Video Card Upgrade For Mac Pro 2,1

mayhaps, though they wont be very accurate unless they are compared/tested on a MAC and not a PC (most reviews/benchmarking is done on PCs)You have to take into consideration that the CPU handles most of the video rendering on a MAC, as opposed to the GPU handling it on a PC.

Video Card Upgrade For Mac Pro 2,1

Is the card need any extra power by a cable?When I was looking at it early on to get the 5770 i was looking at the apple website and what I understand there no extra power cable comes with it. But I can se a cable here at OWC.

Using a 5770 in a MacPro3,1 (2008) driving two monitors, one DVI, one with MiniDisplay port-DVI converter with SL 10.6.6. Everything except OpenGL hardware accelerated apps work fine. OpenGL content creation apps exhibit various artifacts, jitter, etc., even though the drivers pass GLview tests up to OpenGL 2.1 100%. I think it is most likely that the ATI drivers are immature, possibly a bad card. Apple thinks it is a problem with compatibility; according to people we spoke to, the 5770 is only supported in a 2010 edition MacPro! I am typing this while on hold for AppleCare customer relations to see if they will exchange the card.

Hello guys , 1 gen mac pro(2006) my card die 2 years ago , freez and then black ( input not supo..) i bought the the ati from apple 5770 , and the snow upgrade , BUT how i install the snowleopard with a black monitor???? pleaseeee !

I just put an apple 5770 in my Mac Pro 2008, I get video etc, but no Quartz Extreme. I have upgraded to 10.6.6 and still nothing. Is there something else that I have to do? It seems that the driver is not loading, or is missing.

My only remaining question with these cards is what EXACT files are needed to enable the MDP audio output. I have perfectly functioning MDP audio in Windows XP w/ the current ATI HDMI Audio Driver, but no luck thus far in OS X.

You did not state what your OS or Machine model is. That makes a HUGE difference. It also makes a difference in whether ot not you installed the power connector to the card. ATI cards do tend to boot up to a grey screen when no power connector is installed.

I installed the ATI 5770 last night and my computer would not completely start..no USB and the screens would not operate. Moving the screens back to my original card also installled resulted only in the secondary screen showing grey. It was a no-go. I removed all peripherals and it made no difference. My early 2008 did not accept this card. I wasted an evening on this and I have no clue why my install went so badly wrong. I have pulled it and am back to square one and very disappointed in the whole tihng and out a lot of money for this fun. I should have accepted the Apple webpage in this regard.

Thanks Squishy Tia. I installed the SL Graphics Update after the OS upgrade, before my old NEC died. It did seem to help with the numerous crashes. But that CRT NEC died soon after the SL upgrade. All those panics may have hastened its death.

Occasionally, after the Mac wakes up from sleep, the monitor does not light up. Power cycling the monitor, or detaching and reattaching the video cable, restores normal operation. NEC claims that they are getting many reports on this, and that it is due to DisplayPort cables which are not built to spec. But I am using the cable that they provided with the monitor, which they claim should work, plus a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter. I do not see the wake-from-sleep problem if I use a DVI cable.

My reason for buying the card would be to get the DisplayPort, which carries 10-bit per channel color. DVI only carries 8-bit per channel. Are there any other cards which run in the first generation MacPro and have DisplayPort output?

Hi,I just put a radeon HD5770 into a MacPro1,1 (Quad Core 3.0ghz) (late 2006) running OS X 10.6.4, and got no response from the video card at all. My EFI Boot ROM version and SMC version are up to date (according to: )So my question is: what are folks doing to make this work?I desperately need a new video card, and would love to make this happen. Any advice would be highly appreciated.With thanks in advance.Scott

My goal, however, was much more ambitious. I wanted to be able to use it as a daily driver for all of my needs. How did it fair for transcoding HD video? How well does it render and run Final Cut projects? How about gaming in VR? Can it game at all? Let's find out!

One last thing. I want to preface this retro review and state out front that during my usage, I purposely tried to update and upgrade components that I had readily available to bring the system closer to today's needed specifications for various workloads. This is not a review of a machine frozen in time. This is also review about the expandability, the adaptability, and the relevance of such a system from 2009 in today's world.

However, thanks to brilliant hackers who document their knowledge on various web forums, this limitation is easily by-passed with a firmware upgrade. The default firmware on the 2009 Mac Pro is 4,1. The needed firmware to run macOS High Sierra is 5,1 (the firmware for a 2010 Mac Pro). Upgrading the firmware couldn't have been easier. Once upgraded, the limitations were removed and I managed to install first macOS Sierra, and then macOS High Sierra. The firmware upgrade in essence turned my 2009 Mac Pro into a 2010 Mac Pro. With that firmware upgrade, other benefits also manifested. So with the OS smack dab in the modern age, I was set to look at the hardware.

