Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti in Mac Pro 4,1->5,1?

[JulianBoolean]

Some of the higher priced GTX 1080s are overclocked quite a bit and require more power as does the 1080ti and above. The 1080s with the single 8 pin connector work quite well on just power from the MB. I have a flashed 8 pin Gigabyte gaming card, because I really like the cooler.

Given that it's tough to locate any of the internal PSU options that slide into the lower optical bay, I'm taking an interest in your comment bolded above.

Q1. What are the 1080s (model name, vendor) with the single 8 pin connector?

Q2. If the single 8 pin connects directly to the motherboard... then you don't have to sacrifice a hard drive bay, correct?

 

[Dr. Stealth]

forgive my ignorance, but do these secondary power supplies mean a second power cable leaving the mac to the wall, and do you nave a second power switch, or are they wired into the existing power supply?

Good question... Yes, the way this PSU is sold it's intended to have it's own power cord running through the computer and out the back to it's own wall plug. To me that's kind of ghetto. So I tapped into my Mac PSU to power the aux PSU. It was pretty simple as both PSU's are only a few inches apart. No external wires and the aux PSU turns on when I power up the Mac.

 

[flowrider]

Given that it's tough to locate any of the internal PSU options that slide into the lower optical bay, I'm taking an interest in your comment bolded above.

Q1. What are the 1080s (model name, vendor) with the single 8 pin connector?

Q2. If the single 8 pin connects directly to the motherboard... then you don't have to sacrifice a hard drive bay, correct?

Q1. The card I have is this one:

http://www.gigabyte.us/Graphics-Card/GV-N1080G1-GAMING-8GD#kf

There are many others with just one 8 pin connector, including the Founders Edition. You just need to look at the specs.

Q2. Correct. But you need to use both MB 6 pin connectors and cables with an adapter cable like this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/nVidia-DUAL...6fc0683:g:fPgAAOSwAKxWT8SJ&afsrc=1&rmvSB=true

Lou

 

[JulianBoolean]

I'm running (2) factory overclocked EVGA GTX 1080 TI FTW3's (PN 11G-P4-6696-KR) with no issues using a 450w auxiliary psu in the lower optical bay. The 1080 TI's are dual 8-pin each with a TDP of 280w each.

Sierra 10.12.6 & Nvidia Web Driver 378.05.05.25f01 (No Issues)

Windows 10 Pro 1703 & Nvidia Driver 22.21.13.8541 (No Issues)


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Hi Dr. Stealth,

Wow! Wondering if you have any digits for me to ogle. Any bench testing on hand to share? Or willing to perform? Would be especially usefull to me, from your signature it appears we share the same MP 5.1 12 core 3.46Ghz.

Geek Bench
https://www.geekbench.com

Octane (Image Rendering Test)
https://www.geekbench.com

Cinebench R15 (Image Rendering Test)
https://www.maxon.net/en/products/cinebench/

 

[Synchro3]

Hi Dr. Stealth,

Wow! Wondering if you have any digits for me to ogle. Any bench testing on hand to share? Or willing to perform?

Geek Bench
https://www.geekbench.com

Octane (Image Rendering Test)
https://www.geekbench.com

Cinebench R15 (Image Rendering Test)
https://www.maxon.net/en/products/cinebench/

Here some Geekbench results with a GTX 1080 Ti in my Hackintosh: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-hackintosh-thread.1900326/page-24#post-24967575

Never installed the GTX 1080 Ti in my Mac Pro, because I want to use the normal PSU.

 

[Macinsquatch]

I managed to cram two Evga Hybrid 1080 Ti's into my Mac Pro. Hard part was finding a place for the radiators.

 

[Dr. Stealth]

Hi Dr. Stealth,

Wow! Wondering if you have any digits for me to ogle. Any bench testing on hand to share? Or willing to perform? Would be especially usefull to me, from your signature it appears we share the same MP 5.1 12 core 3.46Ghz.

