I believe this is still an issue, unfortunately. At this stage, I doubt the driver fix will be released for Lion, so it's only in Mountain Lion and beyond.
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Frequently Asked Questions About NVIDIA PC (non-EFI) Graphics Cards
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I believe this is still an issue, unfortunately. At this stage, I doubt the driver fix will be released for Lion, so it's only in Mountain Lion and beyond.
I installed a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 on a Mac Pro Early 2008 (MacPro3,1) desktop and everything went smoothly.
I want to use more cards, however, and was thinking of this BoosterX 5. My question is: how did you fit the device inside your computer (assuming it is a Mac Pro)? Or did you leave it out? I know how and where to install the second DVD drive, but the problem is fitting the cables. It seems there is not enough room to squeeze the cables beside the front fan and behind disk bay 1.
One thing others might be interested: After installation and booting, things were OK (alltough I had to use a 6-pin adapter cable to fill the 8-pin power plug). But Civilization V would not start up. Then I installed the Nvidia web drivers. First time the control panel said it couldn't open. I re-downloaded and re-installed and then Civilization started working (much faster than earlier). Actually, I had to play all night just to make sure it works
Just curious; how did you install the extra power supply?
I just left the side of the case off, since it was a short-term experiment. I believe people have modded their case to expand the gap near the front fan, and I was planning on doing that but ended up switching to a Hackintosh instead.
660 fried in Mac Pro 3,1
Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone's heard of this problem (I've searched everywhere and can't find it on any other forums). I installed a GTX 660 in my 3,1 and it worked fine for several months (10.8.5, web driver), but then my machine fried the card. Blue and red dots show up on screen for every game and I get more and more artifacting and screen tearing. Games under Bootcamp won't even load anymore... they freeze and crash Windows. My friend who I got the computer from said he fried 2 cards in it himself.
It's not a heating issue because I did very minimal gaming before things started going bad... he said he thought it was a voltage issue so I installed Afterburner (it's an MSI card) and tried lowering voltage but I think it's too late and the card is gone (luckily under warranty).
Anyone know if there's anything I can do? I don't want to get another card just to have the machine eat it. Weirdly enough, both Apple stock cards (the 2600 it came with and the Radeon HD 5770 I was using before the 660) worked fine. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone's heard of this problem (I've searched everywhere and can't find it on any other forums). I installed a GTX 660 in my 3,1 and it worked fine for several months (10.8.5, web driver), but then my machine fried the card. Blue and red dots show up on screen for every game and I get more and more artifacting and screen tearing. Games under Bootcamp won't even load anymore... they freeze and crash Windows. My friend who I got the computer from said he fried 2 cards in it himself.
It's not a heating issue because I did very minimal gaming before things started going bad... he said he thought it was a voltage issue so I installed Afterburner (it's an MSI card) and tried lowering voltage but I think it's too late and the card is gone (luckily under warranty).
Anyone know if there's anything I can do? I don't want to get another card just to have the machine eat it. Weirdly enough, both Apple stock cards (the 2600 it came with and the Radeon HD 5770 I was using before the 660) worked fine. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
First time I've ever heard of something like this... Maybe you can try using the video card in slot 2?
Thanks for the tip. I managed to install Booster X5 into my Mac Pro Early 2008 with three graphics cards:
- Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 in slot 1 (the main card)
- Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT in slot 2
- ATI Radeon HD 3870 in slot 3
The Booster X5 is installed in the second DVD bay. Its cables go through the small hole in the corner where all the cables go. The cables are just long enough to reach the graphics cards (but they do!). Also, didn't have to give up any hard drive slots.
One mistake I made: I tried to put the internal power cable of the Booster X5 in last. It has a large bulge and will not fit. I should have unscrewed it from the back panel part and put it first through. Now there is no power cord slot in the back, instead, the cord comes straight out. But fixing this is too much work for now.
Some tips in case someone else does the same:
- You must install the Booster X5 backside front, so that the cables will reach the hole in the corner and be long enough to reach the GPU.
- to make the fans blow in the same direction, you should open the Booster X5 and turn its fans around (so that they blow in the opposite direction).
- you need an extension cable for the molex, so that it will reach the Booster X5 molex slot (as it will now be in the "wrong" end).
- this is the toughest: you can't screw the Booster X5 in as the screw holes fill not be where the holes in the case are. You can leave it unscrewed, but do put the molex cable below the case, not above. If it is left below, the latch closing the whole case may not close fully.
- remove the SATA connector of the first drive bay. It will make it much easier to push the cables through. Then, just screw it back. Also, removing the back panel from the optical drive bay will help.
- you will also need to remove the front panel casing (gray plastic) and the heat sink cover next to it.
Everything will fit and look nice, but to be honest, this was my most difficult installation job by far.
