Thank you for that! i picked up a GTX 645 and the first think I'm going to do is upgrade to sierra. next step will be figuring out which storage solution will be best. I'm honestly ok with some 7500 rpm drives if i can get 2tbs in each drive.
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Xserve 2008 video card mods
- Thread starter jamall
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If you ask any Mac user who has upgraded from a 7.5k hard drive to an SSD, it won't matter what other upgrades they've performed, they will always tell you that the SSD made the most difference to their daily computing experience. It's like night and day. I just did a little bit of research and according to this MacRumors user the Marvell 88SE9230 chipset used on this expansion card with 1x SSD and 3x SATA 3.0 ports is natively supported in OS X. Having said that, I experimented with different drives with mixed results and found several 2 TB Seagate drives that worked just fine in the Xserve's drive sleds, however it was necessary to use jumper settings on the drives to slow down the speed of their SATA interface and they weren't always seen after a cold start. For US$60 I think I'll buy one of those cards myself just to have a play around!
So if i got that expansion card, i could use a SSD as my boot drive, and then connect some 2tb drives as well, id just have to find somewhere to mount them? Id love to be able to use the drive sleds so what were you talking about when you referred to jumper settings. if the expansion card works out of the box and lets me use an SSD and connect 3 other drives without running into issues thats definitely worth it instead of messing around trying to get the drives sled to accept of the shelf Hardrives
I read three reports from a couple of years ago, so don't hold me to it, but it appears that chipset was supported natively in OS X. Do a bit of research and let us know what you find out. I had to play with jumper settings to get off-the-shelf drives working in Apple's drive sleds, and only had success with a handful of Seagate drives. It was inconsistent too - drives that worked in one caddy wouldn't necessarily work in others. If you do buy that SSD/SATA card you could get some blank drive trays to mount your drives in and feed SATA cables through the gaps in the backplane to connect them to the SATA ports on the PCIe card.
So i got the xserve running sierra but my GTX 645 isn't outputting any video. it shows up in the system preferences tho. any suggestions? Also it came with a 1tb SAS drive and it won't let me install the OS on it. I'm using an external driver for my boot drive right now but not sure why the internal drive isn't working. shows up in finder and everything just don't like the installer.
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To install OS X you have to make sure that the disk's partition map is GUID and not MBR. To do this from El Capitan or Sierra you'll need to install this version of Disk Utility from Yosemite, as it's been severely hobbled since El Capitan. Select your disk in the side bar, open the "Partition" tab, change the selection in the pop-up menu to anything other than "Current", and the previously grayed-out "Options" button at the bottom should become active.
Nvidia WebDriver Updater automatically downloads the latest drivers supported by your version of OS X and overrides any machine ID checks that might prevent installation if you just download and try to install them yourself. I assume the latest web drivers should support the GTX 645, what's the device ID listed in your system report?
Nvidia WebDriver Updater automatically downloads the latest drivers supported by your version of OS X and overrides any machine ID checks that might prevent installation if you just download and try to install them yourself. I assume the latest web drivers should support the GTX 645, what's the device ID listed in your system report?
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Thank you, i was doing a clean instal of sierra so doing it off the thumb drive and i am embarresed to admit this but completely forgot to run the patches in the post install window after. everything worked great after however. Still can't get the GTX 645 to work tho. this is what I see right now.
Also, my fans are running at 100% straight from start up? any reason this might be happening?
Also, my fans are running at 100% straight from start up? any reason this might be happening?
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Make sure your monitor is plugged into the GTX 645 and that you are using Nvidia's drivers, not the default OS X drivers.
Before you do this, however, try resetting the NVRAM. Worked for me to cut fan speed.
Hi, I have recently purchased an Apple Xserve late 2006. It's a fairly similar architecture and is also basically a hobbled Mac Pro 1,1. My unit arrived damaged and therefore I've spent the last few weeks repairing it and replacing a couple of obsolete parts. The DVD rom arrived totalled, plus I beefed the RAM up to the maximum 32. I also removed the 2 x dual 2.0 CPU and dropped in 2 x quad 2.3 CPU, which should speed things up!
At present I am awaiting an Nvidia GT120 to replace the on-board graphics card, plus I have obtained a 14 x drive A1009 Raid Array (but no fibre channel card for the Xserve at present). I am keen to learn more about this set up and the basic steps to upgrading to something akin to your set up. Did anyone stubble upon a step-by-step guide to setting this up?
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Hello, i'm new.... thanks for the interesting posts, I recently bought an xeon xeon xeon core with 10.7.5 and an integrated x1300 mezzanine, and I added another PCIe ATI x1300 video card, the card is loaded correctly, but nothing appears on the monitor in any of the VGA or DVI outputs, even after the OS is fully loaded ..
could someone help me to understand what must be done to make these two cards work together?
Thank you
could someone help me to understand what must be done to make these two cards work together?