Geek Bench
https://www.geekbench.com

Octane (Image Rendering Test)
https://www.geekbench.com

Cinebench R15 (Image Rendering Test)
https://www.maxon.net/en/products/cinebench/

Here you go... GeekBench, Octane Bench & Cinebench

 

[Dr. Stealth]

I managed to cram two Evga Hybrid 1080 Ti's into my Mac Pro. Hard part was finding a place for the radiators.

That is the most awesome upgrade. I never would have even thought it was possible. Very cool.

 

[Macinsquatch]

I did the PSU mod, and those particular cards (Evga 1080Ti SC2 Hybrid) have a single 8 pin and single 6 pin. Power doesn't seem to be an issue, and I removed the Evga factory fans and have the radiators nested under HDD 1 bay in front of the PCI fan. Then just turned up the PCI fan manually to keep things cool. So far so good.

 

[JulianBoolean]

Here you go... GeekBench, Octane Bench & Cinebench

View attachment 719137
View attachment 719158
View attachment 719138

View attachment 719139

Hi Dr. Stealth, this is sooooooo incredibly useful to me. Thanks for your time performing these bench tests!

 

[Dr. Stealth]

Hi Dr. Stealth, this is sooooooo incredibly useful to me.
Thanks for your time performing these bench tests!

I'm glad I'm useful to someone....

 

[JulianBoolean]

While I am utterly *crushing* on the dual 1080ti setups posted by Dr. Stealth and Macinsquatch, I can't locate any of the PSUs that would fit into an optical bay. Even if I did find one, I'd want another for back up in case of failure.

For top shelf NVidia cards, I’ve zeroed into the following options and questions.

Option A: Go Big Or Home, Big $
External PCI expansion for Multiple GPU (Cubix, Netstor, Amfeltec etc...)
Netstor has 4 and 6 slot boxes with 1000 - 1200 watts that have caught my interest.
You can do up to 16 GPU with Amfeltec cluster.
A-Q1: Yes expensive. But any reason why these wouldn’t work?
A-Q2: Can't use any of the thunderbolt 2-3 eGPU boxes, on a MP 5.1 correct?


Option B: One 1080ti with external PSU
This is what the OP has opted to do
B-Q1: The OP wants to play it safe in terms of power draw?


Option C: One 1080ti, no additional PSU
Dual 6 pin to 8 pin solution
See reply #4 from h9826790
See reply #19 and #2 from iCreate
See reply# 50 from heero503
C-Q1: All of these solutions require losing one or two HDD Bays?
C-Q2: All of these options are "less safe" in some way than external PSU? I know that's a vague inquiry but hoping to get insight on the grey area here.


Option D: One 1080 (non ti) No additional PSU
Of the many vendor flavors, there are a few 1080s with one eight pin connector. Only ~190 watts TPD
means you can connect directly to the MB, no routing to the optical bay, no lose HDD bays.
See replies 32, 53, by flowrider.
D-Q1: since this GPU is so power efficient, could you drop in two of these with no additional PSU?

Thanks!

 

[Macinsquatch]

If you are handy with a soldering iron no additional psu is needed. I’m powering both cards with the factory internal psu.

 

[William Payne]

Its interesting how it seems that a number of those using external psu setups and not the internal power connectors are not have any problem. (or if they are they aren't talking about it). I know people will say it is not and say I am wrong but I do wonder if the pascal glitches are some kind of power issue. I talked to Create Pro about it and they think its a power issue as they haven't had issues with the way they power cards internally. They use some kind of custom power cable.

 

[Macinsquatch]

Both 8 pin connectors on the two cards are getting power from the cables I soldered onto the low voltage side of the psu. Didn’t want that many amps running through the motherboard. No problems at all. And these cards do heavy Cuda workloads that take up to a week to process.

 

[pierrox]

While I am utterly *crushing* on the dual 1080ti setups posted by Dr. Stealth and Macinsquatch, I can't locate any of the PSUs that would fit into an optical bay. Even if I did find one, I'd want another for back up in case of failure.

