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Nvidia GTX 980 for older Mac Pro ?

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Clayton Burkhart

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It has been suggested to me on another thread to update my Mac Pro 5,1 classic tower with this video card. I currently have two GTX 470's in there for dual Adobe and Davinci workflows, but with a single faster card I could free up some space for a RAID host controller card. Obviously, I am interested in the 980's CUDA capacity, however it is unclear if this card is really usable at this date in a Mac. Some people say that Yosemite has provision for it in an unofficial capacity, however others say it needs to be flashed in order to have PCIe 2.0 capacity, etc. The only reseller that does sell flashed 980's is MacVidCards, but the cards are so expensive and the import duties plus shipping to Europe are so prohibitive, I might as well buy a new Mac.

So can I use an unflashed card? Could I flash it myself? Are there resellers who do what Macvidcards does in Europe? Or should I forget the whole thing and just get a GTX 680, which is the last blessed card available for Mac?

Waddya think?
 
You don't have to buy the flashed version. I am currently running the 980 in a Mac Pro 5.1 tower. You will have to upgrade to Yosemite, and then download the Nvidia Web Driver and install before switching your graphics cards, otherwise you won't be able to see anything with the 980. I am currently running the CUDA Driver 6.5.37 and it is stable. There is a newer version, but it crashes Resolve when I try to load a project. Make sure when you buy the card that you also get an additional 6 pin power cable to connect to the motherboard. The box comes with adapters for windows based computers. You will have one power cable in your computer, but you will need a second to power the card properly.
 
Chandler Tucker said:
You don't have to buy the flashed version. I am currently running the 980 in a Mac Pro 5.1 tower. You will have to upgrade to Yosemite, and then download the Nvidia Web Driver and install before switching your graphics cards, otherwise you won't be able to see anything with the 980. I am currently running the CUDA Driver 6.5.37 and it is stable. There is a newer version, but it crashes Resolve when I try to load a project. Make sure when you buy the card that you also get an additional 6 pin power cable to connect to the motherboard. The box comes with adapters for windows based computers. You will have one power cable in your computer, but you will need a second to power the card properly.
Click to expand...

Perfect thats exactly what I needed to know. Thanks!
 
Anyone have numbers on Flashed vs Non-Flashed to see if PCIe bandwidth affects performance.
 
I don't have any numbers specifically and no longer have any Mac towers here to test with, but I can tell you that the PCIe 2.0 bandwidth in the Mac Pro tower is a bottleneck for the GTX980, Titan, GTX780, etc.. It's not a hinderance that will really affect much of your computational operations, but the performance or overall throughput isn't as good as what we would get with PCIe v3.0 links, where the lanes are nearly twice as fast as their v2.0 counterparts.

I can also confirm that a Mac flashed version of the GTX980 is not necessary, as I know several people running them. They are an ideal card for the Mac Pro tower as they operate within the dual 6-pin power configuration. For a GTX Titan or GTX780 (especially the TI variant), I would strongly recommend having it flashed by a reputable provider. The modified EFI ROM clamps power consumption lower to work within the Mac Pro's limits and you won't need to borrow power from an optical bay or external PSU. And none of this power fiddling is necessary with a GTX980.
 
Jeff

I have a 780ti flashed from MacVidcards will it run without an external power supply? That would be great news.
 
Daniel Murphy said:
Jeff

I have a 780ti flashed from MacVidcards will it run without an external power supply? That would be great news.
Click to expand...

It's supposed to and that's been the case for the ones tested by BareFeats and others. But I would ask MacVidCards directly about this. The main reasons to flash the card are to address the power issue and to have a card that will support the Mac EFI extensions so you can boot the system to the OS or perform other pre-OS operations without available drivers.
 
Thanks Jeff. I may stretch a few more months out of my tower with a 980 and keep my trusty GT120 nearby for handling bootups.
 
