Video Card - Mac Pro High Sierra & Native

[Siegfried Meier]

Hey guys,

Would love opinions on what card you guys are recommending with High Sierra and PT Ultimate 2018.4 Native. The stock card in our Mac Pro 5,1 2012 is no longer cutting it.

I've got the Sapphire HD 7950 in mind that OWC sells - it has 3072 MB of VRAM.

Would love to hear some thoughts!
Thanks,
Sig

[Mount Royal]

Originally Posted by Siegfried Meier

Hey guys,

Would love opinions on what card you guys are recommending with High Sierra and PT Ultimate 2018.4 Native. The stock card in our Mac Pro 5,1 2012 is no longer cutting it.

I've got the Sapphire HD 7950 in mind that OWC sells - it has 3072 MB of VRAM.

Would love to hear some thoughts!
Thanks,
Sig

I trust you have the ATI Radeon HD 5770 card in the 5,1 MacPro. In what way is that card not working in High Sierra and 2018.4?

I thought that, on paper at least, the 5,1 MacPro was not suited for High Sierra. My teaching was that the 5,1 stopped at Sierra. No? Is it possible that your difficulties aren't traceable to the video card, but to an OS incompatibility? Asking out of ignorance.

John Caldwell

[peterle]

mac pro 5.1 is high sierra compatible (even an 4.1 flashed to 5.1)
..a 5770 card should do the job , also 5870

[DetroitT]

Hi.
I'm running HDX card (Power need)

Been using the Sapphire Mac edition with 3 displays.
HS MacOS 10.13.xx and Pro Tools have issue with Window configurations.
That said HDX Power required a PCIe power cable mod.
This again has been working fine until recent. Showing it's age I have tried a few variations.
1. MacVideoCards GTX 1080 8GB (Mac power draw for my system) worked great but initial Fan ramp-up
and expanding into larger SSD and spinner drives kept my search going.
2. AMD WX7100 (Ideal power draw and 6 pin)
No-one flashing WX and Apple Drivers put it as and external GPU.
Pain with too many ktext mods to wrangle.
3. my current solution is a NVIDIA P4000 (6 pin 105 watts) and a GTX 120 Mac card for boot EFI
Not as drawing in power (Even as 2 single slot) works nicely with 4K and 3 displays.
Pro Tools Window configs holds most but some like colors, Transport, System Usage floating windows do not hold there place.

In general I'm at the best yet.

In retrospect the flashed MVC GTX 1070 might have been a single, dual slot lowish power solution.

Depending on your graphic and PCIe Power needs the Sapphire Mac Edition is a great card/price.
I don't recommend the older GTX 680 Mac Edition (2 of 2 failed at a studio I service)

[Siegfried Meier]

Is this the same card as I was referring to from OWC?

Thanks!!
Sig

Originally Posted by DetroitT

Hi.
I'm running HDX card (Power need)

Been using the Sapphire Mac edition with 3 displays.
HS MacOS 10.13.xx and Pro Tools have issue with Window configurations.
That said HDX Power required a PCIe power cable mod.
This again has been working fine until recent. Showing it's age I have tried a few variations.
1. MacVideoCards GTX 1080 8GB (Mac power draw for my system) worked great but initial Fan ramp-up
and expanding into larger SSD and spinner drives kept my search going.
2. AMD WX7100 (Ideal power draw and 6 pin)
No-one flashing WX and Apple Drivers put it as and external GPU.
Pain with too many ktext mods to wrangle.
3. my current solution is a NVIDIA P4000 (6 pin 105 watts) and a GTX 120 Mac card for boot EFI
Not as drawing in power (Even as 2 single slot) works nicely with 4K and 3 displays.
Pro Tools Window configs holds most but some like colors, Transport, System Usage floating windows do not hold there place.

In general I'm at the best yet.

In retrospect the flashed MVC GTX 1070 might have been a single, dual slot lowish power solution.

Depending on your graphic and PCIe Power needs the Sapphire Mac Edition is a great card/price.
I don't recommend the older GTX 680 Mac Edition (2 of 2 failed at a studio I service)

[DetroitT]

Yes. A nice card. It has a small efi switch for mac or win systems.
It requires 2 six pin pci power connects which come with it and the mac handles well.

PS Being a Radeon Graphic Card, all mac drivers are native.

[arche3]

128g ram doesn't hurt. I use 128.... everything snappy using 2 high end video cards 5 monitors.

[Siegfried Meier]

If 128GB of RAM is the requirement, then there won't be an Apple laptop or iMac useable with current versions of Pro Tools for the next 10 years...

[arche3]

Protools has been buggy for awhile. You basically need to add $$$ for new machine. Video cards. Ram to get it to work like it used to.

[DetroitT]

Trim Support Yes or No can be viewed in the About this Mac>System Report>Hardware>SATA/SATA Express

Using non Apple SSD's this is supported but not always trim On.

I found using Samsung Pro and EVO products trim support on resulted in noticeable stability for my classic Mac Pro 5,1

I dropped $10 for Disk Sensei software to turn this on.