GeForce GTX 480 on a Mac PRO. Possible?

[macuserx86]

nVidia, burning tomorrow's homes.

Of all the Asian Ricer shops, that is the best one.
somebody call 911
Fermi fire burning on the dancefloor!


I really hope we can get the ATI 5xxx series in a Mac Pro soon.

 

[10THzMac]

I have just purchased a Palit GTX 480.

I have tried three different configs for the external power feeds:

1. 6-pin from motherboard, 8-pin from molex > 6-pin adapter to 6-pin > 8-pin adapter.
2. 6-pin from molex > 6-pin adapter, 8-pin from motherboard to 6-pin > 8-pin adapter.
3. 6-pin from motherboard, 8-pin from 2 x molex to 8-pin adapter

These all boot fine, but none cause the fan to spin up - this is worrying since it should spin up, even at idle. When I initially bought the card, I tried it and got the fan problem, took it back to the shop where they tried it on their rig and it worked fine. I got a replacement card anyway just in case and tried it, but the same problem, no fan spin up. Without the fan going, the card hits 110°C and shuts off.

I previously had a 4870x2 (now very glitchy and crashes starting any game) which was powered either using 1 or 2, I can't remember which, but know it was one of them. This setup was working fine, the 4870x2 would power up just fine with it's fan going. The 4870x2 has a higher power usage than the 480 which is confusing me as to why it's not spinning up the fans. My 8800GT also works just fine off the same slot.

Is anyone successfully powering the card off the internal power supply?

So this is interesting and worrying - I only got up to running an 8800 + 285 using the 2 motherboard 6 pin and rerouted optical molex to pricure 3x 6-pin and that was fine.

Can anyone help macest here - maybe

(a) someone who has in the past powered a 295 internally?
(b) does anyone know the actual rated power for the two motherboard 6-pin and optical supplies - maybe it is just falling short of what the 480n needs and the fan is a symptom?

I cannot comment on the heat from an second internal PSU as I went external as soon as I went to 2x285.

 

[MacVidCards]

I used to run a 4870x2 in my 2006. (Single card with Dual GPUs) It has Quad 3.0 5165s i added, which may have added to power issue.

I used a 6 pin to 8 pin adapter.

Whether I ran this from one of motherboard connectors or the molex adapter, i still could run out of juice. However, this would only be playing Crysis on 30" with everything cranked.

And then it would take an explosion or similarly difficult rendering task and BAM the whole machine would shut off. Made the explosion seem very real but after about 5 times I decided to sell 4870X2 since it was only especially useful in Windows and i wasn't interested in replacing a burnt PSU for a silly game. Fan always worked fine however, and quite a fan it was.

I have noticed some 8800GTS and even a GTX285 actually stop fan after initial boot but fan always restarts after a few mins as temps build and saturate heatsink.

this is a very odd issue, hard to imagine it is just a lack of power.

 

[jav6454]

Of all the Asian Ricer shops, that is the best one.
somebody call 911
Fermi fire burning on the dancefloor!

I really hope we can get the ATI 5xxx series in a Mac Pro soon.

I love you for that reference.

A GTX 480 with 197.75 drivers from nVidia.

If you dared install a GTX 480, this is proper cooling

But the following picture is what nVidia fanboys actually believe:

Click to enlarge

 

[jav6454]

Needs more fermi fire.

 

[MasterPug]

More or less as expected, get grey screen of death under 10.5.8 and under 10.6.3 I get the system up but with the card only just recognized, with sysinfo reporting the PCI ID correctly as per screen shot below. I have a mixture of CoreVidia and Netkas injectors in there to manage the PC 285 I just took out, so this is not terribly controlled.

Anyway, it might help readers to know the hardware is perfectly capable of running this card, so it is a matter of OS X drivers now, and perhaps waiting for a full Mac version.

Ok, I think I'm in a bit above my head at this point. I have a GTX 470 installed now and running in bootcamp, with an old GT 120 left in there for when I'm in OSX, but it won't finish the OSX boot.

I intend for the 470 to be more or less non-functional in OSX, such as you have in your set up. What sort of horrible driver fiddling do I need to do to accomplish this?

(By the way, once I got the right power cables for it, the 470 is powered just nicely through the motherboard. No extra fiddling required.)

((apologies for the thread necromancy))

 

[alxklv]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/955949/

 

[VanneDC]

just did some reading and i am not sure its as bad as everyone thinks it is, the GTX 480 is amped at 250w tdp, whereas the mac pro (2008) 3,1 has sufficient power to run cards up to 300w.. so if thats the only card your running you should be able to do so???