Frequently Asked Questions About NVIDIA PC (non-EFI) Graphics Cards

[Supermacguy]

Recommendation for card

Been reading this thread, looking for a new card. Can anyone help with some guidance?

Mac Pro 4,1 DP 2.93ghz
SSD in drive bay 1 (not pcie, in HD drive bay) using TRIM enabler
3 other HDs
ATI Radeon 4870 512mb
10.9.5 as main OS, 10.10.x and 10.8.5 on other drives
Running 2 monitors only, sometimes 3, at "standard" resolutions, ie 1920x1200 and below, no 4k.

Use: mainly Final Cut ProX, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, iMovie, Aperture. No games. No 3d modelling.

I want 100% seamless and reliable operation, including boot screens. Total cost should be under $500 (a little wiggle room). Should be future proof to keep me happy for 3 years.

Been looking at EVGA - GeForce 760 (4gb) or GeForce 970 (4gb). What are the differences? Given my setup, is 4gb overkill?

MacVidCards: can you flash a 970 or 760? What are the prices for that?

Thanks! Chris

 

[Synchro3]

Here you go: http://www.macvidcards.com/index.html

GTX 760 is in shop. I guess GTX 970 will follow.

 

[pixxelpusher]

Thanks for the reply. I've been looking at that and a few other cards. I'm just a casual gamer so was wondering would a GTX 670/680 be an ok alternative to the 970? They're about a quarter the price on ebay! (good for my wallet). I'd be upgrading from a Mac HD5870, and have done all the usual upgrades to max out my system (2xQuad Core 3GHz, 32GB Ram, SSD).

Trying to weigh up: Performance / Power Draw / Price.

Anyone with any more info as to using these cards in this system? Would they improve upon what I have already have?

 

[666sheep]

Anyone with any more info as to using these cards in this system? Would they improve upon what I have already have?

As MP 2006 owner, you may find this thread useful: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1685478/

 

[pixxelpusher]

As MP 2006 owner, you may find this thread useful: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1685478/

Hi thanks, I'll repost there and see, but it seems like it's more of a ATI/AMD thread. Would like to know if anyone's running those GTX cards I was looking at and if they work well for gaming?

 

[romanboy]

Hi thanks, I'll repost there and see, but it seems like it's more of a ATI/AMD thread. Would like to know if anyone's running those GTX cards I was looking at and if they work well for gaming?

Well you can always have a look at various online posts comparing any of the cards on the market for gaming. There's even some sites which compare the cards in the Mac OS. To be honest, if a card is better than another in windows, it will be a similar story in the Mac OS. Hope this helps.

 

[pixxelpusher]

Well you can always have a look at various online posts comparing any of the cards on the market for gaming. There's even some sites which compare the cards in the Mac OS. To be honest, if a card is better than another in windows, it will be a similar story in the Mac OS. Hope this helps.

That's what I've thought as well (from the generic charts I've seen). I guess the first part of my question is why I came onto forums as I haven't been able to find any comparison sites that answer: does the hardware in the old mac pro 2006 limit the performance gains of these video cards? I'm not really in a position to go out and buy a whole lot of them to test, so was hoping others might know.

 

[romanboy]

That's what I've thought as well (from the generic charts I've seen). I guess the first part of my question is why I came onto forums as I haven't been able to find any comparison sites that answer: does the hardware in the old mac pro 2006 limit the performance gains of these video cards? I'm not really in a position to go out and buy a whole lot of them to test, so was hoping others might know.

Well I don't think anyone is in that position, really.
With Nvidia cards, you won't get boot screens, unless you resolder the EPROM chip, or send it to MacVidCards to do it for you. It's not expensive, and he adds full PCI-E speeds to it. But it's not exactly cheap considering it's for a 1,1 mac. I'd say see if the 680 cards work for te games you want to play at the resolution you're after, and if they do, get one! Otherwise save up for a 970. Low power draw, ridiculously powerful.

 

[pixxelpusher]

Well I don't think anyone is in that position, really.
With Nvidia cards, you won't get boot screens, unless you resolder the EPROM chip, or send it to MacVidCards to do it for you. It's not expensive, and he adds full PCI-E speeds to it. But it's not exactly cheap considering it's for a 1,1 mac. I'd say see if the 680 cards work for te games you want to play at the resolution you're after, and if they do, get one! Otherwise save up for a 970. Low power draw, ridiculously powerful.

