EVGA 570 GTX 1.25gb on Mac Pro?

[Dark Goob]

I have 2009 Nehalem Mac Pro. I heard 10.8 supports 570 GTX natively. Anyone know if EVGA 570 GTX model 012-P3-1570-AR will play nice without any modifications to my drivers? Or what else do I need to put in?

What extra would I need to get a regular boot screen? Thanks

 

[MacVidCards]

Hi,

First let me say that Portland is wonderful. I just spent a few days in Redmond and on way to Palo Alto area spent a night in Portland. Hit Lovejoy bakery in the AM, every single sandwhich had butter as 2nd ingredient. Not LA at all, but a nice thing for a change.

The 570 will work fine in MP. Please read the threads that are already started by myself and Asgorath. The nice thing about the 1.2GB version is no help needed for OpenCl.

The boot screen is a whole different thing, requires soldering on a new chip and writing an EFI specific for your card. Not a DIY type thing for most people. But using a GT120 or 2600XT as an EFI card can solve most issues.

 

[Dark Goob]

Yeah i got it and it worked fine. The other nice thing was that both DVI ports work fine, and since my 285 was also dual-DVI, I didn't even need to buy any adapters. Unigine benchmarks it 50fps vs. like 24fps on the 285. Though Second Life client didn't speed up much, I think their code just isn't optimized well for 10.8 or that card. Singularity ran real smooth.

I'm pretty handy with a hot air gun and soldering, I've recapped a few boards and such. How hard is it to swap the ROM chip? As for the EFI, is there one already out there? I can program C++ and Java etc., but It's probably i assembler eh?

Also: do you think that the custom NVIDIA driver will improve OpenGL performance? Or does it just add CUDA and that's it? Any other impact?

I would throw the 285 in the slot above it for an EFI card / space heater. But I'm very afraid of burning my house down...

 

[Asgorath]

Also: do you think that the custom NVIDIA driver will improve OpenGL performance?

You can always assume the answer to this will be yes. At worst, there might be no difference for a particular application, but in general you should expect better performance from the web driver.

 

[Dark Goob]

I read about someone splitting the 6-pin power cables and running dual big cards. Any thoughts on that? I mean the beast has a 1500w power supply, I can't be anywhere close to that now can I? (4xHDDs, 1xDVDRW, 1xBDRW)

If anything it would just be a cooling problem. I might want to install a decent air conditioner in that small room, in that case... the Mac Pro and my Dell 24" already keep it a toasty 75 even on cold days lol. But would the case's built-in fans handle this? Is it even worth trying?

 

[MacVidCards]

There is a practical limit to how far you can stretch the 150 Watts available on Mac logic board.

A guy posting at Netkas crossed the line.

He ran an MSI GTX580 that required Dual 8 pins on the Dual 6 pins. And it worked !!!

So naturally he booted into Windows and fired up an overclock utility and tried running those clocks up. As soon as he ran into trouble, he did the sensible thing and started using the software to increase voltages to the GPU core.

And now his Mac won't boot via his RAID card or on the GTX580 unless it sits for 10 hours.

So, I think we found what a bridge too far is. An 8 pin cable is designed for 150 watts, a 6 pin for 75 Watts. Use your own judgement.

 

[ReallyRedCobra]

I have the overclocked version evga 570 in my mac pro 1,1 and its been just fine. I'm pulling power from the motherboard. I just had to buy an additional 6pin/6pin power cable off ebay and its been working great.

 

[degl]

My 2009 Mac Pro have a MSI GTX 570 1.25gb and run perfectly fine, fast, quiet and cool. Totally recommended.

 

[Dark Goob]

There is a practical limit to how far you can stretch the 150 Watts available on Mac logic board.

A guy posting at Netkas crossed the line.

He ran an MSI GTX580 that required Dual 8 pins on the Dual 6 pins. And it worked !!!

So naturally he booted into Windows and fired up an overclock utility and tried running those clocks up. As soon as he ran into trouble, he did the sensible thing and started using the software to increase voltages to the GPU core.

And now his Mac won't boot via his RAID card or on the GTX580 unless it sits for 10 hours.

So, I think we found what a bridge too far is. An 8 pin cable is designed for 150 watts, a 6 pin for 75 Watts. Use your own judgement.

Well I heard of someone running a 5870 and a 670 or something like that. He just used a Y-splitter on the 6-pin cords, and it was fine. I don't plan on over-clocking. What wattage a 285+570 draw?

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

I'm running a Palit 570 Sonic Platinum which is an awesome card but has 1 8pin and 6 pin so I'm just running an external PSU. It compares to a 580. I did purchase an auxiliary power supply to mount in my lower ODD bay which supplies 2x 8pin and 2x 6 pin power so I can upgrade to dual GPUs in the future.

It works great in OSX.8 and Windows 8. Just keep an EFI card around which the GT120 is for. Have it set for PhysX in Windows lol. MacVidcards will also modify your card for you if you want one card with EFI and boot screen.