how to install a video card with 800w on mac pro

[parisinvest]

hello you all, i've just bought a Radeon r9 390x 8go video card, and want to install on my mac pro 5.1, while waiting for the delivery, I want to know how to connect it, its system requires is 750w, but recommended at 800w to 850w, I knew there some ways upgrade the supply power on SATA ports inside, but don't know how to do it, my card has one 6 pin and one 8 pin power connector, thank you so much.

if possible to know, which video card with 4g vram, has the lower power supply please? that's for my another mac pro. thank you.

 

[h9826790]

hello you all, i've just bought a Radeon r9 390x 8go video card, and want to install on my mac pro 5.1, while waiting for the delivery, I want to know how to connect it, its system requires is 750w, but recommended at 800w to 850w, I knew there some ways upgrade the supply power on SATA ports inside, but don't know how to do it, my card has one 6 pin and one 8 pin power connector, thank you so much.

if possible to know, which video card with 4g vram, has the lower power supply please? that's for my another mac pro. thank you.

You mixed up quite a few things.

1) The 390X is not a 800W GPU, but just 275W.

2) Your 5,1 has a 980W PSU. Way more than enough for any single GPU.

3) what 4GB card you are looking for? High performance or low power draw? You can’t have both.

4) there is no way to “upgrade” the 5,1’s PSU

If you want low TDP card, AMD is the very last brand you should consider.

Besides that, do you need boot screen?

Use this card for what?

Why insist 4GB?

Which OS you will run with this card?

We can’t give you good advice without all the details.

 

[parisinvest]

You mixed up quite a few things.

1) The 390X is not a 800W GPU, but just 275W.

2) Your 5,1 has a 980W PSU. Way more than enough for any single GPU.

3) what 4GB card you are looking for? High performance or low power draw? You can’t have both.

4) there is no way to “upgrade” the 5,1’s PSU

If you want low TDP card, AMD is the very last brand you should consider.

Besides that, do you need boot screen?

Use this card for what?

Why insist 4GB?

Which OS you will run with this card?

We can’t give you good advice without all the details.

hi sir,
thank you for your reply, I bought the card from eBay, so its description said need 750w power, and i checked amazon seller it's said also 750w, so was I confused too, btw if like you said my mac pro provide enough power, how do i use the cable, please? how many mini 6pin to 6pin, or mini 6 pin to 8 pin, or SATA to 8 pin ? I've checked on youtube, but still not an ideal how to do the conection exactly;
for the 4go video card, it's flexible, one with 3go should be ok, just for some photo edtion, and the start up screen is essential, i wont cry if i don't have it, but need to switch to windows sometimes, so better has the start up screen, i need a 4go card aussi for mac pro running high sierra or sierra, could be flashed one, all ports work, nvidia or amd both possible, but better use only the mini 6 pin power supply on the mother board, so i dont have to draw my disc out to use sata power.
thank you again for your help.
daniel

 

[Macschrauber]

The seller meant the pc should have a 800 W PSU - for the whole machine.

 

[h9826790]

hi sir,
thank you for your reply, I bought the card from eBay, so its description said need 750w power, and i checked amazon seller it's said also 750w, so was I confused too, btw if like you said my mac pro provide enough power, how do i use the cable, please? how many mini 6pin to 6pin, or mini 6 pin to 8 pin, or SATA to 8 pin ? I've checked on youtube, but still not an ideal how to do the conection exactly;
for the 4go video card, it's flexible, one with 3go should be ok, just for some photo edtion, and the start up screen is essential, i wont cry if i don't have it, but need to switch to windows sometimes, so better has the start up screen, i need a 4go card aussi for mac pro running high sierra or sierra, could be flashed one, all ports work, nvidia or amd both possible, but better use only the mini 6 pin power supply on the mother board, so i dont have to draw my disc out to use sata power.
thank you again for your help.
daniel

For any single 8pin, you need two mini 6pin to power it properly.

For any single 6pin, only one mini 6pin is required.

For a single 8pin, at least use three SATA to power it, but still can't guarantee the SATA port can handle the power spike.

If boot screen is essential, then a flashed GTX 680 4GB is a good choice. If 3GB is also OK, then any properly flash reference 7950, 7970, R9 280, R9 280x are also OK. However, if you want a card that can be properly powered by just the mini 6pins. Then you should only pick the card that has dual 6pin input (no 8pin input).

There is no requirement to dual boot Windows and macOS. Choose the next boot partition in system preference or using something like BootChamp should be good enough.

Also, I can't see why need 4GB card to run Sierra / High Sierra.

 

[parisinvest]

For any single 8pin, you need two mini 6pin to power it properly.

For any single 6pin, only one mini 6pin is required.

For a single 8pin, at least use three SATA to power it, but still can't guarantee the SATA port can handle the power spike.

If boot screen is essential, then a flashed GTX 680 4GB is a good choice. If 3GB is also OK, then any properly flash reference 7950, 7970, R9 280, R9 280x are also OK. However, if you want a card that can be properly powered by just the mini 6pins. Then you should only pick the card that has dual 6pin input (no 8pin input).

There is no requirement to dual boot Windows and macOS. Choose the next boot partition in system preference or using something like BootChamp should be good enough.

Also, I can't see why need 4GB card to run Sierra / High Sierra.

thank you so much, i've learn a lot of, btw why it is useless using a 4go video card on a mac pro ? doesnt it need more gpu power to do video edition? i mean yes we can understand that culculte need more cpu power, and photos too, but video needs more gpu power am i right?

 

[h9826790]

thank you so much, i've learn a lot of, btw why it is useless using a 4go video card on a mac pro ? doesnt it need more gpu power to do video edition? i mean yes we can understand that culculte need more cpu power, and photos too, but video needs more gpu power am i right?

I didn’t say 4GB VRAM is useless.

For 1080P video editing, 3GB is still enough. I tested it by myself. On a cMP, a HD7950 3GB can do some simple 4k video editing without issue.

At the end, it’s the software to determine if CPU / GPU is more important.

GPU can also compute.

CPU can edit videos.

In fact, on cMP (in MacOS), all video decoding / encoding still done by CPU, not GPU.