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Mac Pro with GTX 285 and Radeon 5770 Possible?
I’ve been building up my Mac Pro 2009 for Resolve. Right now there’s a GT120 for the GUI and a 285 for the GPU in slots 1 and 2. The other slots are the BM Decklink and a CalDigit RAID card. I’ve got the internal drives raided using the card and bypassing the backplane with a TransIntl Pro Cable. I’ve got a boot drive in the optical bay.
OK, here’s the question:
The GT120 sucks for FCPX, which I tested against both my 17″ Macbook Pro and my 4870 in a 2,1 MacPro, both of which are far snappier than the 120, which is hooked to a 30″ and a 24″ monitor.
The GTX285 has 2 auxiliary power ports and the GT120 gets its power from the bus. If I swap out the 120 for a 5770 (which should work better with FCPX), that card has 1 auxiliary power requirement. Can I run power for that from the optical bay if I ditch my DVD drive using a 15pin SATA to 6pin PCIe cable like this one:
Is there a voltage issue or other problem I’m not forseeing? Has anyone on this forum done something like this?
I know I could swap the 285 for a Quadro 4000, which only needs 1 power cable, but I’d like to keep the 285 if possible and just swap out the 120 for the 5770…
Any ideas?
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3 Replies
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[Paul Golden] “Can I run power for that from the optical bay if I ditch my DVD drive using a 15pin SATA to 6pin PCIe cable like this one:”
You have to issues to contend with. One is physically getting that cable to run from the optical bay compartment to the pci compartment, this is much, much trickier than you think. But there are ways… though you might not be able to close the box after. 😉
The second issue is trickier… it’s getting the power supply to handle that draw. I would think it very unlikely to impossible that the built in power supply would work.
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I believe both of the connectors supply variable 12V, 5V and 3.3 power depending on the device connected, but the amp draw on a Graphics card at max is much more than a disk drive. But if the PSU on the Mac Pro is built with additional headroom, there may be enough juice to add a single 75W load (which is the equivalent of the 5770’s single auxiliary input (assuming that the DVD drive is retired.) The MacPro PSU is rated for 980W.
On an older 2,1 Mac Pro, I was able to snake an Esata cable from the motherboard up to the Optical bay, so I’m wondering if there’s any room on a 4,1 to snake a cable down through the back along the motherboard and back to the PCI cards.
I’m looking for a technical reason I can’t do this (like error monitoring etc.) Any thoughts?
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Technical reason is the power supply almost certainly can’t handle it, there is very little room on the MacPro ps, the 285 sucks up a lot of juice. As to errors.. I’ve seen installs with ati & q4000 and they seem to work ok, other than the not very good performance of the q4000 of course.
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