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Mac Pro 3,1 "Eight Core" 3.2 GHz + EVGA GTX 660 FTW ACX poor performance.

P

Phreon

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 6, 2014
3
0
Hi,

I'm sorry if this has already come up or has been solved, but I'm someone stumped. I recently acquired a Mac Pro 2008, dual quad core for nearly nothing. I've in the process of "hot rodding" it for video editing, photo editing, etc. I have OSX 10.9.4 on a Crucial SSD + 2 TB WD black drive set up as a fusion drive, am keeping the onboard 8 GB RAM for now and have added a Inateck USB 3 card. I've been messing with the above EVGA GTX 660 card in slot 1 with limited success.

The card works fine for normal desktop, but I've been fighting with CUDA and OpenCL support. I believe I have Cuda working correctly - I had to jump back to the 6.0.51 to get CUDA-Z to find it; 6.5.14 doesn't seem to work. OpenCL is odd. I've tried the built in OSX and nVidia 334.01.02f02 drivers, but openCL seems slow. LuxMark V2.1 results in a score of 524 - TomsHardware shows a LuxMark 2.0 bench of 3787 for the GTX 660. Also, when I do a system report, PCI cards shows as "There was an error while gathering PCI card information."

The card seems to be working ok; FCPX Trial seems snappy, but DaVinci Resolve Lite 11 is almost unusable and Steam games crash. Any idea where to look? I'm at a loss at this point.

Thanks

EDIT: The CompuBench CL test suit looks WORSE using the GTX 660 than the system CPU but bench higher... The card never seems to get warm. I have it drawing power from the MoBo as it should be.
 
Last edited:
Take a few moments to read the sticky thread at top of this section of forum.

Most of your questions are answered there.

Also take a minute to play with Luxmark. There is more than 1 test in there.
 
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Mac Pro's largest bottleneck is due to the Frontside bus. Models after the 3,1 utilized the system bus of Quickpath interconnect, which opened up a lane specifically between the CPU and ram.

That's why you can get a 4,1 then flash to 5,1 and swap out two x5690's and have a new mac pro in a classic shell!
 
TzunamiOSX said:
Are you from Europe? Some faked 660 GPUs are found in Europe. Labeled to Point of View 660 4 GB with manipulated BIOS but it is a much slower 440 Series.
Where did you Bus the Card? Can you post a picture of the Connection Panel?

Here is a picture of th fake GPU

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2014/08/28/fake-gtx-660/1

http://wccftech.com/fake-nvidia-graphic-cards-flood-world-markets/

More infos:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/...fake-card-as-i-am-returning-it-as-soon-as-it/
Click to expand...


Wow. I was not aware of this. Very informative! Thanks for that!
 
Hmm... So am I correct in reading openCL is faster on 5xx series cards then 6xx series? Seems like I wasted my money if that's correct. In my research, the 660 seemed like a sweet spot for price/performance. I'm primarily interested in using the GPU for photo and video editing acceleration - gaming is an afterthought.

Given the 3,1s system bus bottlenecks, all things being equal, would I see better performance from 2 GTX 5xx / 6xx cards or a single one like a Titan? Or am I wasting my time? Also, I haven't found clear information whether SLI on Macs works with dissimilar cards in the same family, i.e, a GTX 6xx and 5xx, for example.

Granted, this is a budget machine - I'm not looking to throw money at it given it's age, but given for about $650 I have an 8 core 3.2 GHz with a 2.24 TB fusion drive set up, USB3, much faster video card than the Radeon 2600 and (soon to be) 16 GB of RAM, I can't complain. It completely smokes any laptop or PC I currently have access to. I think in the video card arena, I'm close to the point of diminishing returns though.

What this all comes down to is FCPX trial seems to play and scrub Gopro H.264 and CineForm video seamlessly while BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve 11 Lite (Feature rich and FREE) performs terribly. I'm not looking to deal with 4K video here, just what my GoPro Hero 3+ Black spits out and RAW photo editing.

Thanks for the feedback thus far.
 
Last edited:
Phreon said:
Hmm... So am I correct in reading openCL is faster on 5xx series cards then 6xx series? Seems like I wasted my money if that's correct. In my research, the 660 seemed like a sweet spot for price/performance. I'm primarily interested in using the GPU for photo and video editing acceleration - gaming is an afterthought.

Given the 3,1s system bus bottlenecks, all things being equal, would I see better performance from 2 GTX 5xx / 6xx cards or a single one like a Titan? Or am I wasting my time? Also, I haven't found clear information whether SLI on Macs works with dissimilar cards in the same family, i.e, a GTX 6xx and 5xx, for example.

Granted, this is a budget machine - I'm not looking to throw money at it given it's age, but given for about $650 I have an 8 core 3.2 GHz with a 2.24 TB fusion drive set up, USB3, much faster video card than the Radeon 2600 and (soon to be) 16 GB of RAM, I can't complain. It completely smokes any laptop or PC I currently have access to. I think in the video card arena, I'm close to the point of diminishing returns though.

What this all comes down to is FCPX trial seems to play and scrub Gopro H.264 and CineForm video seamlessly while BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve 11 Lite (Feature rich and FREE) performs terribly. I'm not looking to deal with 4K video here, just what my GoPro Hero 3+ Black spits out and RAW photo editing.

Thanks for the feedback thus far.
Click to expand...

No such thing as SLI on OSX.

In Windows the rules are pretty clear, you will need an enabler for it to work on matched cards.

You might have a look at barefeats.com. The 3,1 runs into a ceiling sooner than 4,1/5,1 but cards matched to your primary app can be a good thing.

A 5770 pair works exceedingly well in FCPX. The GTX570 is a much better CUDA/OpenCl card then GTX660 will ever be.
 
Korican100 said:
Mac Pro's largest bottleneck is due to the Frontside bus. Models after the 3,1 utilized the system bus of Quickpath interconnect, which opened up a lane specifically between the CPU and ram.

That's why you can get a 4,1 then flash to 5,1 and swap out two x5690's and have a new mac pro in a classic shell!
Click to expand...


So for those who have a MacPro 3.1 (2008), there are hopes to boost it up?
Or is there a way to get around it?
Thanks.


: Mela:
 

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