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On Apr 6, 2012, at 1:12 PM, Brian Maffitt wrote: A decent nVidia game card (GTX 480, GTX 580) will really rock the CUDA, if the Mac Pro supports it. In OSX Lion you can run most NVidia cards with just a few small problems. One, the NVidia cards will not show the boot screens. You don't see the screens until the desktop loads. Not a problem for most every day needs. I have a GTX570 in my Mac Pro 3.1. There was a directory problem with one of the partitions on the main drive which needed to be fixed by booting to the Lion Repair Disk which only shows up on the boot screens when you hold CMD-R during the start-up process. I ended up booting the Mac Pro into terminal mode and fixed it by hooking the MacPro to my MacBook Pro. Second problem is the NVidia cards so far fail at OpenCL tasks. While they are working on OpenCL drivers if you run a OpenCL benchmarking application it fails with a "No OpenCL device" error. For OpenGL the 570 seems to run fine. The last problem is the the GTX570 requires two power connections but, of course, does not come with the cables necessary to connect to the two connectors on the MacPro's motherboard. I was able to use the cable that was connected to my old ATI card for one of the connections and got the other from the second power connector in the optical bay. Something of a small hack and you can buy the correct cable for about $10 on-line. (Not really something you will find laying around in the usual stores for electronic "stuff") I have read that the GTX-580 needs an external power supply to keep from overloading the MacPro but the GTX570 seems to run fine, so far. |
