Adding in a gtx 460 2gb in a 2008 (3.1) MacPro?

I am boot camping win 7 64 bit on a 2008 MacPro (3.1)
I want to add in a gtx 460 2 gb card to use with Octane Render on the Windows side. The card would not be connected to any monitors, but would only be used to crunch renderings in Octane Render.

Will I be able to stick this card in the 2nd 16x slot without worrying about a modular or external PSU (I've read about people adding gtx 480 and 470 but having to supply power from alternate source)? In the first slot I have my display card (8800 GT) that is connected to my monitors.

Would the presence of this card cause any issues when I jump over to the osX side?

Thanks for your help,
/Christian

2008 MacPro (3.1), Mac OS X (10.6.4), Windows 7 64 bit (bootcamp), 14 GB RAM

Posted on Aug 31, 2010 8:46 AM

Reply
4 replies

Aug 31, 2010 9:30 AM in response to cakesson

Maybe this mrbojanglesix MacRumors.
I have 2 drives in my mac pro 4,1 so I installed windows on the second. OSX on the first. After I had finished installing windows I went back to OSX to fool around and make sure everything worked, which it did. Then I installed the newest nvidia drivers, and plugged in my gtx 470 as is described above. Go into windows, everything works fine, card is fast, gt 120 still running the monitor.

So I try to boot back into OSX and notice the bootloader skips it, going right for the windows drive. So I option boot OSX and grey apple screen I just get a blue screen. So I pop in my 10.6 disk, and option boot the dvd, same story. Anyone have any suggestions? Apple won't really talk to me since its unsupported stuff. Help would be appreciated.

(side note: the 470 seems quiet, doesn't make much noise at all, not even while running at 20 gigaflops/sec with octane render (which seems like it would constitute "underload", seems hot in the back but that's what everyone says about it. Is there any way to monitor the fan, and make sure it is spinning up? And that I can't just hear the gt 120?).

Only difference above being 460 vs GTX 470. Apple has trouble with cards having 2GB; it can depend on the model PC card whether OS X will even boot or not.

Most definitely have to split power.

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Adding in a gtx 460 2gb in a 2008 (3.1) MacPro?

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