Thinking of taking the leap, because Nvidia's OpenCL performance comes far short of the 7970's and the programs I intend to use for the most part accelerate with OpenCL
 
KBS756 said:
Does OpenCL work correctly for the 7970 or is it hobbled due to sub par drivers?

Thinking of taking the leap, because Nvidia's OpenCL performance comes far short of the 7970's and the programs I intend to use for the most part accelerate with OpenCL
Click to expand...

OpenCL works just fine with my 7950, 7970 should be the same.
 
KBS756 said:
Thanks thats great

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202001
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161431
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127732

Would you recommend any of those brands in particular?
The HIS Card seems to be a bit longer would it fit in a Mac Pro 4,1
Click to expand...

Personally I would buy Sapphire, as they make excellent cards, not sure how the quality\customer service is with MSI or HIS.

Also you will need an external Power Supply for any 7970, as they pull more than 225Watts (MAX for the Mac Pro)
 
GP-SE said:
Personally I would buy Sapphire, as they make excellent cards, not sure how the quality\customer service is with MSI or HIS.

Also you will need an external Power Supply for any 7970, as they pull more than 225Watts (MAX for the Mac Pro)
Click to expand...

Thanks

Yes I was planning to go the power supply in optical bay route if I can figure out how to route the cables without having to drill the case in some way.
 
KBS756 said:
Thanks

Yes I was planning to go the power supply in optical bay route if I can figure out how to route the cables without having to drill the case in some way.
Click to expand...

I did quite the same mod as Dr. Stealth's job to add, in a very clean way, the same extra power supply he used.



There is a space between the side and the front of the case. It's not very big but sufficient to route cables.
The problem, is the size of the 6 ans 8 pin connectors of the extra power supply. They are too big for this space.
So, to solve the problem, I unpluged the pins of the connectors (not very difficult with a pin extractor) to be abbe to route the cables in the space.
As the cables of the extra power supply was too short to join the card (even with pluged with the cards cables), I cut the cables and extended them.
It's a little bit time consuming job, but the way I found to a clean install without drill the case ;)
 
J-MI said:
I did quite the same mod as Dr. Stealth's job to add, in a very clean way, the same extra power supply he used.

[url=http://imageshack.us/scaled/thumb/6/radeon7970.jpg]Image[/URL]

There is a space between the side and the front of the case. It's not very big but sufficient to route cables.
The problem, is the size of the 6 ans 8 pin connectors of the extra power supply. They are too big for this space.
So, to solve the problem, I unpluged the pins of the connectors (not very difficult with a pin extractor) to be abbe to route the cables in the space.
As the cables of the extra power supply was too short to join the card (even with pluged with the cards cables), I cut the cables and extended them.
It's a little bit time consuming job, but the way I found to a clean install without drill the case ;)
Click to expand...

The cables came with the power supply?
Where did you route the plug to power the optical bay power supply from?
And did you remove that plate between the optical bay and the back panel to be able to route those cables? Can you show a picture or 2 from that compartment please thanks.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202005

This is what I am considering getting. Believe its 2x8 pin

and by pin extractor you mean one of these ? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16899884001
 
brentsg said:
I don't understand the attitude. If I was going to behave ... like that.. I wouldn't want my business' URL in my sig.
Click to expand...
Absolutely. I'd never knowingly put profit into the pockets of such an uncivil individual, when there are plenty of "nice folks" around working just as hard or harder to please their customers. [wow. I'm still reading along the thread and he's getting worse and worse.]

Also: Motherboard traces don't suddenly "blow" like a fuse does (except in the event of something like a lightning strike). They heat up over time, doing slow damage to themselves and perhaps to nearby traces. Then eventually there's a failure.

Another point: The new Mac Pro coming out some time soon may well have 8-pin connectors on the board. That may be why the drivers are included in the pre-release build of 10.8.3.

I myself will stay deliberately in spec -- it's not a question of blowing an expensive component, though of course I'd rather not. My work is live, not studio. Imagine being in the middle of doing a show at the moment of a failure that could have been avoided!
 
