So I've got a bit of a weird setup going on, I'll admit. I've been running ESXi 6.0.0 on my 2012 5,1 for almost 7 years at this point. Initially this was to support a bespoke CI workflow that needed some macOS build agents but eventually just turned into my homelab. Everything's been going great so far, only I decided recently to overhaul the hardware and give my media server VM some more oomph with a passthrough GPU for hardware transcode (the HD5770 barely supports any modern video codec).
I thought it would be clever to retire the EVGA RTX 3060 Ti FTW3 in my desktop and move it over to the Mac Pro, so I went all in on Pixlas-modding the PSU to support it. After a bunch of trial and error and testing with a DMM I did finally manage to verify that the mod was successful, so I plugged in the new card. I didn't really expect any video output from the host given that I made a point to not install any of the Nvidia drivers on it (it's gonna be used entirely within the guest after all), but after a pretty long time the ESXi management network didn't come up at all.
To try and get some level of boot up diagnostics from the machine, I decided to reinstall the old ATI card (in its original x16 lane) and the new EVGA card on top of it (in the second x16 lane). With this configuration I've found that consistently the machine won't post at all unless I have the EVGA card unplugged.
It's hard to find info pertaining to my situation specifically, as I have no intention of running macOS on this machine (at least, not on bare metal), but I figure it could be one of a couple different things:
Does anyone have any insight into this? Willing to test pretty much anything, provided I have the time, spoons, and tools to do so. I'm also not attached to ESXi—I'm slowly working towards migrating the host to Proxmox, assuming the at-this-point ancient version of ESXi plays nice with VM transfer.
I thought it would be clever to retire the EVGA RTX 3060 Ti FTW3 in my desktop and move it over to the Mac Pro, so I went all in on Pixlas-modding the PSU to support it. After a bunch of trial and error and testing with a DMM I did finally manage to verify that the mod was successful, so I plugged in the new card. I didn't really expect any video output from the host given that I made a point to not install any of the Nvidia drivers on it (it's gonna be used entirely within the guest after all), but after a pretty long time the ESXi management network didn't come up at all.
To try and get some level of boot up diagnostics from the machine, I decided to reinstall the old ATI card (in its original x16 lane) and the new EVGA card on top of it (in the second x16 lane). With this configuration I've found that consistently the machine won't post at all unless I have the EVGA card unplugged.
It's hard to find info pertaining to my situation specifically, as I have no intention of running macOS on this machine (at least, not on bare metal), but I figure it could be one of a couple different things:
- There's some specific driver thing I need to do, or some BIOS/firmware setting I need to change. I'm not really sure what this would be, but I'm kinda hoping for it because I figure it would be the easiest thing to solve.
- It's a power draw issue. Like, the 3060 Ti is pulling too much power and shutting the system down before it can start. I've seen references to this on here and in other places discussing the need for the Pixlas mod in the first place but it seems to me that the PSU should be beefy enough to supply even this card. Looking around online, benchmarks seem to say that it peaks under sustained load at around 257W and idles at around 9W, both of which should be fine and I don't think I'd reasonably hit the peak under my intended use-case. Maybe it pulls a lot of current at startup?
- I'm not convinced this is even the case, because the machine itself stays powered when the card is plugged in. I just don't get a boot screen even from the original GPU.
- The hardware is just entirely incompatible and there's no way I will be able to run this configuration. For obvious reasons, I'm hoping this is not the case. But if it is, then it is. I guess.
Does anyone have any insight into this? Willing to test pretty much anything, provided I have the time, spoons, and tools to do so. I'm also not attached to ESXi—I'm slowly working towards migrating the host to Proxmox, assuming the at-this-point ancient version of ESXi plays nice with VM transfer.