If you're ready to spend big bucks on a rendering machine -personally I wouldn't invest too much in a 7 years+ old computer with unforeseeable future- why don't you build a Linux machine dedicated to your work? I don't know about the softwares you're using, but most film studios I work with have dedicated Linux machines for Davinci Resolve because those are the most powerful/stable combos you can get.

 

[Smokeysbc]

If you are handy with a soldering iron no additional psu is needed. I’m powering both cards with the factory internal psu.

I was looking at a EVGA GTX 1080 TI Founders edition for a Mac 5.1. Can that be powered by the two 6 pins from the MB and 2 SATA ports to a 6pin to 8pin for the second slot on that card. I am just worriedI won't be able to get enough power without an external power supply.

Thanks,

 

[JulianBoolean]

Quick Question: Mac Vid Cards currently has two options for the 1080ti:

GTX 1080 Ti 11 GB ... DPx3/HDMI
GTX 1080 Ti 11 GB ... DPx2/HDMIx2

Can somebody elaborate what's the difference here? I'm not understanding the abbreviations.

 

[flowrider]

^^^^
DPx3/HDMI = 3 Display Ports, 1 HDMI port
DPx2/HDMIx2 = 2 Display Ports, 2 HDMI Ports

Lou

 

[JulianBoolean]

^^^^
DPx3/HDMI = 3 Display Ports, 1 HDMI port
DPx2/HDMIx2 = 2 Display Ports, 2 HDMI Ports

Lou

Hmm... I'm currently using two Silver 30" Apple Cinema Monitors, with my 2012 MP 5.1.

I have a third Apple Cinema, but it's not hooked up. These old monitors won't last forever, and I will eventually need to replace with 2 or three newer monitors.

Q: Is there a better choice here that will cover both current needs and future options?

 

[mattspace]

Q: Is there a better choice here that will cover both current needs and future options?

That really depends on your budget. 5K screens seem to be in a no-man's land, the only company making them is LG, and they're only doing so for Apple - noone else is selling 5k screens any more from the look of things. LG seem to be selling their excess manufacturing capacity for those panels as their Thunderbolt 3 displays, and the conspiracy theorist in me suspects that Apple may have suggested to LG that if they want to keep the iMac supplier contract, they'll ONLY make 5k displays in TB3.

Which leaves a question of where are all these DP1.4 5k screens we were supposed to have?

Right now, if you want a retina-ish screen, Dell does a new premium 27" 4k wide gamut display, or there's their slightly older tech 8k 32" display which is a lot more expensive.

 

[pierrox]

For the sake of testing, I got hold of a 1080Ti and I realized that I have a bottleneck. Yes, all the benchmark apps show the insane power compared to my 980Ti, or to my old R9 290X, but in real life use it doesn't make a big difference.

I need power to crunch video rushes with DaVinci Resolve and several tests showed me that the bottleneck is not the GPU! The project I'm currently working on is shot in 4K @10bits with several GH5 cameras. I'm converting to Avid DnxHD36 to edit from 300 hours+ of footage. My GTX 980Ti crunches happily at 60fps on average. I took a timeline and converted it with the same specs using the 1080Ti: 62fps.

The bottleneck is the drive speed. I improved a bit by converting to a SSD instead of the RAID0 (500MBps vs 320MBps), but let's face it: in the real world rushes are delivered on USB3 spinning drives, not on SSD. If I was backing up to a monster RAID, it would improve a bit, but clearly not massively. Now if my rushes were different and required more conversion power, it might be worth the investment. But for now, I'm just going to return the 1080Ti.

My post is a bit off track, so to go back to the subject, all those tests were done with my 4,1>5,1 @2x3.46Ghz and the GPU is plugged in via a Pixlax mod.

 

[h9826790]

For the sake of testing, I got hold of a 1080Ti and I realized that I have a bottleneck. Yes, all the benchmark apps show the insane power compared to my 980Ti, or to my old R9 290X, but in real life use it doesn't make a big difference.