So nobody at all's running a 2006?
I was just watching this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqWErkP5QMg

From the comments (and results) it looks like there probably is a bottleneck in the computer crippling card performance (and that was a 2008 model).

One guy noted a GTX 660 works just as good if not better than a GTX 670. So there must be a point where cards hit a bottleneck and no more gains can be seen, would that make sense?

So in my logic there wouldn't be any point buying a card like the 970 or probably not even the the 680 if they perform like a 660 (but I haven't seen any real proof of this either).

 

[romanboy]

So nobody at all's running a 2006?
I was just watching this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqWErkP5QMg

From the comments (and results) it looks like there probably is a bottleneck in the computer crippling card performance (and that was a 2008 model).

One guy noted a GTX 660 works just as good if not better than a GTX 670. So there must be a point where cards hit a bottleneck and no more gains can be seen, would that make sense?

So in my logic there wouldn't be any point buying a card like the 970 or probably not even the the 680 if they perform like a 660 (but I haven't seen any real proof of this either).

Oh, I'm sure plenty of people are running 1,1 macs, but not many would have more than 1 or two cards. I have a 3,1, and I've tried a ATI 6870, flashed by myself and I also modded the resistor to have full PCI-E speed. I then also had two Nvidia 570 cards, and now have a Nvidia 970 card.
Unfortunately I can only tell you that the cards were better in performance in the order I mentioned them (6870<570<2x570<970). I play some games, in Mac OS and in Windows, via Boot Camp, and do some video editing which uses the graphics card. I will stick with the 970 for a long while as it's a low power one and it doesn't need an external power supply, unlike my two 570's which I had before. And it flies, too!! Really quick and powerful card.

I hope you'll find some answers, but to be honest with you, with the added efficiency of the 970 card, it's really good to save up for one. Mine has one 8-pin power socket, and one 6-pin, but using two 6-pin connectors is fine, even under stress with furmark, or Unigine Valley. I had to connect the 6-pin cable to the correct side of the 8-pin power socket, as directed here in this very thread (I believe, I could be wrong), but it's stable as anything. So if you can save up for one, go for it!!

Otherwise get what you can afford, really. It will all work, pretty much, from my understanding, and the newer the card, the more difference it will make.

 

[pixxelpusher]

Oh, I'm sure plenty of people are running 1,1 macs, but not many would have more than 1 or two cards. I have a 3,1, and I've tried a ATI 6870, flashed by myself and I also modded the resistor to have full PCI-E speed. I then also had two Nvidia 570 cards, and now have a Nvidia 970 card.
Unfortunately I can only tell you that the cards were better in performance in the order I mentioned them (6870<570<2x570<970). I play some games, in Mac OS and in Windows, via Boot Camp, and do some video editing which uses the graphics card. I will stick with the 970 for a long while as it's a low power one and it doesn't need an external power supply, unlike my two 570's which I had before. And it flies, too!! Really quick and powerful card.

I hope you'll find some answers, but to be honest with you, with the added efficiency of the 970 card, it's really good to save up for one. Mine has one 8-pin power socket, and one 6-pin, but using two 6-pin connectors is fine, even under stress with furmark, or Unigine Valley. I had to connect the 6-pin cable to the correct side of the 8-pin power socket, as directed here in this very thread (I believe, I could be wrong), but it's stable as anything. So if you can save up for one, go for it!!

Otherwise get what you can afford, really. It will all work, pretty much, from my understanding, and the newer the card, the more difference it will make.

Thanks for the follow up. Would you have any benchmarks of the cards you have? FPS, Unigine Heaven or LuxMark? I could then compare to the Mac 5870 to see what the difference is. I would only want to be running a single card so no external power supply.

Have looked up the price of a 970 but it's around $500 which I think's too expensive for this Mac, I'm thinking something <$200 would be good (as that's what I picked the Mac 5870 up for). So maybe a 660ti / 670 / 680?

Was also reading this article on barefeats and it looks like the 2006 really does cripple cards in some cases: http://www.barefeats.com/wst10g7.html

 

[romanboy]

Thanks for the follow up. Would you have any benchmarks of the cards you have? FPS, Unigine Heaven or LuxMark? I could then compare to the Mac 5870 to see what the difference is. I would only want to be running a single card so no external power supply.

Have looked up the price of a 970 but it's around $500 which I think's too expensive for this Mac, I'm thinking something <$200 would be good (as that's what I picked the Mac 5870 up for). So maybe a 660ti / 670 / 680?

