Hi All,
I've just purchased a Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 from eBay and triple checking that it is compatible with my 2009 Early Mac Pro. I've been told by a Mac Facebook group that is is plug and play however the ebay seller said I need to buy a Mac specific one. There doesn't seem to be any definitive answer on this. I have a few hours till he posts it out so really need the help. He said it's a PC version and no mention of Mac. I am using the Latest El Capitan OS. Thank you.
It will work fine in a Mac. You have to connect each power input (two total) to one AUX power connection on the logic board. You need a Mac cable since the connection on the logic board are not the same as in a PC.
However, since it is not a Mac card noting will show on the screen until the drivers load which is righ before the login screen.
Thus you can't use the special keyboard startups like Option and Recovery mode.
Thank you for your reply, can you please send me a link of the Mac cable I need to buy. Thank you
As Illaass says the card will work fine in a classic Mac Pro even under El Capitan but you will not get access to the pre-boot Mac features like selecting an alternate boot drive or using the Recovery Partition and hence using FileVault encryption.
There was never an official Mac version of the Radeon HD 7970 however Apple provide drivers for it as standard and it is possible to 'flash' the firmware in this card to add full pre-boot Mac support. (I have done this to a 7970 myself.)
See http://forum.netkas.org/index.php?topic=5619.0
The process basically boils down to extracting the existing Windows firmware, appending the Mac EFI code and then writing the new combined firmware back to the card. This is done in Windows typically via Boot Camp, it cannot be done in a virtual machine. Or you can take a chance and use a 7970 ROM image (firmware) created by someone else.
Hi everyone.
I'm considering purchasing a used flashed 7970 for my mid-2010 MacPro 5,1.
Does anyone have experience using this card with the Adobe CC 2015 suite? I read that it's fine for FCP, but Adobe's CUDA may be a problem for the 7970.
Also, I have several PCIe cards and am wanting to get an Accelsior PCIe SSD. Will the 7970 generate too much heat (and potentially endanger the Accelsior)?
RAfBOy wrote:
Hi everyone.
I'm considering purchasing a used flashed 7970 for my mid-2010 MacPro 5,1.
Does anyone have experience using this card with the Adobe CC 2015 suite? I read that it's fine for FCP, but Adobe's CUDA may be a problem for the 7970.
Also, I have several PCIe cards and am wanting to get an Accelsior PCIe SSD. Will the 7970 generate too much heat (and potentially endanger the Accelsior)?
Only Nvidia cards support CUDA so an AMD Radeon HD 7970 is never going to support CUDA. As a result Adobe software will work better with an Nvidia card than an AMD card.
I would not expect a heat problem but you can always move the Accelsior to a slot not next to the video card, the Accelsior card is I believe only a 4x i.e. four lane card and as such can be located in any slot without a performance hit e.g. the topmost slot.
Sapphire HD 7970