KBS756 said:
The cables came with the power supply?
Where did you route the plug to power the optical bay power supply from?
And did you remove that plate between the optical bay and the back panel to be able to route those cables? Can you show a picture or 2 from that compartment please thanks.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202005

This is what I am considering getting. Believe its 2x8 pin

and by pin extractor you mean one of these ? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16899884001
Click to expand...

Yes, two pairs of the cables come with the power supply, and each pair with 6 pin and 6+2 pin connectors. As I not plan to use 2 CG in may mac Pro, I have cut and used one pair of cables to make the other longer.
I also moded power supply's plug (adding a 6 pin female conector) because the original male plug who comes with the power supply is too long and it doesn't match in the space between the mac pro pawer supply and the auxiliary power supply. I take power (110v) for the auxiliary power supply on the Mac Pro power supply (As Dr Stealth done), and just put a 6pin male plug (red wire on the pictures).
For the 12v power, I use the 2nd Mac pro sata connector with a sata II male and 4pin molex adapter.


Some Pics







 
J-MI said:
Yes, two pairs of the cables come with the power supply, and each pair with 6 pin and 6+2 pin connectors. As I not plan to use 2 CG in may mac Pro, I have cut and used one pair of cables to make the other longer.
I also moded power supply's plug (adding a 6 pin female conector) because the original male plug who comes with the power supply is too long and it doesn't match in the space between the mac pro pawer supply and the auxiliary power supply. I take power (110v) for the auxiliary power supply on the Mac Pro power supply (As Dr Stealth done), and just put a 6pin male plug (red wire on the pictures).
For the 12v power, I use the 2nd Mac pro sata connector with a sata II male and 4pin molex adapter.


Some Pics

[url=http://imageshack.us/a/img825/4962/p1050125v.jpg]Image[/URL]

[url=http://imageshack.us/a/img198/5310/p1050126.JPG]Image[/URL]

[url=http://imageshack.us/a/img62/1182/p1050129r.jpg]Image[/URL]

[url=http://imageshack.us/a/img18/4079/p1050131n.jpg]Image[/URL]
Click to expand...

You pulled power from the powersupply for the auxilary one, I dont feel comfortable doing that so wondering, will the wire that comes from the outside to the AUX power supply route through the Mac Pro case without mods?

Thanks

Might just go with a external modular power supply because I'd feel safer that way rather then messing with the Mac Pro power supply where I am not too comfortable
 
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Think I may go with the HIS it seems to be better at keeping cool and quiet, will power it externally also the 3 GB vapor x ... doesnt have 2 mini display ports

Only question will a graphics card this long fit in a Mac Pro?

300mm long according to newegg's measurement

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161431

Thanks! Looking to buy this week so a bit urgent.
 
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KBS756 said:
Think I may go with the HIS it seems to be better at keeping cool and quiet, will power it externally also the 3 GB vapor x ... doesnt have 2 mini display ports

Only question will a graphics card this long fit in a Mac Pro?

300mm long according to newegg's measurement

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161431

Thanks! Looking to buy this week so a bit urgent.
Click to expand...

Vapor X is all kinds of awesome BTW, I've had a few of them and they always ran cool and quiet.
 
lewdvig said:
Vapor X is all kinds of awesome BTW, I've had a few of them and they always ran cool and quiet.
Click to expand...

Problem is Newegg sold out of the 6GB Vapor X and the 3 GB doesnt have 2 Mini display ports ...

So i want to know if the HIS 7970 fits in my Mac Pro

Thanks!

And do you guys sell your old Video Cards or keep them?
 
Last edited:
KBS756 said:
Problem is Newegg sold out of the 6GB Vapor X and the 3 GB doesnt have 2 Mini display ports ...
Click to expand...

Craigslist or kijiji maybe? I'll always buy used given the choice, but i know it isn't for everyone.

I am running an xfx dd 7870 in my 4,1 right now and it seems great. The build, temps and sound are all very good.
 
lewdvig said:
Craigslist or kijiji maybe? I'll always buy used given the choice, but i know it isn't for everyone.

I am running an xfx dd 7870 in my 4,1 right now and it seems great. The build, temps and sound are all very good.
Click to expand...

Not really one to buy used, would that 300 mm 7970 from HIS fit in a Mac Pro?

Newegg Measured it at 298mm
 
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