5770 and 5870 in Mac Pro 2009 - noisy PCIe expansion bay fan

Question

5770 and 5870 in Mac Pro 2009 - noisy PCIe expansion bay fan

I replaced the Geforce GT120 by the ATI radeon 5770 in my Mac Pro Quad 2.66 Nehalem. I had severe trouble with the speed of the fan of the PCI-e expansion bay: 2000 RPM and really noisy. After 30-60 minutes it slowed down and became silent, but upon reboot the noise and the high speed were there again.
I have sent the 5770 back to Apple. I am considering to try the 5870, but I am afraid I will be in trouble again.
With the GT 120, the fan speed is only 800 RPM and the Mac is silent. The ATI Radeon cards require one or two power cables connecting to the logic board.
Could that be the cause of the problems or was the 5770 a bad card? Or is it the logic board. I ran the Apple Hardware Test. everything was OK.
I checked it with Techtool Pro and there were no problems found.
Any help would be much appreciated. I have zapped the PRAM and reset the SMC without result.
Kind regards and thanks of reading.

Mac Pro Quad 2.66 Nehalem 2009., Mac OS X (10.6.5), OWC SSD + 12 GB RAM

Posted on Nov 26, 2010 12:34 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 30, 2010 12:14 PM in response to Mac_Hammer_Fan

If it is any consolation I have the same machine and installed the Radeon 5770 and have intermittent high expansion bay fan speeds (1400-2400rpm). I just checked this board today because it seems more noisy today than in a while and the ambient air is listed as 78 degrees F. The card has it's own fan and exhaust slots in the back of the card and the air from them is warm but not what I would consider hot. I had had two video cards and a eSATA card installed and never had a problem. Now with just this card and the eSATA it exists. I'm betting if I call Apple about it they will tell me it's only listed on their site as compatible with the 2010 Mac Pros, so, for now I will live with it.

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Answer 2

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Nov 30, 2010 12:42 PM in response to Ted Slawski

It lists 2009-10, sounds like a faulty card, let them exchange and deal with it.

Unfortunate that OS X doesn't have a good GPU utility to access and control/monitor graphic cards like EVGA and AMD have for Windows.

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Answer 3

Dec 22, 2010 12:15 PM in response to The hatter

It must have been a faulty card.
Today I placed an ATI Radeon 5870 in my MacPro and the card and the pci expansion bay fan are silent. At startup the speed is 2000 RPM, but after one minute it drops to a very acceptable 800 RPM.
My problem is solved. Thanks.
Cinebench and XBench scores of both cards are the same, but with OpenGL Extensions Viewer and SmallluxGPU the 5870 is the winner.

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