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tevion5

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 12, 2011
1,967
1,603
Ireland
Watching the RTX 3000 announcement from Nvidia I'm very keen to get a 3070, or possibly 3080, for bootcamp usage on my 7,1 after seeing the amazing performance to price ratio.

But as flagged by some others on this forum, and power requirements aside, the fan array on the reference cards looks designed to play well with standard PC gaming cases but not Mac Pros.
  1. The half of the card with a fairly traditional blower design looks fine. Suck in from inside the case, blow out the back. The 7,1's case fans compliment this well enough.
  2. What they do NOT complement well is the half of the card that blows heat down nearer the front. This is designed to blow heat "upward" in a PC case to the back top section where there are usually 1 or 2 rear case fans. Owners of 5,1 and 7,1 MPs know due to the motherboard placement on our systems GPU's are "upside down" compared to regular PC placement.
Until recently I had a blower design Vega 64 as my primary GPU until I replaced it the other week with a Radeon Pro W5700X for better performance and much, much lower power draw and noise.

What concerns me about the RTX 3000 series is the beefy power draw and therefore generating a LOT of heat. In a config like mine (see below), I'm concerned the hot air blown downward near the front of the case right on top of my the MPX module won't allow enough room for optimal heat dissipation. That's the "danger zone" I see with these cards. I'm worried it could lead to a big revving up of the fans during demanding tasks.

What do people think? Will the Mac Pro 7,1's case airflow be enough to handle RTX 3000 front fans without problems?

Mac Pro RTX 3000 Airflow.jpg
 

Graham King

macrumors regular
Mar 27, 2011
159
110
Oakland, CA
Do you think moving the W5700X to slot 3 and the RTX to slot 1 would help with airflow? Would having the MPX in slot 3 hurt performance in MacOS?
 

ArPe

macrumors 65816
May 31, 2020
1,281
3,325
Zotac RTX 3070 is almost a half length card that won’t run hot.
 

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tevion5

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 12, 2011
1,967
1,603
Ireland
Do you think moving the W5700X to slot 3 and the RTX to slot 1 would help with airflow? Would having the MPX in slot 3 hurt performance in MacOS?

Doing that would limit the cooler supply of air just as much, which I suspect would be even worse.

Having the MPX module in slot 3 shouldn't make any different in MacOS though afaik.
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Zotac RTX 3070 is almost a half length card that won’t run hot.

Oh wow I hadn't even thought about other vendor options this early! That could be a lot more suitable. Crazy you could get 2080ti performance out of that little thing.
 

TrevorR90

macrumors 6502
Oct 1, 2009
379
299
Yeah, as the other person pointed out, aftermarket would be the best option here.

Nvidia definitely didn't design this card with the Mac pros layout in mind, would've been nice if they did. Why not wait for AMD's offerings?
 
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