It's literally in the first post.
Thanks, but either I miss the forest for the trees or it’s not there. I’m talking about a pcie Adapter card to put the original Apple Mac Pro drive inside a cMP.
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NVMe with ST-NGFF2013-C; Vega Internal GPU; Mac Pro 2013 (6,1)
- Thread starter CodeJingle
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Thanks, but either I miss the forest for the trees or it’s not there. I’m talking about a pcie Adapter card to put the original Apple Mac Pro drive inside a cMP.
Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry - I totally misread your post. Whoops! That'll teach me for replying when I've just walked in from work. LOL.
I think Sintech make adapters. Haven't tried them, but I'm thinking about getting one too but found it hard to know which one to buy... http://eshop.sintech.cn/storage-adapter-20132016-mac-ssd-c-130_132.html
Hi everyone.
This is and impressive thread. Kudos to you @CodeJingle and everyone else helping on this. Impressive indeed.
I've been playing with external GPUs connected to Macbooks for a while (via Thunderbolt) and the possibility to connect a third party GPU to a Mac Pro 6,1 came to my mind while reading this post "Late 2013 Mac Pro System Block Diagram" https://egpu.io/forums/desktop-computing/late-2013-mac-pro-system-block-diagram/ at https://egpu.io
According to this diagram your findings are correct:
- The CPU has 40 PCIe G3 lanes.
- 16 lanes go to each GPU .
- and 8 lanes to the PCIe switch located at the IO board.
- There are 4 additional lanes (DMI Gen2 ?) that go to the PCH located on the Logic board.
- This PCH provides PCIe G2 to the rest devices.
- among them, 4 lanes to the PCIe SSD storage located at GPU B board.
This architecture has a bottleneck when it comes to internal storage: 4 lanes will give us a maximum of 2 GBytes/sec (4 lanes from the SSD to the PCH and 4 lanes from the PCH to the CPU). I could connect a GPU to the SSD port (like this) but it won't be able to go over that limit.
External via thunderbolt won't help. Thunderbolt 2 has a theoretical limit of 2 GBytes/sec (that never reaches).
The Logic board brings the PCIe lanes coming from the CPU directly to the GPUs without any other steps in between (like your investigations confirmed) hence it should be possible to disconnect a GPU and bring these x16 to an external card. A very exciting perspective!
What I'm trying to do: I'm looking for a "Card breakout adapter" for the FCI Meg-Array connector (basically a connector already soldered on a board).
I don't have tools nor experience dealing with that kind of compact electronics and a card breakout adapter would help me to explore these connections and try to bring cables to a card.
This is the closest I've got: http://www.zebax.com/doc/ZX1/ZX181-Meg-Array.pdf
Unfortunately this one is for a 400 pins connector and not for the 300 we need
Congrats again and just mentioning this here in case one of your readers can help.
Thanks!
Juan
You can find 300-pin MEG-array connectors here. Unfortunately no breakout board
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No worries. Since I’m not a native speaker my text might have been not that clear..
Thanks for the link. I will check it out and give it a try. Will let you know how that goes.
No worries. Just FYI, I'm still waiting for an adapter I ordered from them Mon 23 July... so be prepared for a wait.
Disappointing. The only reason I upgraded my internal ssd was to have a reasonable sized bootcamp partition. I hope they figure it out.
My experience of BootCamp on this machine when I installed it a month ago was that it's pointless. VMware can do anything that needs Windows to run well enough except games, and the bootcamp drivers for the video cards under windows are SO bad and out of date that current games (Star Wars Battlefront 2 for example) don't even run, and when you hack them to run they are shockingly bad frame rates so pointless... :/
I don't play BF2, but I've had good experiences using the bootcampdrivers.com drivers for my d700s. I only do casual gaming (World of Tanks/Warships, Guildwars 2, etc). Ironically, many of the games I still play actually have Mac clients that are either just plain broken, or perform horribly on macOS.
I did briefly investigate bootcampdrivers.com but was uneasy about non-authentic drivers. In the end I just kept an old Mac Pro 3,1 around with a GTX680 in it purely for Windows 10 games. Much faster anyway than a single D300...
@CodeJingle
I'm trying to mod the cheesegrater BootROM to make it boot from FL1100 and I'm investigating ROMDumps of 5,1 and 6,1 Mac Pros.
I've found the hardware descriptor in the private NVRAM part of the trashcan BootROM, maybe this could be useful to you? I don't remember you referring to it.
I'm trying to mod the cheesegrater BootROM to make it boot from FL1100 and I'm investigating ROMDumps of 5,1 and 6,1 Mac Pros.
I've found the hardware descriptor in the private NVRAM part of the trashcan BootROM, maybe this could be useful to you? I don't remember you referring to it.
Outside of NVMe you are essentially describing the purpose of this thread. You are welcome to try it. Add your research journal entries to the thread.
I have most of the pins mapped already, including all the PCIe lanes. It is simpler to solder wires directly to the logic board which has most of the meg array pins already broken out as test points on the bottom of the board (so you don't really need a breakout board). Just buy a 2nd logic board and save one of them as the untouched vanilla. More expensive but simpler.