If someone really wants photos I may supply them, but it requires taking the whole thing apart and I'm really not eager to do so
Pro Tip: You can change which card OS X uses as the primary video accelerator by connecting displays to each card, and changing your primary display. I'm currently running a GTX 660 and a Radeon 2600 XT - Windows doesn't like this configuration (because 2 separate vendors) and it messed up my OS X settings. By making my main monitor (connected to the GTX 660) my primary display, it changed (in System Information) my graphics adapter to the 660. Works the other way around too, if I make the secondary display (connected to the 2600 XT) my primary display, System Information sees that as the graphics adapter. Just some fun facts if you're having trouble.
I have to admit I'm really curious what those three video cards are doing. It's an odd mixture.
It seems like only low-watt cards (under 110w) work in the 3,1. So far, only the 5770 (108w) and the original 2600 XT (45w) didn't fry. Cards fried include 8800 GT (125w), Radeon 4870 (150w) and GTX 660 (140w). It seems like when the power supply goes above a certain level, it kills the card. Does anyone know of a way to verify this? Could it be just a bad PCIe power port and I could use power from SATA instead?
You could buy Hardware Monitor to check temperature, voltages, and power draw using the MP's sensors. You could directly check the PCIe supplementary power sockets with a voltmeter for the correct voltage.
You can check everything related for loose connections. I've seen a loose connection cause scorching around the connector area and I imagine the intermittent power to the electronics couldn't have been good.
I can add this, check if the fan spins and reacts to load by increasing speed.
GTX570 and GTX580 cards built on original reference design have an issue with 3,1. The fan will frequently either not run at all or run at a constant low speed. This is only in slot 1. Move up to slot 2 and they run normally.
Slot 2 is a better choice anyway if you don't have a card above it. It allows air to circulate above and below the card, slot 1 has card sitting above CPU and RAM heat that rises through metal.
And I can add this. My GTX570, for sale in the Marketplace Section, modified my MacVidCards worked perfectly in slot 1 in my old 3,1 Mac Pro. It's just the reference cards, not the ones modified by MVC, that have this issue.
Lou
I originally had the card in slot 1 then moved to slot 2 but its problems only continued. Fans are running and I was looking at voltage meters but don't really know what I'm looking for... there are no nasty activity spikes or anything. I booted up Witcher 2, which had horrible texture popping, and an error message popped up that I'd never seen before:
"Free virtual memory address space dangerously low! Starting to release old OpenGL textures to avoid crash. This might lower game's performance considerably. Please consider lowering AA/multisampling setting or video resolution to decrease the amount of memory needed by the game."
I hit OK, and all the ground turned blue and then the game crashed (like a bad acid trip). I've got 12 gigs of physical ram and 2 gigs of DDR5 on the card... is this somehow related to the problem?
Is this confirmed? Is it safe to upgrade to Mavericks with a eVGA GTX 670?
Thanks in advance.
Asgorath confirmed on page 1; This is not meant to be sarcastic, just letting you know.
As to my question, are there any performance gains on third party GPUs? Also how does this affect bootcamp?
Question: Does VGA Out work on these cards? I have a VGA display I need for server management. It runs off a switchbox, and the only way I can get it to work alongside my GTX 660 is to keep the Radeon 2600 XT installed to run the VGA display, but this causes problems under Windows, and when I try to run both my DVI and VGA display (one over DVI Single Link, one over DVI Single Link to VGA Adapter, respectively) off JUST the GTX 660, I get an odd black screen with one flashing white square in the top left corner. I'm running Mavericks, and have been so since the GM - is this a driver issue? Or does VGA out simply not work on these cards? The odd thing is, I can boot into my recovery partition with JUST the GTX 660 installed and get a perfectly functioning dual display. Weird, huh?
Many modern cards only have VGA in one of the DVI ports, usually the one closest to PCB.
The way to tell is to look at it, there will be a small cross of pins below the main body of them.
A DVI to VGA adapter just passes the existing signal from those pins. The DVI only port just has the large "hot plug detect" blade with nothing else around it.
The way to tell is to look at it, there will be a small cross of pins below the main body of them.
A DVI to VGA adapter just passes the existing signal from those pins. The DVI only port just has the large "hot plug detect" blade with nothing else around it.
Yeah, I'm in the right DVI port. It gives me signal to both monitors in my recovery partition AND in Windows 7, but I get that odd error when booting into my main OS X partition, hence using the Radeon for the VGA monitor.
It's the end result of a long process. Initially I had the ATI Radeon HD 3870. Then, I got more monitors and needed a new card, so I got the Nvidia GeForce 8800, which seemed the best at the time.
Just recently the ATI card started making lots of noise and I replaced it with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 and got things to work. I didn't want to buy another 8800 as it was old and expensive (the Apple version of it). However, as it turned out, I managed to fix the fan on the ATI and it still works fine, which is why I kept it in.
I didn't want to add a lot of adapters to use the GTX760 only, as I already had the hardware to connect the other monitors to the older cards, so I kept them all. At the moment I have 5 monitors, but one is going away soon, so I have 4 left.
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