Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

MP 7,1 The future Mac Pro has a problem…RTX 4090

Its smaller in length than a 3090ti but slightly wider, I didn't hook up to internal power as my 6900xt is using 3 X 8 pin belkin power cables and there are only 4 on the logic board. So i used an external corsair SF750 with the corsair flat 12 pin cable coming through a PCI slot on the rear to power the 4090. when in Mac OSX i can turn the 4090 off completely via the PSU remote switch. (very Green you might say)
 
Matty_TypeR said:
Its smaller in length than a 3090ti but slightly wider, I didn't hook up to internal power as my 6900xt is using 3 X 8 pin belkin power cables and there are only 4 on the logic board. So i used an external corsair SF750 with the corsair flat 12 pin cable coming through a PCI slot on the rear to power the 4090. when in Mac OSX i can turn the 4090 off completely via the PSU remote switch. (very Green you might say)
Click to expand...

Oh wow I'm using AMD 6900XT and it's only using 2 8pins I believe and is sufficient with 2 ports. Would Nvidia RTX4090 Founder's Edition also be sufficient with just using 2 ports using Belkin's cables? Also do you think if I put my 6900XT on the bottom (Slot 1 on the PCIE) and 4090FE above it (Slot 3 on PCIE) it won't fit? Currently they both (3090FE & 6900XT) fit fine on mine, only except 3090FE is squeezing it horizontally to Mac Pro's system fan a bit.
 
Well i have it up and running, and here is a screen shot of furmark at 4k and results.
Screenshot 2022-12-16 210709.jpg
 
LEOMODE said:
Oh wow I'm using AMD 6900XT and it's only using 2 8pins I believe and is sufficient with 2 ports. Would Nvidia RTX4090 Founder's Edition also be sufficient with just using 2 ports using Belkin's cables? Also do you think if I put my 6900XT on the bottom (Slot 1 on the PCIE) and 4090FE above it (Slot 3 on PCIE) it won't fit? Currently they both (3090FE & 6900XT) fit fine on mine, only except 3090FE is squeezing it horizontally to Mac Pro's system fan a bit.
Click to expand...
the 4090 needs 4 X 8 pin connections, max 600w so 2 X 8 pin is no good. running the above bench in 4k it was drawing 500w and 97% GPU usage. but it runs silent. i moved it up one slot to the 3rd from bottom 16X PCIe slot above where my install picture shows to give the 6900xt PCIe in slot 1 as more room to breath below it.

It run's fine on the external power supply SF750 watt as its the only thing it's running. the power cable is 68cm long so comes out of rear pci slot cover, to PSU under back of desk. you wouldn't know it was there looking at it.

So far very impressed by the 4090, it is a beast of a caard, a shame Apple refuse to suport Nvidia, but hey how the 6900xt also does well in OSX.
 
  • Like
Reactions: LEOMODE
In a real Mac Pro an Apple m2 ultra would do the basic stuff and pci-Express graphic cards could be added as additional cards to do the advanced stuff. There is no other way. Just an m-system-on-chip will never be enough for the heavy stuff like playing GTA 6 at 8K.
 
Matty_TypeR said:
the 4090 needs 4 X 8 pin connections, max 600w so 2 X 8 pin is no good. running the above bench in 4k it was drawing 500w and 97% GPU usage. but it runs silent. i moved it up one slot to the 3rd from bottom 16X PCIe slot above where my install picture shows to give the 6900xt PCIe in slot 1 as more room to breath below it.

It run's fine on the external power supply SF750 watt as its the only thing it's running. the power cable is 68cm long so comes out of rear pci slot cover, to PSU under back of desk. you wouldn't know it was there looking at it.

So far very impressed by the 4090, it is a beast of a caard, a shame Apple refuse to suport Nvidia, but hey how the 6900xt also does well in OSX.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the information. Wow requires 4 ports??? but doesn't Mac Pro have 6 ports anyway, so I guess I can still use 4090 FE and 6900XT or AMD 7900XTX/XT as AMD 7900 series require the same power as 6900XT anyway.

Yes I know these days GPUs run quiet/silent and sometimes fans don't even run in minor tasks (I was able to see it visually by putting my cards in Razer Core once). And I should definitely consider external PSU, and I guess what you're saying is you just open up the PCI slot by removing the Apple PCI slot cover and connect the power cable through there and hook up the 4090.