All right so I got a GTX 980 (PNY) and updated my Mac Pro with the latest NVIDIA drivers (Quadrok5000 for Mac) and.....Nothing.
Black screen on Yosemite 10.10.2. Two power connectors connected, the fans turn and zero.

Any suggestions?
 
The cards that macvidcards sells have flashed firmware, it's not something simply fixed by updating a driver.
 
As far as the performance of a pci-e x16 gen 3 vs pci-e x16 gen 2 for GTX GPU's (780 or 980 for instance), I don't see a massive amount of performance gain between a gen 3 pci-e 16x and 8x slot (which should be comparable bandwidth to an older Mac Pro gen 2 pci-e 16x GPU slot). The tested cinebench performance difference in my Z87 system is like 100 fps vs 85 fps, so there is a performance gap but its not a huge gap.

Transcoding rates for 4kHD Raw files in RedcineX are 15 fps vs 12-13 fps, which is a far cry from the old Mac Tower that would maybe get 4-5 fps with an ATI 5770 or GTX 9800.
 
Shiblon Wixom said:
The cards that macvidcards sells have flashed firmware, it's not something simply fixed by updating a driver.
Click to expand...



Actually. if you had read the beginning of this thread, you would understand that we are discussing the fact that the GTX 980 does normally work straight out of the box with Yosemite/Mac albeit without the boot screen. No need for the flashed card from Macvidcards. This is because even though the card has not been "blessed" by Apple, unofficial provision has been made for it in the operating system. I am asking this question of those people who have already been successful with cards which are not from Macvids...
 
Clayton, have you installed the NVIDIA web drivers as well as the CUDA drivers? In my experience you should have the lastest web driver installed, but the CUDA driver you will have to play with to find out what is most stable with your system, depending on the applications you run. If you aren't getting any image, then I'm guessing you installed the CUDA driver but not the web driver. The CUDA drivers aren't necessary for the card to operate OSX, just to use CUDA support in programs like Premiere and Resolve. Put your old graphics card in the computer and visit this link to download the web driver - http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/81365/en-us

Once you have downloaded and installed the driver, go to your menu bar and find the NVIDIA icon on the right. Make sure that NVIDIA Web Driver is selected and not OS X Default Graphics Driver.

Once that is complete, you can then download the latest version of the CUDA driver and work your way back to find the most appropriate driver that works for you. http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html
 
Chandler Tucker said:
Clayton, have you installed the NVIDIA web drivers as well as the CUDA drivers? In my experience you should have the lastest web driver installed, but the CUDA driver you will have to play with to find out what is most stable with your system, depending on the applications you run. If you aren't getting any image, then I'm guessing you installed the CUDA driver but not the web driver. The CUDA drivers aren't necessary for the card to operate OSX, just to use CUDA support in programs like Premiere and Resolve. Put your old graphics card in the computer and visit this link to download the web driver - http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/81365/en-us

Once you have downloaded and installed the driver, go to your menu bar and find the NVIDIA icon on the right. Make sure that NVIDIA Web Driver is selected and not OS X Default Graphics Driver.

Once that is complete, you can then download the latest version of the CUDA driver and work your way back to find the most appropriate driver that works for you. http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html
Click to expand...

Hi Chandler, thanks for your feedback.
What concerns me is that I have installed the latest webdriver from Nvidia from the beginning (343.02.02f01)...so really not sure what's gowing on here.
Going to do a clean install of my system on a SSD anyway, so might as well start from scratch. Perhaps there is a conflict somewhere in the current system.

EDIT: Did a clean install. Only Yosemite the webdriver and the CUDA. Doesn't work. Nada, No idea why. Suggestions?
 
Ok, an update here.
I returned the card and got a first generation Nvidia GTX 980 with a single fan and two 6-pin connectors (as opposed to an 8-pin + 6-pin).
It works.
So there you go. Stay away from overclocked and non double 6 pin configurations on the cards.
 
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