Installing Windows 10 via Boot Camp should be a straightforward affair. It was not. I won't get into the drawn-out process but I managed to get Windows 10 installed on the HDD and I managed to do it in such a way that Windows 10 ran like a regular install would normally run rather than Windows 10 "know" that it was a Boot Camp install. The benefit to me was that I could download the latest manufacturer driver for my GPU upgrade described below. Otherwise, you'd be limited to using Apple Boot Camp specific drivers that tend to be older and missing features.

Now that I had a modern OS, I began to wonder how capable of a machine I already had without other upgrades. Looking at my requirements for transcoding, rendering video and gaming, I was anticipating decent enough abilities in transcoding and video rendering, but I had no expectations of it being able to game. However, as I stated earlier, if I could readily upgrade something, I would do so.

The system came with a 160 GB SSD drive and a SATA 640 GB HDD. Frankly, these are fine for my purpose but note that the standard SATA connections on the motherboard of the Mac Pro would make getting a larger SSD an easy upgrade.

I put both of my AMD RX 580 GPUs into the Mac Pro to hopefully get higher fidelity for gaming and hardware encoding. Since I was able to already install macOS High Sierra, the upgrade was literally plug and play (with some caveats I'll detail in another article). At this point I was amazed with how I could reasonably upgrade hardware components such as a modern GPU (let alone two of them!) in such an aging system. Truly a testament to the engineering that went into designing the 2009 Mac Pro. I went from 1 GB of onboard VRAM to 2x8 GB. The system worked surprisingly well. In fact, as I mentioned previously, since I was able to install the latest AMD "Adrenaline" drivers, I knew I had the latest and greatest software those GPUs could offer. Yes crossfire worked (mostly, but I'm not certain if the issues I had were due to the Mac Pro or due to crossfire itself).

Don't get me wrong. Although I was able to install two modern GPUs in this machine, there are a couple of allowances I had to accept. Firstly, the Nehalem CPUs aren't nearly fast enough to properly feed one let alone two of the RX 580 GPUs. In fact, in order for me to have stability, I had to reduce the power draw on the GPUs so that it didn't shut off my Mac Pro since the power draw was too high. Benching between various tests the difference was only a few percentage points lower when using reduced power but the benefits of having both GPUs was still apparent. Remember, I'm not looking to see if the 2009 Mac Pro can best a modern equivalent. I'm seeing if along it's lifespan, various upgrades and updates can keep it within an acceptable performance level. So far, it seems like it can.

So far I have not spent any extra cash on updating the 2009 Mac Pro. Up until I actually tried using the machine, I never even really considered upgrading the CPU or memory. However, seeing how promising the dual GPU upgrade went, I started researching the possibility of purchasing an upgraded CPU and memory.

The firmware upgrade that I performed taking the system from 4,1 to 5,1 made this CPU and memory upgrade an even better proposition. Memory wise, I could now install faster 1333 DDR3 memory. Up to 128GB of it if so inclined. On the CPU front, the firmware update now supports the considerably faster Westmere Intel Xeon chips. Not only do they have faster clock speeds, but they also have more cores per chip. The system could be upgraded to 12 cores running at 3.06 GHz. The most amazing part is that would bring the 2009 Mac Pro on par with the Mac Pros sold up until the release of the 2013 "trash can" Mac Pro and in doing so, giving the 2013 model a run for it's money.

And it's this ability to upgrade it to Westmere that again shows that although not the fastest, not even the most efficient, but still is relevant for today's workloads. With the bulk of the cost of the machine already paid for, these incremental upgrades offer excellent cost benefit over buying a similarly or slightly better spec'd workstation. Remember value added over time.

Although I have yet to perform the upgrade of memory and CPU, I've found some vendors selling the whole CPU and memory tray on eBay at the cost of around $1000 where you can simply swap out the old one and put in the new one. Or if you just want to upgrade only one of the components, you can do so for considerably less. You simply need to make certain that you buy CPUs that are compatible with your current CPU and memory tray. A single core tray cannot be upgraded to a dual-core tray for example. So you need to buy either a single core chip or two dual-core chips. I'm looking out for deals so if you spot any, leave me a comment to let me know! 350c69d7ab