And yeah just by looking at the benchmark and reviews, it looks like it's something like:

4090 >>>>>>> 7900XTX > 7900XT > 4080 >>>> 3090 >>>> 3080.
 
Lefteous said:
In a real Mac Pro an Apple m2 ultra would do the basic stuff and pci-Express graphic cards could be added as additional cards to do the advanced stuff. There is no other way. Just an m-system-on-chip will never be enough for the heavy stuff like playing GTA 6 at 8K.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think for the GPU space, Apple is still not up to par with Nvidia/AMD, so I wonder how they will try to achieve for the professionals/pro-consumers for GPU-intensive asks. I would really love Apple to open up external GPU at least but since external GPU only gives you 20-50% of its original power, that's equivalent to Apple Silicon GPU power these days anyways. So perhaps Apple just wants to catch up in a couple of years and has some sort of master plan to overcome Nvidia/AMD in the near future if they will never implement external vendors on GPU.
 
Apple will never support Nvidia cards, they might do drivers for the 7900xtx but with Apple wanting AS I doubt the 7900xtx will be supported. Plus you can’t natively boot windows with AS only VR so for my needs the 4090 offers the best in windows and 6900xt for OSX. Enough has been said in threads about AS already. Best wait and see what comes.
 
Matty_TypeR said:
Apple will never support Nvidia cards, they might do drivers for the 7900xtx but with Apple wanting AS I doubt the 7900xtx will be supported. Plus you can’t natively boot windows with AS only VR so for my needs the 4090 offers the best in windows and 6900xt for OSX. Enough has been said in threads about AS already. Best wait and see what comes.
Click to expand...
Never say never. Noone also knew they were gonna ditch Nvidia, when they used to be the best partner :)
 
LEOMODE said:
Never say never. Noone also knew they were gonna ditch Nvidia, when they used to be the best partner :)
Click to expand...
The last series of Nvidia drivers were for the 1000 series - that is now 3 generations back.

Apple has left the PC space. It is what it is.
 
Matty_TypeR said:
Apple will never support Nvidia cards, they might do drivers for the 7900xtx but with Apple wanting AS I doubt the 7900xtx will be supported. Plus you can’t natively boot windows with AS only VR so for my needs the 4090 offers the best in windows and 6900xt for OSX. Enough has been said in threads about AS already. Best wait and see what comes.
Click to expand...
Excuse my ignorance, but what is an AS and VR?
 
Matty_TypeR said:
Well i have it up and running, and here is a screen shot of furmark at 4k and results.View attachment 2129402
Click to expand...
Replying to this post for anyone wondering how much the 4090 is bottlenecked by the Xeon... The answer is, quite a bit! Here's my PC build with a 13900k and a base Zotac 4090, which is power-limited to 450w. Running this on my 34" ultrawide, so I had to run it in 4k windowed, vs 4k fullscreen, so not quite apples-to-apples, but it's rendering the exact same scene, at the exact same resolution.

A really important thing to note - the 4090 was a fantastic upgrade from the 3090 for me. Yes, it's faster, obviously, but I honestly wasn't aching for more speed, but what really surprised me is how quiet the thing is. It's the quietest air-cooled video card I've owned in decades, by a huge margin! Honestly quieter than most of the water-cooled cards I've used, as well. Overall, my desktop sitting on my floor, running at full-tilt, is quieter than my loaded Mac Studio doing the same - mostly because of the pitch of the noise. It does remain quiet regardless of what I do - I've not gotten it to be loud with gaming at all, and even running Furmark was surprisingly quiet. Overall VERY impressed.

1672841048687.png

I also ran it fullscreen at full resolution (3440x1440) to see the result:

1672841418566.png
 
Matty_TypeR said:
Its smaller in length than a 3090ti but slightly wider, I didn't hook up to internal power as my 6900xt is using 3 X 8 pin belkin power cables and there are only 4 on the logic board. So i used an external corsair SF750 with the corsair flat 12 pin cable coming through a PCI slot on the rear to power the 4090. when in Mac OSX i can turn the 4090 off completely via the PSU remote switch. (very Green you might say)
Click to expand...
Hey there do you mind giving the external PSU part, how you turn off that switch manually, and the cable you hook it up to? I definitely want to use your method so I can run 4090 when on Windows and turn 4090 off when on Mac OS and run 6900XT only. I noticed on Mac OS if it's connected to a Nvidia card it always crashes and causes a sleep reboot. Thanks in advance!
 
  • Like
Reactions: Norbert Mikołajczyk
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back