Radeon R9 280x on Mac pro

Lance,

My $.02 is yes that sounds like the right way to power this card.

Dang I was changing my post above and got kicked out while editing for some reason.

I guess the molex cable is useless.

My current setup is.

Slot one 5870

slot 2 2600xt

slot 3 pro tools native

slot 4 OWC accelsior.

I guess I am drawing a fair amount of power as is.

The esata sounds like a good way to go. Going to wait and see what macvidcards have to say about

flashing this card and his thoughts on the power issue.

thanks! Will pst back if I get something working here.

I think that is exactly the way I'd power it.

Get the 150 Watts for the 8 pin from 2 x 75 Watts 6 pin.

Get the 75 Watts for 6 pin from SATA. Get a 2 x SATA to 6 pin cable for that.

Two SATA ports give you 9 amps at 12v, that's about 100 Watts. Max.

The Mac Pro PSU gives you 980 Watts.

First it is important to not pull more from one each individual power lane than it can provide.

After that you can add all components together and see if it's under 980 Watts in total.

Which I guess it still is 😉

Thanks nfoo will give that a shot. Will get back in a few days when the cable comes in and I can try it out.

Yes, please report back if everyrthing works out fine for you.

Good luck!

I never got my xfx r9 280x black double d addition card working without it being flashed, I sent it to macvidcards and he flashed it and modded it so it runs at pcie2 speeds and has the boot screen. Only one of the dvi port works, and two mini display ports, not sure about the hdmi yet. But I am able to run my 30 inch apple display off the dvi, and two monitors off the display ports, so three monitors at once. If the hdmi works I would be able to run, one dvi, one mdp, and hdmi. I am using the 8 to 6 pinn cable that came with the card and one 6 to 6. He had issues flashing it because the xfx card came with MSI rom, which is really odd as it came from newegg new. I will do some testing and benchmarking to see how it compares to my old 5870, hopefully it will kick its but and post in a few days.

Well its been a long road and I originally got my card a XFX R9 280x double D black addition.

I got it flashed by macvidcards. My card is working with 10.8.5 and 10.9.2 with three monitors, one dvi and two mdps work. Everything is great till I run a game. My frame rates are about half of what they should be even via bootcamp and the screen goes black after a few minutes of play but the mac stays on but I have to force shut down and reboot then everything it back to normal , If I up the speeds on the fans via macsfancontrol I am able to play a game without blacking out in Mavericks and Windows but not in 10.8.5 it will still black out. Not blaming macvidcards for this, he said the card actually had a MSI bios instead of XFX which was wierd and he did have some issues flashing it at first, but said it did not black out on him. I have tried the card in two mac pros and it happens in both. This version of the card is overclocked, and I am wondering perhaps it just starts sucking too much power as it seems like the card is working under ok temperatures. But again raising the fans to 2000 rpms seems to keep the card functional so if anything I am using more power when doing that and it doesnt black out.

Maybe just got a bad card or perhaps when it kicks into a game it is drawing to much power, but again with the fans cranked up it does not black out. Too late to retun the card😟. I am running it with the 8 to 6 and the 6 to 6 cables.

I guess I could buy an external psu, but maybe that wont fix the issues and I will just be waisting more money.

Live and learn I guess. As we know this card did not work at all except in Windows until flashed in OSX unfortunatly I did not have a bootcamp setup when I got the card which I should have to test it out and make sure it was good before sending it our to be flashed. Not sure what to do at this point, maybe buy another one perhpas not the overclocked version and just take the loss on this one. Just putting this up for others to ponder and learn from if they are thinking of going the XFX R9 route, I would def first make sure it is finctioning 100 percent in windows befor falshing it. The good news is I upgraded my CPUs in my 2009 2.26 8 core to Xeon 2.66 12 cores and all went well with that upgrade, though its not easy. My geek bench multi core is a hair faster than the new Mac Pro 8 core, 26397 which is pretty sweet, total cost for my 12 core mac pro 1350.00 including 32 gigs of 1333 ram but not the video card upgrade.🙂 Now to just figure out this video card ordeal, I really dont like the idea of buying one of the older Apple approoved cards as they are way overpiced and three years old. I have a 5870 and its still a pretty good card... but I want more speed for FCP rendering etc. check out my CPU install video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAdgT-hJuXU

On the "wasting money" you know a 450W PSU that fits into an optical drive cage is.... less than $50.

Yeah I thinks that's what I will, any models you recommend?

You would require something like this for supplemental power

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16817101044

hum, if that link doesn't work, blame Evernote. Newegg tends to have a number of them, low cost, designed for GPU and have 2 x 8-pin plus 2 6-pin cables. The cabling can be where it gets to be fun, and messy.

It would power your GTX 780Ti safely, without messing with your motherboard dedicated power.

How to do this, here are couple of useful posts;

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1520765

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1472518

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1684482

I'm running a GTX760 in my Mac Pro 3,1 and the stock Radeon 2600XT.

The nvidia card is stock, not flashed, and boots fine. The nvidia drivers (mavericks default and the nvidia supplied one) are 100% on it. Got the GTX760 because this specific one had 2 6-pin inputs, no need to muck around with any 8-pin adapters.

I keep the 2600XT around for my 2nd monitor and because the GTX760 doesn't show any video until the system has boot into the Finder.

I had a 5870 that I flashed before getting the nvidia card and that worked OK but never seemed to be that much faster (poor drivers?) than the 2600XT.

Thanks Hatter, I found the same unit not at newegg because they said they were sold out but on eBay, seller was Newegg, go figure, anyway got it for 25 bucks will see what happens.

In addition, a EVGA GeForce GTX 760 4095 MB FTW, runs perfectly in a 4.1, 5.1 mac pro.

Without going the MacVidCards route, adding a psu or waiting for Nvidia or Apple, it may be the highest end card one could use reliably mixing PC cards w a Mac Pro.

EVGA GeForce GTX 760 4095 MB FTW, runs perfectly in a 4.1, 5.1 mac pro.

Runs perfectly after the login screen, but presumably does not provide boot-up screens, right?

¿ Or does this one provide boot-up screens as well?

No Login screen. it's important to have access to an apple certified card for this reason.

In example, when you install 10.9 or 10.10 you will need the apple EFI card to get past the registration section of the install.

There are other situations in which you may need an Apple friendly card on a mac pro, but for the most part you won't.

The GTX 760's run fine with two 6 pins. The 770's + call for more voltage from pcie slot, and have higher TDPs. Any GTX 760 is well within 4.1,5.1 Mac Pro's abilities.

In Windows 8.1 I can push the EVGA 4GB 760 FTW 115%, 100mhz+ Core and Mem, using EVGA Precision X 4.2.1 without an issue. On the Mac side there are only benefits in real world use, as well as being able to use feature rich HMDI, DVI and Displayport screens in tandem.