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Update mid-2010 5870 vid card?

eoblaed

eoblaed

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Apr 21, 2010
3,093
3,219
The Radeon HD 5870 in my wife's machine is still kicking, but has gotten pretty loud over the last year or so (I'm guessing the bearings in the fan are a bit funny at this point).

I'm looking to update the card in there. Doesn't need to be any better, but shouldn't be any worse. I'm surprised that the only cards I can find online that meet those criteria are north of $300, almost $400 or more ... which seems weird to me considering the HD 5870 is 7 years old.

What (new) card would you guys use to replace the HD 5870 in a mid-2010 Mac Pro?
 
7 years old, open it up, blow the dust away, re-apply thermal paste may help a lot.

It's very simple and easy to do, just watch few Youtube videos and you should able to do it without issue.

However, if the noise clearly from bad bearings (or something like clicking noise), but not high fan speed. Some WD40 may help (again Youtube will show you how to do it), but the chance can fix it will be lower.

If you don't want to fix it, but only want a new Native Mac graphic card. There is only 1 choice. The Sapphire HD7950 Mac Edition. Which is almost $500 now, more expensive than the GTX 980 Ti.

If you don't need new card, then there will be more choice avail on e-Bay, HD5870, HD7950, GTX 680. But they are all expensive.

The best alternative should be buy a relatively cheap new card and flash it yourself. Netkas forum has all the details.

If you really don't want to do anything by yourself, then you can go to macvidcards' online shop to buy a flashed card. There are lots flashed card on the net, but quite a lot of them a fake, so I won't recommend any other seller than MVC.

The easiest and cheapest alternative is just buy a PC graphic card and use it without the bootscreen. You will lost the ability to use boot manager (hold option during boot), the choice still there, but the screen is black, make it technically unusable. If you don't need boot manager at all. I recommend you simply buy a PC card (e.g. reference RX460 is a good choice) to replace your current card. And keep the current card properly stored as backup.
 
i think the only new card is the rx460 on osx10.12, it's small cheep and quiet + powered by the pci plug so no cables needed
:D
but like h0826790 says you will lose boot screen, not a problem for most ppl
 
eoblaed said:
What (new) card would you guys use to replace the HD 5870 in a mid-2010 Mac Pro?
Click to expand...

You can get a GTX 680 2GB on Ebay for under $150 and it will be an upgrade. Get a model with two 6-pin power connectors. If you have Windows, you can flash it yourself for full mac compatibility. It is quite easy--see the instructions in my sig.

The RX460 might be new, but it is very low end. It will be slower than the 5870.
 
Thanks for all the information!

I'm not inclined to lose the boot screen (e.g. just yesterday, I replaced the old HDD with an internal 6G SSD (via PCI-E). Would've been near impossible without the boot screen.

Having the ready made ROM to flash for the GTX 680 is attractive. I'll try cleaning out the HD5870 first and see if that improves the noise. If that fails, I may go this route.
 
h9826790 said:
The RX460's performance doesn't looks too bad when compared to the HD5870, but much lower power consumption.

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-RX-460-vs-Radeon-HD-5870
Click to expand...

Interesting, I am surprised to see that it is that close. On paper the RX460 looks significantly worse in so many ways:
(HD5870 vs RX460)
Bandwidth: 153600 MB/sec vs 112000 MB/sec (37% slower)
Texel Rate: 68000 Mtexels/sec vs 61040 Mtexels/sec (11% slower)
Pixel Rate: 27200 Mpixels/sec vs 17440 Mpixels/sec (56% slower)

On the other hand, the 5870 only has 1GB instead of 4.

That GPUBOSS looks like a decent site, I think I will start using it.
 
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