Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Flashed GTX 780 - only 40-60fps????

I have an unflashed GTX 780 installed. Your FPS numbers are about right. I asked awhile back whether flashing or not would improve peformance and the MVC response was no. It just gives you a boot screen, which is actually quite important when something goes wrong with your Mac.

If you're looking for 100FPS in OSX in games, you're going to need a 980 or 980 Ti. 780 is a nice card but it's no beast. You're not CPU limited either. Check out your Activity Monitor usage when a game is running. It's a good 30-40% constant utilisation but it's definitely not maxed out.

Install the latest nVidia web driver. That gives a very easy boost to performance.

Finally if you're willing to downgrade OSX, you may see a lot better performance in Mavericks / Yosemite. El Capitan has not been good to games.
 
Looks like thronstack is running OS 10.10. My score in OS 10.11.3 - Web Drivers in Extreme HD is attached. My Card is an MVC flashed Gigabyte GTX 780 (3GB) accelerated to 1006 MHz.

Valley, 10.11.3 Web Driver.jpg

Lou
 
I've attached Valley benchmarks (Extreme HD preset as well as a custom "Medium" setting) from my Skylake (i5-6600K, currently non-OC) build with a reference (non-OC) GTX 780.
With high GPU load, the results don't differ very much. However, at lower GPU load (that "medium" setting), the CPU performance comes into play a lot more. My Skylake build scores almost twice as high as the 2.8GHz Xeon.

That's exactly what you can see in the different games. Some don't need much CPU power, so they scale very good with GPU performance, others don't.
Medium.png ExtremeHD.png
 
superdx said:
Check out your Activity Monitor usage when a game is running. It's a good 30-40% constant utilisation but it's definitely not maxed out.
Click to expand...

That's because the CPU has many cores. When we talking about CPU limiting in gaming, we usually talking about single thread performance, but not multi thread performance.

e.g. A game can only use 2 threads, on my W3690 (12 thread available), it can only use up to 17% of the CPU. If I see 17% of utilisation of this game, most likely that means I am CPU limiting.

In fact, I rarely see a game can use more than 4 threads. For a 4,1 or later. That means the game almost never use more than 50% of the CPU.
 
HI all,

Thank you all so much for chiming in with Benchmarks and information. It looks like this is just a Mac OSX/bad game optimization issues for OSX. Every game that I had mentioned before, significantly increased in performance when I booted to Windows, night and day difference.

Thanks again everyone
 
Yeah, the difference is huge. If we ran the same benches in windows instead, the stratification of capability across your GPU options would be much more evident.
 
Synchro3 said:
GTA V uses six cores.
Click to expand...

Sorta kinda: it uses other threads for ancillary tasks, but the rendering is still largely single-threaded and on CPU3, and increase in fps is pretty linear with increase in clock speed. I didn't notice a huge difference when I went from a 4690K to a 4790K. I did notice a big improvement when I went from a 670 to a 980.
 
Just gonna' jump in and encourage the OP to do the CPU upgrade... super simple on a 2010. You can do the Northbridge Chip re-paste, too, if you wish, but it isn't necessary. (If you don't upgrade the CPU, you won't likely be repasting the Northbridge chip, right?) I've upgraded two Mac Pro 4,1 CPUs to hex 3.33 and 3.46gHz hex processors, and even single-core performance is much better as a result. Why not make your Mac all that it can be?
 
DPUser said:
Just gonna' jump in and encourage the OP to do the CPU upgrade... super simple on a 2010. You can do the Northbridge Chip re-paste, too, if you wish, but it isn't necessary. (If you don't upgrade the CPU, you won't likely be repasting the Northbridge chip, right?) I've upgraded two Mac Pro 4,1 CPUs to hex 3.33 and 3.46gHz hex processors, and even single-core performance is much better as a result. Why not make your Mac all that it can be?
Click to expand...

The last Single Processor Mac Pro 4,1 (2009) I upgraded (just a couple days ago) had a Northbridge chip with 85 percent dried thermal paste . It was slowly dying and is precisely the reason why the Nehalem Macs will all fail someday without servicing . The Dual Processor Trays are in even worse shape than the Single Processor versions .
 
IMO, anyone try to re-paste the NB must fully ready for accidentally break the rivet. They may easy to break, especailly after few years of thermal stress. If no backup plan for that, better not to touch it.
 
h9826790 said:
IMO, anyone try to re-paste the NB must fully ready for accidentally break the rivet. They may easy to break, especailly after few years of thermal stress. If no backup plan for that, better not to touch it.
Click to expand...

Scary , isn't it ? ;) . And Apple won't sell these proprietary fasteners , either . That's why I learned how to make my own .
 
Machines said:
Scary , isn't it ? ;) . And Apple won't sell these proprietary fasteners , either . That's why I learned how to make my own .
Click to expand...

Machine, may I ask you a question? Did you ever use those liquid metal thermal paste? Do you know will they "dry up"?

I am thinking for NB this kind of stuff, we never upgrade it. If liquid metal work, and it can last long, then how about just do it once, and then no need to touch it again?

I know it's electrically conductive, but as long as we do it right, it should not cause any damage, isn't it?
 
Machines said:
Scary , isn't it ? ;) . And Apple won't sell these proprietary fasteners , either . That's why I learned how to make my own .
Click to expand...

If you break a fastener, can you just add an aftermarket Northbridge heatsink with adjustable mounts to match the hole pattern? Example:

51RHmEARIfL.jpg
 
h9826790 said:
I don't think so. The stock NB heatsink is quite small because it hide under the main heatsink. I don't think this kind of large after market heatsink can fit into the position.

By the way, it seems there is an easy work around.

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...9-mac-pro-2x2-26.1637891/page-3#post-22554447
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link, I've bookmarked it in case I need it later.

Perhaps my photo is a bad example due to the height, but there are low-profile aftermarket Northbridge heatsinks too. And I wonder if one of those would fit the existing holes, assuming it was low enough to fit.

cnbs1l1.jpg
 
h9826790 said:
Machine, may I ask you a question? Did you ever use those liquid metal thermal paste? Do you know will they "dry up"?

I am thinking for NB this kind of stuff, we never upgrade it. If liquid metal work, and it can last long, then how about just do it once, and then no need to touch it again?

I know it's electrically conductive, but as long as we do it right, it should not cause any damage, isn't it?
Click to expand...

Not really my cup of tea . Arctic MX4 is an awesome paste and the maker claims 8 year durability . I just placed a single processor Mac Pro 4,1 (2009) X58 "Northbridge" chip at load for a client with a nice constant 1500 RPM on the booster fan for continuous load for medical imaging . It was stress tested for 16 hours and the X58 did not exceed 47 degrees C . That's quite cool and way under its limit (which is 100 degrees C according to Intel's spec sheet.) I rebuilt the "Northbridge" heatsink with MX4 .

Untitled JPEG.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back