David Pirinelli
Forum Replies Created
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You have to consider that Nvidia and AMD don’t put 8 pin plugs on their cards to try to look Macho.
They put them on there because they need more power than a 6 pin can provide.
A 6 pin is specced at 75W while an 8 pin is 150 Watts. So when you use one of those adapters, you are basically DOUBLING the juice going through the wire, and the traces on your Mac Pro logic board
It will probably be fine, just like you can get away with driving 80 MPH most of the time on the freeway.
HOWEVER….sooner or later you might get a citation and sooner or later you might be doing some heavy GPU computing in a warm room with a Mac full of 12 cores, 4 drives, 4 PCIE cards and bad airflow. And then there might be a little “pop” sound followed shortly by that awful smell of burned electronics. The smell that means “something is already dead”.
A Mac Pro logic board is like $1,000. An external PSU is $100. How much is a few days downtime worth while Apple puts in a new Logic Board? (But your clients will understand and wait patiently, right?) Or as Rohit notes, just use a 570 and you are within spec. There is a 2.5 GB 570…enough RAM for 4K and more speed than the 480 offered while using less power. We sell an EFI one that is fully Mac ready, or you can get a PC one and live with a few shortcomings.
I am including this picture from a 580 being killed. The guy who bought this used a few too many adapters and now the card is dead.
When I was young I had a nifty extension cord that rolled up inside a reel. I only needed to run power 6 feet so I only unrolled it that far and left the rest of the cable inside the reel. A few hours later I smelled burning plastic. The cable inside the reel had all melted together. Anytime you add wire, you are adding resistance. The electricity creates heat instead of being current available at the end of the line. The variety of adapters used here caused the 580 to die.
These are serious cards and need serious power. Trying to run the card this way is just like trying to power 17 strings of Christmas lights from the same outlet. Yes, you can buy adapters and plugs to do it, that doesn’t mean you should.
The dead card has yet to return to me but I believe he killed it. It was a 3GB model. The 3GB card is going to need more juice than a 1.5GB card. (the old “no free lunch” principle). Don’t try to power these cards with a string of Hinky Molex to PCIE 6 pin to PCIE 8 pin rigs. You are just going to burn something up.
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Something you need to understand about Ebay is that sellers pay commission based on FInal Value.
If I buy something for $550 and sell it on Ebay for $550 I will pay $30 or so to Ebay and then 3-4% to Paypal. So, by selling something for what it cost me I will lose around $50. I would need to sell the item for $600 to break even.
The IRS gets a cut of profit as well.
I would much rather that you bought a 580 and tried it out as is.
If you want/need the extra functionality I can offer send me the card and I will modify it.
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Just went from 200 to 300 in a few minutes huh?
Well, neither number is correct and I am not holding a gun to anyone’s head to buy one.
If you use a GT120 for GUI, then you don’t need to use EFI on 580, the PCIE 2.0 thing only affects high bandwidth transfers.
You would be best to just get one from Newegg if you are convinced from the get go that EFI/PCIE 2.0 is a waste of money.
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The OpenCl fix is pretty much same as before.
On front page of Netkas.org
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Whatever you do, be absolutely CERTAIN that you have enough power for a 580.
I have sold 2 of them and already someone has blown one up.
He got an entry level Cyclone chassis and used a single 6 pin power plug through splitters for both the 6 pin and 8 pin on the 580.
Result, one dead 580.
It seems they are even more sensitive to power needs then 480s, which is odd.
The cards are available from Newegg or TigerDirect or many retailers. If you don’t think you need an EFI one, by all means just get a PC one.
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Give me a few minutes, I am going to try to fix the driver kext.
OSX 10.7.4 breaks the “MAGIC ” support.
I have a feeling that Nvidia will release new drivers for 10.7.4 soon, but until then I will figure out and post a fix.
EDIT: OK, here is a quick fix. This will enable the driver to include GTX570 and GTX580.
I will do one for GTX560 later on.
If you were using the “”self init” feature, you will also need to install ATY_Init from Netkas.
If you had one of our EFI cards, this should do it by itself.
You will need to use Kextdrop or Kexthelper to install this once you unzip it.
If you are using an EFI card, you will have one screen still functional to “see” from while you install this. If you were using the “Magic” feature, the card will be black as night until you install this fixed next AND ATY_Init.
If you were using Magic Drivers to run a GTX4xx card, you don’t need this fixed kext, just ATY_Init.
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The Quadro cards only have an edge in software that uses Double Precision
Until someone points me at some, I don’t know if there is any for Macs.
So, the GTX cards will almost always outperform a Quadro 4000.
The 6000 is the only one of the family with real grunt behind it. And it is somewhere between a GTX470 and GTX480.
So for most Mac users, a GTX570 just became the best option. If you are running 10.7.3, a GTX570 2.5 GB will outperform a Quadro 6000 for most things.
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CUDA-Z is an excellent way to troubleshoot CUDA issues.
Run it and see what it says about your Quadro 4000
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Based on this thread, it seems that1.5 is bare minimum for 4K.
So the GTX570 should be gotten in the 2.5GB version and the GTX580 should be gotten in the 3 GB version, whenever possible, if you plan to use the higher res files.