Was also reading this article on barefeats and it looks like the 2006 really does cripple cards in some cases: http://www.barefeats.com/wst10g7.html

Yes, I do have sown benchmarks. I will upload shortly.

 

[romanboy]

OSes used:
10.8.5
10.9.2

web drivers used:
WebDriver-313.01.04f01 in 10.8
WebDriver-331.01.01f04 in 10.9

One Nvidia GTX 570:
10.8.5 mac driver. Best result, 100% of itself.

10.8.5 Nvidia web driver. 73% of best result

10.9.2 mac driver. 62% of best result

Two Nvidia GTX 570:
10.8.5 mac driver. Best result, 100% of itself.

10.8.5 Nvidia web driver. 73% of best result

10.9.2 mac driver. 63% of best result

Same results in 10.10.
I'd upload some 970 results, but I'll probably be cluttering by replicating similar results from other sources.

 

[pixxelpusher]

OSes used:
10.8.5
10.9.2

web drivers used:
WebDriver-313.01.04f01 in 10.8
WebDriver-331.01.01f04 in 10.9

One Nvidia GTX 570:
10.8.5 mac driver. Best result, 100% of itself.
Image
10.8.5 Nvidia web driver. 73% of best result
Image
10.9.2 mac driver. 62% of best result
Image

Two Nvidia GTX 570:
10.8.5 mac driver. Best result, 100% of itself.
Image
10.8.5 Nvidia web driver. 73% of best result
Image
10.9.2 mac driver. 63% of best result
Image

Same results in 10.10.
I'd upload some 970 results, but I'll probably be cluttering by replicating similar results from other sources.

Thanks this is helpful. I'll try and do mine too. Interesting to see the Apple drivers work the best (and the older OS?), I just thought Nvidia's were supposed to be better (from what I've read). My OS has been limited by Apple but I'm hoping to do the 10.10 hack update soon and see if that does anything for GPU performance.

As a side question, how are you running multiple OS's, separate hard drives, or one drive partitioned?

 

[romanboy]

Thanks this is helpful. I'll try and do mine too. Interesting to see the Apple drivers work the best (and the older OS?), I just thought Nvidia's were supposed to be better (from what I've read). My OS has been limited by Apple but I'm hoping to do the 10.10 hack update soon and see if that does anything for GPU performance.

As a side question, how are you running multiple OS's, separate hard drives, or one drive partitioned?

No, its not that. It's the OS power managent drivers. MacPro 3,1 users with 10.9 onwards had to delete some kext files which causes GPU performance to drop by 1/3. Happened with Ati cards, and I feel that it happened with Nvidia. However I don't know. I just noticed a drop in performance between 10.8 apple drivers and 10.9 Apple driver. Nvidia couldn't be run on my Mac with 10.9, with any card, after a certain version of the drivers. Older ones ran fine though.

Edit: separate hard drives and separate partitions.

 

[romanboy]

Here is my 970.

And here is the Cuda-Z Performance tab.

It's about 25% slower than everything else I'm seeing in other model MacPro's. I've removed the two offending kexts, and rebuild the kext cache with Kext Utility. No dice, I still cannot get proper performance.

 

[666sheep]

2.5GT/s is your problem, at least in CUDA-Z performance tab.

 

[romanboy]

2.5GT/s is your problem, at least in CUDA-Z performance tab.

I thought as much, but I also thought that the Nvidia web drivers fixed all of that... Before with my Nvidia 570 I couldn't even run the web drivers, but now they don't. Except they don't give me 5GT/s. Anything I can do? Others with Mac Pros 3,1 and Nvidia 970 cards have higher performance.

 

[pixxelpusher]

Here is my 970.

Image

And here is the Cuda-Z Performance tab.

Image

It's about 25% slower than everything else I'm seeing in other model MacPro's. I've removed the two offending kexts, and rebuild the kext cache with Kext Utility. No dice, I still cannot get proper performance.

Thanks for the further benchmarks. I'm planning on benchmarking mine at the end of the month and start looking at upgrades (I'll post results). But from what I've been reading it sounds like the CPU limit of the 2006 1,1 is what's probably bottlenecking my gaming performance as it's not feeding the GPU fast enough (and generally only uses a single CPU core). So I'd get better performance of the HD5870 in a newer model Mac Pro like the 2008 / 2009.

You mention deleting kexts, are the GTX cards generally plug and play or do you have to modify the system to get them running?

