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Replacing Power Supply on Mac Pro?

H

Habib Khan Awan

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Hey everyone, been meaning to upgrade my Mac Pro for a while but I have a few questions.

When I first bought my Mac Pro in mid August 2012, I switched out the standard video card that came with it with a mac flashed GT 120 for the GUI and a GTX 580 for the GPU. I also added a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card for outputting to an extra monitor for Resolve work. Everything had been running smooth and it was eating 1080 footage for breakfast. But since then I'd invested in a Scarlet and have been slowly saving up money to upgrade my system to handle 4K footage. Currently it can run most 4K footage at 1/2 and 1/4 resolution in Premiere easily, but struggles in RCX and Resolve (I have to set the timeline resolution in Resolve to 1080 or my system can't handle it).

A few months ago I came across another mac flashed graphics card, specifically a GTX 570. Managed to snag it for a good price, and thought it would make a great replacement for the GT 120 as my GUI, especially since it's the model with the dual DVI ports. My only concern is would the combination of the GTX 580, Intensity Pro, AND a GTX 570 put too much strain or flat out overload the standard power supply on my Mac Pro? I admit I'm a bit of a chicken and would rather try to get a definitive answer before swapping the cards in and hope for the best.

If I do have to replace the power supply, what would an appropriate sized model be? Would it be as simple as just running down to Micro Center and grabbing a bigger power supply, or would I have to go online to Newegg or Amazon? Are there specific differences between PC and Mac power supplies?

Mac Settings:
MacPro 5,1
Processor: 2 x 2.4 GHx 6-Core Intel Xenon (12 Core)
Memory: 64 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
Software: Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5
Graphics: Nvidia GT 120 512 MB (GUI), Nvidia GTX 580 3GB (GPU)

Thanks in advance for any and all help on the subject!
 
Mac Pro PSU's are proprietary. I'm sure you can cobble something together, as I've seen it done, but there are a few things to consider here.

The GTX570 is a double width card just like your GTX580 and requires two power connectors as well. So either way, you need to add extra power and there are ways to do this without replacing the main power supply. Being double-width, it is going to cover up one of the X4 slots in the computer, so that will give you two GPUs plus the Intensity Pro card and no room for anything else.

Having the 570 + 580 cards will speed up Resolve a bit more for node processing. Since the later releases of Resolve 9, we no longer need separate GUI cards, so the GT120 is really dead weight in the system. Depending on which other apps you use, it may make more sense to leave the GTX580 as the primary GPU, or at least it probably will for apps that can only use one CUDA GPU at a time.
 
Just checked the card, you're totally right about the cards taking up all the available slots Jeff. Times like this when I wish I had the technical know-how to make a Hackintosh. I was thinking about it today...would an PCIe expansion chassis be a workable option? I currently don't have a desk that would support a rack-type mounting system yet, but I did manage to find one on Newegg that I thought might work.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...58247&ef_id=Up1lsAAAAZa5ni95:20140112230837:s

Do you guys think this would be a viable option? I figured if this works I could take out the GT 120 and substitute the GTX570 as the GUI, leave the Intensity Pro as is, and move the GTX 580 to the expansion chassis? I only really use both the Intensity Pro and (currently) the GTX 580 for Resolve work and Premiere. I don't really mind a slower RCX at the moment, although in the future I'd love to drop some cash on a Red Rocket X. Figure if I have the GTX 580 and (eventually) a Rocket X in the expansion chassis, I could conceivably just turn off the chassis when not using the aforementioned programs? I was also thinking of eventually looking into a third-party USB3.0 expansion card, but I haven't really seen one that was reliable on a Mac system yet. I can deal with the FW800 bottleneck for now, but I know that time will eventually prove me wrong on that front. Either way, USB3.0 or even SATA, I'd have to find a solution to add more slots.

Damn now I really wish I'd built a Hackintosh.
 
PCIe expansion is a solution, but an expensive one. The expansion system you found at NewEgg is the wrong type and adds 4 legacy (ancient) 32bit 33MHz PCI slots that were all the rage 15 years ago. The solution you're looking for comes from companies like Cubix and Magma.
 
What is the power supply limit of the Mac Pro? How many watts, 350?
 
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