A 2nd way to break out all the pins is with the meg array connector from digikey. My post about that is already in this thread - here for the two 300 pin GPU connectors
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ac-pro-2013-6-1.2085886/page-23#post-26077809
Though less widely available, here are the equivalent for the 320 pin IO connector
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ac-pro-2013-6-1.2085886/page-23#post-26078850
I am temporarily taking care of three children instead of two (kinship care dealio). This has an extreme reduction in my spare time. So my posting will be more sparse. Still there is the possibility for me to personally hookup replacement internal GPUs in the next few months (hopefully by November 2018, one year since I started the project). We will see.
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Drivers from BootCampDrivers.com is required for boot camp on trash can. Absolute garbage without it. Latest Windows 10 runs 4k at 60 hz and can play games reasonably well on dual D700s. But you need BootCampDrivers.com otherwise yes agreed run in a VM.
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You might as well DM me the entire image for the latest version of 6,1 firmware. Should only be 8 megabytes right?
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Like this or something else?
https://m.newegg.com/products/N82E16815287035
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Isn't that just an m.2 adatper for m-key SSDs?
I would like to reuse my old original apple SSD inside a cMP 5,1
Instead of using the OWC enclosure, like you did.
You want to re-use nMP 6,1 SSD inside of cMP 5,1? There is no adapter for that currently. Maybe there is a market for this reverse adapter that does not exist yet.
Update: I was wrong see post for follow-up
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ac-pro-2013-6-1.2085886/page-30#post-26373233
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I have two of those adapters, with SSUBX, seems a common one.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Ada...108.1000016.1.535ff07ewzbMay&isOrigTitle=true
Thank you for correction. In this case I love to be wrong! Yes that looks like Apple stock SSD slot in the PCIe adapter card.
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I've sent a link from when I bought the cards, updated link https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Ada...1465-Mac-Pro-MD878-ME253-SSD/32800886955.html
Thank you! I saw that card and was wondering if it would work. I was just wondering why the nMP was not mentioned in any advertisement or description.
Gonna order one of those!
It's only a adapter, and not a good one, but works nicely. I bought a heatsink install kit too, SSUAX/SSUBX works a lot better with heatsinks.
I've received the Sintech C adapter which I bought to upgrade my nMP from 256GB to 1TB.
But it occurred to me that perhaps I can transplant my 2015 MBP's 1TB SSD (655-1810) to the nMP and instead upgrade the MBP to a 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD with the Sintech adapter.
In principle, the transplant should not be an issue yes? Thanks in advance!
But it occurred to me that perhaps I can transplant my 2015 MBP's 1TB SSD (655-1810) to the nMP and instead upgrade the MBP to a 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD with the Sintech adapter.
In principle, the transplant should not be an issue yes? Thanks in advance!
I used to switch the original SSDs from my MBPs (Late 2013, Mid 2014, Early 2015) to my nMP and vice versa: no issues at all.
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Are there no sleep issues with such an adapter? It should be the following, https://www.ebay.it/itm/Sintech-M-2...459516?hash=item1a59209dfc:g:kq0AAOSwSrxbMVvt Is it correct?
Thanks.
Thanks for your reply. It answers my question on the viability of transplanting the MacBook Pro SSD to the nMP.
I've been following a parallel thread here on macrumors.com about using the Sintech adapter with nVME SSDs in MacBooks. As far as I understand there are definitely sleep/hibernation issues without patching the EFI on 2013-2014 MacBooks. In general, the larger effect appears to be on battery life due to the higher power draw of Samsung SSDs in particular. I've been considering the lower power draw Intel 760p 2TB which appeared successful for at least one user, although I might wait for the Intel 660p 2TB for a slower but lower priced alternative to the Samsung 970 EVO 2TB.
I ordered two of these long Sintech C adapters on Amazon and they were shipped directly from Sintech in China. They appear identical to the one you linked from eBay.
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I can confirm that ntfs is having conflicts with apfs.
So is there any way I can use windows and mac together?
So is there any way I can use windows and mac together?
Yes ! Install Windows on it's own, dedicated spinner HDD - boot into EFI and select the Win HDD.
Works for me .. long bootup though = black screen with a blinking cursor for up to 1 minute. . then Bingo !
I haven't used Bootcamp for years as I only use Win for flashing GPU's .
Hmm I guess that's for mac 5,1 not 6,1? But I will give a shot to not use bootcamp this time.
Thanks!
Similar to feedback from MIKX, you can have a second NVMe drive and partition it as NTFS-only with no APFS partitions on the same drive. That should work and not crash. This is unfortunate for Mac Pro 6,1 since it requires a second hard drive located outside of the cylinder housing. This type of setup may also increase the difficulty of switching boot volumes.
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Except for Mac Pro 6,1 there is currently no evidence to suggest this bug exists on any other Apple computer. But no one has tried to reproduce this issue on a 5,1 or iMac Pro, at least no one that has gotten back to me. So there is a possibility.
Anyone with a 5,1 or iMac Pro willing to attempt a bug repro for this issue?
[doublepost=1535659320][/doublepost]Having less time to spend in the office, I have moved my inside-out Mac Pro (late 2013) back home. It is in pieces, I need to set it up again which takes a couple hours.
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