I need power to crunch video rushes with DaVinci Resolve and several tests showed me that the bottleneck is not the GPU! The project I'm currently working on is shot in 4K @10bits with several GH5 cameras. I'm converting to Avid DnxHD36 to edit from 300 hours+ of footage. My GTX 980Ti crunches happily at 60fps on average. I took a timeline and converted it with the same specs using the 1080Ti: 62fps.

The bottleneck is the drive speed. I improved a bit by converting to a SSD instead of the RAID0 (500MBps vs 320MBps), but let's face it: in the real world rushes are delivered on USB3 spinning drives, not on SSD. If I was backing up to a monster RAID, it would improve a bit, but clearly not massively. Now if my rushes were different and required more conversion power, it might be worth the investment. But for now, I'm just going to return the 1080Ti.

My post is a bit off track, so to go back to the subject, all those tests were done with my 4,1>5,1 @2x3.46Ghz and the GPU is plugged in via a Pixlax mod.

Your “convert” means video transcoding / encoding?

If yes, of course it won’t make any difference, you are CPU limiting.

The video engine of the 1080Ti only can be use in Windows or Linux. Not in MacOS. Without GPU hardware decoding / encoding ability in MacOS, you are almost always CPU limiting.

For video export (encoding), no doubt you have to do it in MacOS with your editing apps. In this case, the 1080Ti is completely useless (same as any other GPU). But for transcoding, I am now using FFMpeg in Windows, my 1080Ti can easily go 10x faster than my W3690. I’m some specific case, it’s about 30x faster.

I am very happy with my 1080Ti’s performance. However, the bad news is, in MacOS, it’s very crippled. But this never change. MacOS is never aim to be a high performance platform. It’s for easy daily use.

 

[William Payne]

For the sake of testing, I got hold of a 1080Ti and I realized that I have a bottleneck. Yes, all the benchmark apps show the insane power compared to my 980Ti, or to my old R9 290X, but in real life use it doesn't make a big difference.

I need power to crunch video rushes with DaVinci Resolve and several tests showed me that the bottleneck is not the GPU! The project I'm currently working on is shot in 4K @10bits with several GH5 cameras. I'm converting to Avid DnxHD36 to edit from 300 hours+ of footage. My GTX 980Ti crunches happily at 60fps on average. I took a timeline and converted it with the same specs using the 1080Ti: 62fps.

The bottleneck is the drive speed. I improved a bit by converting to a SSD instead of the RAID0 (500MBps vs 320MBps), but let's face it: in the real world rushes are delivered on USB3 spinning drives, not on SSD. If I was backing up to a monster RAID, it would improve a bit, but clearly not massively. Now if my rushes were different and required more conversion power, it might be worth the investment. But for now, I'm just going to return the 1080Ti.

My post is a bit off track, so to go back to the subject, all those tests were done with my 4,1>5,1 @2x3.46Ghz and the GPU is plugged in via a Pixlax mod.

Out of curiosity did you get Davinci Resolve from the App Store or from Davinci Resolve directly?

 

[pierrox]

Out of curiosity did you get Davinci Resolve from the App Store or from Davinci Resolve directly?

No I bought it from Blackmagic. The version of the MacApp store is crippled - or at least it was when I bought it (version 12), it didn't offer GPU/Cuda acceleration. It was tailored for the Mac Pro Trashcan, out of an agreement between Apple and BMD.

Your “convert” means video transcoding / encoding?
If yes, of course it won’t make any difference, you are CPU limiting.

Yes I meant transcoding. But you're not totally right in the sense that Davinci uses CUDA to help the process, or OpenGL though not as much. On the same setup, when I had the R9 280X installed, I was peaking at 30fps (60 with the 980Ti) and for fun I tried the GT120 on its own and it peaked at 7fps. Now it won't even launch as BMD removed it from the supported cards.