#Replacement video card for mac pro 1 1 1080p#
#Replacement video card for mac pro 1 1 drivers#
#Replacement video card for mac pro 1 1 driver#
#Replacement video card for mac pro 1 1 full#
#Replacement video card for mac pro 1 1 for windows 10#

So if you configure a Mac Pro 5,1 with a 980Ti/1080Ti and RX 560, you might as well just not even bother counting on using the higher powered cards in MacOS at all (at least High Sierra), which is a real bummer.

#Replacement video card for mac pro 1 1 drivers#

You then have to zap the PRAM and only use the RX 560, so at that point it becomes a useless exercise to try running High Sierra with the NVidia Web Drivers and a low powered AMD Metal card like the RX 560 also installed. YouвЂ™ll get to the login screen but can go no further.

#Replacement video card for mac pro 1 1 driver#

When you boot High Sierra with the NVidia Web Drivers for a Maxwell or Pascal NVidia card and y ou have an AMD metal card present, a driver clash occurs and since you have no boot screen, youвЂ™re now stuck. You could technically put something like an ITX RX 560 4 GB in Slot 2 which is low powered as well (if you just needed a display card for Mojave/Catalina), but not so fast.

#Replacement video card for mac pro 1 1 for windows 10#

LetвЂ™s say you arenвЂ™t going to use a Titan Ridge, and you donвЂ™t care about NVMe storage and donвЂ™t care about Snow Leopard but want to run your 980Ti or 1080Ti for Windows 10 and High Sierra and you also want to run Mojave and Catalina using a supported card.

#Replacement video card for mac pro 1 1 1080p#

Despite the fact that slot 3 is just 4x, thatвЂ™s more than enough bandwidth for this low rated card, which is only going to be used to push 1080p 60Hz anyway and mainly just be used for boot screens, so PCIe v2 at 4x was plenty for that card. With my GTX 980Ti in Slot 1 (lower slot) at 16x, my recently acquired PCIe NVMe RAID card (WD AN1500 1 TB) in slot 2 (capped at 8x in the 16x slot) and my flashed GC Titan Ridge in slot 4 (rated at 4x in that 4x slot), all that I had left was slot 3 for a GPU that produces a boot screen and it had to be single wide. These requirements were all especially important to me after recently upgrading to NVMe Storage (more on that in another article). It also requires no additional auxiliary power and will work in all versions of the cMP (Classic Mac Pro) from the 2006 1,1 to the 2012 version of the 5,1. No overhang вЂ“ no large fan or heat sink sticking out preventing you from installing other cards. WhatвЂ™s more is that it only takes up a single slot.

#Replacement video card for mac pro 1 1 full#

Why this card in particular though? WhatвЂ™s so special about it? This card not only provides you a boot screen, but also provides you with the ability to boot into Snow Leopard and get full 3D acceleration (yes itвЂ™s a weak card вЂ“ even for Snow Leopard overall, but itвЂ™s better than no 3D acceleration at all and gets you up and running when you need it to). In my case (and in the case of many others) just like I discussed in last yearвЂ™s article, a great option for that secondary video card is the Radeon HD 2600 XT. NVidia Maxwell and Pascal cards (like the 980Ti and 1080Ti) unfortunately require these special web drivers (Kepler cards like the Titan Black 6 GB or GTX 780Ti however have native MacOS drivers and do not require dedicated web drivers). The fail-safe is to always have a backup low powered video card running вЂњin tandemвЂќ in another slot that can produce a boot screen or boot natively with no special drivers. The only trouble is that with the NVidia cards running Web Drivers, if power is interrupted or if you ever need to reset the PRAM, the default goes back to the Mac Default driver, giving you a dark screen and no video when booting your Mac back up. It is a shame you canвЂ™t really push these cards any further. While I was fully aware of the limits of the NVidia web drivers last year (High Sierra was the end of the line), these 980/980Ti cards and their successors вЂ“ the 10Ti are great options for the Mac Pro 5,1 running High Sierra with the NVidia Web Drivers. As fate would have it, I had been quite satisfied with the performance I was getting from the GTX 980Ti in my 2,1 last year and got another. This 5,1 is a very powerful machine and has been an incredible pleasure to own so far (grabbed for under $1000 shipped on eBay last year).

The GPU madness this year is a bit of a different story, but at the end of the day comes down to the same conclusion for my use case but with just 2 of those 3 cards being used. That May 2020 article in itself was a bit of GPU madness with me employing 3 different cards for various purposes.

This is a bit of a throwback to my article from May of last year вЂ“ Tri-Booting a Mac Pro 2,1 вЂ“ not long before I had just procured my Mac Pro 5,1 (well technically a 4,1 that was flashed to a 5,1 with dual Intel Xeon 5680 CPUs with 12 cores at 3.33 GHz).