 

[romanboy]

Thanks for the further benchmarks. I'm planning on benchmarking mine at the end of the month and start looking at upgrades (I'll post results). But from what I've been reading it sounds like the CPU limit of the 2006 1,1 is what's probably bottlenecking my gaming performance as it's not feeding the GPU fast enough (and generally only uses a single CPU core). So I'd get better performance of the HD5870 in a newer model Mac Pro like the 2008 / 2009.

You mention deleting kexts, are the GTX cards generally plug and play or do you have to modify the system to get them running?

Nah, plug and play. Install the web drivers first though. Some installers won't run though, so you need to get modified ones. See te netkas.org forums.

 

[buzzworm]

I just bought an EVGA 8800 GT 512 video card off eBay that is PC flashed. I'm in sling it into my macpro 1,1. From what I've read the card will work unfleshed but will not show a boot screen.

Since I'd like to have a boot screen I intend on flashing it. Since the Macpro1,1 is 32bit efi don't I need the card to be 32?

Will the card run10.6 thru 10.10 with a 32bit Mac rom flash?

 

[romanboy]

I just bought an EVGA 8800 GT 512 video card off eBay that is PC flashed. I'm in sling it into my macpro 1,1. From what I've read the card will work unfleshed but will not show a boot screen.

Since I'd like to have a boot screen I intend on flashing it. Since the Macpro1,1 is 32bit efi don't I need the card to be 32?

Will the card run10.6 thru 10.10 with a 32bit Mac rom flash?

Well that card SHOULD work, but the EEPROM chip is too small to be flashed. It need to be replaced, really. With a bigger EEPROM chip. MacVidCards do that, but it's worth considering if you need to spend that extra money. Do you REALLY need the boot screen? Further more, flashing with EFI will probably being full PCI-E speed as well, although on a 1,1 you probably only have PCI-E 1 anyway.

 

[buzzworm]

Well that card SHOULD work, but the EEPROM chip is too small to be flashed. It need to be replaced, really. With a bigger EEPROM chip. MacVidCards do that, but it's worth considering if you need to spend that extra money. Do you REALLY need the boot screen? Further more, flashing with EFI will probably being full PCI-E speed as well, although on a 1,1 you probably only have PCI-E 1 anyway.

I' forgot to mention that it's the Superclocked edition (EVGA GeForce 8800 GT Superclocked 512MB PCI-E Video Graphics Card). Doesn't this have the 128k rom? I was reading this page that said it did.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=11554764

Windows PCs only require 64K of flash memory on the card for the video BIOS they use. The Mac, however, needs a 128K flash memory chip on the card, since it has the EFI64 data AND the BIOS information stored on it. Furthermore, I understand this only works when the EEPROM ID has an "MX" on the beginning of it. Flash chips marked with a "PMC" on them won't work, even IF they're 128K.
The specific EVGA board does have the correct 128K flash chip on it ("eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT 512MB DDR3 Superclocked Edition PCI-Express Graphics Card (512-P3-N802-AR)" - $254.99 before $30 rebate.)

Also, will this card work with 10.6 through 10.10? The reason I ask is I want multiple boot drives because of older software.

 

[romanboy]

I' forgot to mention that it's the Superclocked edition (EVGA GeForce 8800 GT Superclocked 512MB PCI-E Video Graphics Card). Doesn't this have the 128k rom? I was reading this page that said it did.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=11554764


Also, will this card work with 10.6 through 10.10? The reason I ask is I want multiple boot drives because of older software.

Oh right! This I don't know. Might be worth having MacVidCards chip in with an answer, if he has the time.

 

[buzzworm]

So I got it all working!

The EVGA GeForce 8800 GT Superclocked 512MB PCI-E Video Graphics Card has a 128k rom. I ran NVflash in Dos from a USB stick and typed in NVFlash check. The results said 1024 which means it's flashable to the Mac Rom.

After flashing the card my MacPro 1,1 now boots with bootloading grey apple screen

It's running 10.7 on one SSD and 10.10.1 on another. They both display boot apple graphic. I'm pretty thrilled.

If anyone cares, I ended up installing a clean copy of 10.10.1 on my other Mac Pro. Then CCC that to a SSD and replaced the two ROM files using Mr. Zarniwoop's instructions.

Copy Pike's EFI32 boot.efi to that drive's /usr/standalone/i386 and /System/Library/CoreServices/ directories overwriting the stock Apple EFI64 boot.efi and repair permissions. That drive should now be bootable on a 2006/2007 Mac Pro.

Still can't believe this old mac is not EOL