Thank you
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The first question is which OS version are you using? Second question is why on Earth would you waste a PCIe slot on another X1300? I'm pretty sure support for that particular ATI chipset ended around the same time the Xserve2,1 was delisted from PlatformSupport.plist, and I shudder to think what you might have paid for one. There are dozens of single-slot PCIe cards that are passively cooled, have support (mostly) built-in to the latest versions of OS X/macOS, are cheap, and will blow the X1300 out of the water, if you are ever able to actually get it to work. Try any fanless GT 610 - 630 or GT 710 - 730 for under $50, and as long as you can live without the boot screen (you'll still have the X1300 for that) you'll be much happier.
HI Jamall, nice to meet you , as written in the post I installed 10.7.5, I used a second x1300 because they gave it to me free, and since it's free I do not see why not use it .. the card, as you can see from the attached images is correctly recognized without errors, but I do not have video output, can you help me? What can I check in the PlatformSupport.plist? my xserve is used in a recording studio, I do not need graphics acceleration, I need not spend money .... Thanks
Does anyone know the actual size of the PCI-X slots on the 2009 model? I ordered an Xserve for an awesome MacPro, but haven't received it yet. The Apple Support site says it accepts up to 9.25 inch cards in the larger slot. However I was wondering if an AMD Radeon Pro WX7100 would fit in one of these if I run an external lead for power? AMD states the card is 9.6 inches, but is that because they added clearance for the power connector or is it going to get in the way of the memory slots? Supposedly this is the fastest single slot video card out there, while it does require external power, this could be an awesome card if it would fit. If anyone knows that would be great!
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Okay, got my Xserve. The large PCI slot is actually exactly 10 inches to the memory. It will probably hold a 10" card, but you probably wouldn't be able to pop open the clips to remove the memory without removing the card. It seems that it would hold a somewhat larger card and probably would hold a WX 7100 Pro. I ended up ordering a PowerColor RX 590. Waiting for that to come up.
But the next question for any of the people who have done video mods on these boxes, what do you do about power? My Xserve has two 750 Watt power supplies. This should be plenty to power a 250 watt video card especially when each PSU is putting out 62.5 AMP's for 12 V. And it supposedly load balances the power between power supplies. It looks like these power supplies are single rail, as it seem there is only one 12V output. The sticker on the PSU says 12V @ 62.5 AMP output, so I would assume it is a single rail which would be ideal. I was looking at the system trying to figure out where to pick up 12V power, there is 'jumper', a 14 wire cable going from the power distribution board to the board to the RAID controller. I took some voltage measurements, but there are 3 12V wires off of it. I was considering splicing into those three wires and combine then together to use to power 6 and 8 pin connectors for a video card. However these are not larger gauge wire, so I am not sure if this could overload the wire or the connector on the power distribution board. It seems silly to use an external power supply for a video card when I have two much higher quality and more powerful power supplies built into the box which are redundant.
I know a 6 pin GPU power cable has three 12V lines and I believe if you had multiple GPU power cables which are normally on different rails in an ATX power supply. Or they are the same 12 v circuit with current overload protection because this is part of the ATX spec. I guess i could in theory solider wires to a power distribution board and pul power off there. Not wanting yet to ruin mine, some of them are similarly priced on ebay as to buying a new supply, but I found some 2008 ones for $10. They look the same, have a different part number, not sure if they will work or not as a test to try to pull power off the internal power supplies for a graphics card. Anyone have thoughts on this?
But the next question for any of the people who have done video mods on these boxes, what do you do about power? My Xserve has two 750 Watt power supplies. This should be plenty to power a 250 watt video card especially when each PSU is putting out 62.5 AMP's for 12 V. And it supposedly load balances the power between power supplies. It looks like these power supplies are single rail, as it seem there is only one 12V output. The sticker on the PSU says 12V @ 62.5 AMP output, so I would assume it is a single rail which would be ideal. I was looking at the system trying to figure out where to pick up 12V power, there is 'jumper', a 14 wire cable going from the power distribution board to the board to the RAID controller. I took some voltage measurements, but there are 3 12V wires off of it. I was considering splicing into those three wires and combine then together to use to power 6 and 8 pin connectors for a video card. However these are not larger gauge wire, so I am not sure if this could overload the wire or the connector on the power distribution board. It seems silly to use an external power supply for a video card when I have two much higher quality and more powerful power supplies built into the box which are redundant.
I know a 6 pin GPU power cable has three 12V lines and I believe if you had multiple GPU power cables which are normally on different rails in an ATX power supply. Or they are the same 12 v circuit with current overload protection because this is part of the ATX spec. I guess i could in theory solider wires to a power distribution board and pul power off there. Not wanting yet to ruin mine, some of them are similarly priced on ebay as to buying a new supply, but I found some 2008 ones for $10. They look the same, have a different part number, not sure if they will work or not as a test to try to pull power off the internal power supplies for a graphics card. Anyone have thoughts on this?
