Expanding the Mac Pro 2013

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Andrea.db Author

Level 1

0 points

Expanding the Mac Pro 2013

Hi everyones,

I am a holder of a mac pro in 2013:

OS X Yosemite 10.10.4

3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5

12 GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC

2 AMD FirePro D500

I work a lot with 3D and Motion Graphics, and I bought this model thinking to solve rendering timing, but I noticed that rendering time is not very fast. I wanted to know if with a thunderbolt Box with PCIe slot, i can add an external graphics card that supports CUDA drivers, because the softwares that i use requires this.

Thanks in advance.

Mac Pro (Late 2013), OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Jul 23, 2015 4:42 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

sinoue

Level 2

236 points

Jul 27, 2015 11:57 AM in response to Andrea.db

Your Mac Pro's FirePro cards use a custom Cylinder Mac Pro connector and I haven't seen any new graphic card offerings. Maybe when the updated Mac Pro comes out next year we might see new graphics card.

I like your idea of an external PCIe graphics card, but I'm not convinced you'll get getter results, just more output displays. You could also look at using USB 3 display adapters to power additional monitors.

CUDA drivers is a NVIDIA only thing and I've only seen their cards on the older Mac Pro Tower configurations. If you get your Mac Pro Cylinder up and running with an external thunderbolt PCIe connected NVIDIA graphics card I'd love to see you post the results. G'Luck!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7987/running-an-nvidia-gtx-780-ti-over-thunderbolt -2

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Answer 2

lllaass

Level 10

210,411 points

Jul 27, 2015 12:37 PM in response to Andrea.db

Yes you can but performance is not that great since. See:

http://mediapros.co.uk/portfolio-view/thunderbolterizer/

Can I use an external graphics card over Thunderbolt?

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Answer 3

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Jul 27, 2015 1:12 PM in response to Andrea.db

Or... sell it and do a custom build of a older Classic MP 5,1 and then you can use GTX 980, or two AMD R9 280x cards. The cMP is still holding its own and upgradeable to be a viable option. For much less, or get more for $5K - 980, multiple 1TB SSD blades or 4 x 1TB SATA III SSDs, 128GB RAM, 4x6TB storage.

For some apps, for a smaller footprint, the nMP might be perfect.

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Answer 4

Andrea.db Author

Level 1

0 points

Jul 28, 2015 1:55 AM in response to Andrea.db

Thank you guys for all your support.

@sinoue: so thunderbolt connection is slower than a pcie connection? I this case is not a good idea to spend money for a thunderbolt box and an NVIDIA graphic card and not use it in full.

@Illaass: i have read the link that you provided me and i can see that there are a lot of bugs about. I have read about Kernel panic and driver compatibility problems.

@the hatter: your idea is good but at the moment i am looking for an easiest way before sell my new mac pro.

So guys, you know if apple is working on something? Yesterday i called the apple and they gave me an appointment to the genius bar. They told me that there is a way but they will explain me better when i will go to the genius bar. If you have some news about, before i go to the genius bar, it would be great. If not, thanks for your support again, and if i will have good news from genius bar, i will let you know.

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