Radeon Vega in a Mac Pro 5,1

I can imagine it is, Shecky Lovejoy. I wish I could afford to get that one, or the nvidia 1080 or Titan, whichever model that is, but I can't afford that right now, what with the exchange rate, shipping, taxes, etc ( I live in Canada) . . All I can say is, in theory it works .I've seen a tweet from a developer showing off a Radeon Vega in an eGPU and installed in a Mac pro, and the model listed was a MacPro 5,1. Since neither of us have Thunderbolt, the eGPU is probably out, but High Sierra should support the card with no real difficulties, but you'd have to wait until the new high-end iMac Pro comes out for the drivers to be finalized, because that's the video card it uses, apparently. And, I'm sure you've heard you can get it with up to 18 cores, tricked out and decked out to the nines, but it'll cost you $13,000 (plus tax, of course) -that's for the top end, money is no object one. I'm sure you know that already....Yeah, power could be an issue, but I'm sure there are ways around that. I haven't tried it in my own Mac Pro 5,1 but if someone's willing to give me one, for free, I'll gladly take it (what? what do you mean not a snowball's chance in....oh, right, got it)

So there you go...8k footage needs a lot of power and bandwidth, tons, in fact. Guess you're going to have to save up...

right? and...here I am with a 2k monitor, no 4k for me, let alone 8k. I don't know if they even make 8k monitors--maybe they do,but I haven't seen one, and I'm 100% sure I can't afford one. Heck, your R9 280X is still more powerful than my Sapphire 7950....

that's all I have, k??

John B

BareFeats: Extrapolating iMac Pro GPU Performance Using RX Vega 64

One of his tests uses a version of the Radeon RX Vega 64 or 56 on a "regular" board inside a Mac Pro 2010 model. it is quite comparable to the iMac Pro.

lol, pretty sure you gotta pull of the EEPROM chip, program the new one with EFI bootloader, and solder it back on. most of us rely on Macvidcards.com for this.

I'm running a Vega 64 in a mac pro 5,1 with an additional 750wat psu plugged in to power it. Runs great. Way better than my GTX 980 ever did and the PSU helps with stability.

There is no bottleneck with PCIe 2.0. Its the same bandwidth as 3.0 I believe. Just doesn't have oh so convient short PCI slot.

They are back ordered but eBay can get you a card if your willing to shell out the extra money.

If do a little googling you will find pictures but basically you just need to jumper the postive and ground on the Motherboard power connector of the external PSU to make it turn on. You could splice with a sata connector to make it turn on/off with the mac pro, or solder to the psu itself but honestly, thats just too much trouble. I sit the dang thing right on top of my mac pro and leave the side panel off. One of these days I'll make a plexiglass side panel to replace my existing metal one that accomodates extra fans and the external psu right on the side of the chassis. Also, I don't like mixing grounds, thats done already in the AC circuit.

Anyways, if they support the card then you can mail them a Vega 64 and they can perform the EEprom chip replacement. They do not currently sell amd cards and for all I know, maybe AMD's eeproms are reprogrammable but that is not ussually the case. Might just need to research that a bit more, Macvidcards support channel would be able to answer that question quickly though.

Make sure you got a powerful enough psu or use multiples, this freaking Vega uses a crapload of power. I tried a dedicated 500watt and it still reset on me, which is why I upped to 750watt.

Uh, I don't think your going to find a PCI to PCI expansion chassis with a psu powerful enough for the Vega 64. If we had thunderbolt, maybe, but without it highly unlikely.

Nope. If you really need a screen you can just keep your 980ti and plug it in when needed. Boot screen is really only needed if your doing diagnostics. If I remember correctly, recovery will work without the efi bootloader. Its literally just that boot screen.

While it won't be as fast in a 2010 mac pro as the new iMac Pro it is still worth doing and will smoke the R9 280X.

Check out Barefeats for benchmarks they have several tests.

http://barefeats.com/imacpro_vs_pt4.html

I have a 980ti and am thinking about getting the Vega pro. But they are power hungry, you either need to run one cable to the logic board and one to the super drive bay or get a separate PSU. From what I here they will not run off the dual cables to the logic board as it uses two 8 pin connectors. It only works with High Sierra as stated. I am also wondering if you get the boot screen with it or not. Please post back here is you gave it a try.

It is pricey, but if you run FCPX all day then it might be worth it, if you use Adobe then defiantly not worth it. Is AMD Frontier like NVIDIA Founders edition? I think that is what you would want, not one tricked out for gaming, as close to stock as possible.

I will wait to see if Apple actually comes out with a new mac pro this year... but how much will that cost? My 2010 mac pro 12 core is hanging in there.

Just double checked for you. It works. Vega 64 with factory boot loader renders a display in Recovery mode but you have to wait for it since recovery takes a little bit longer.

A lot of time when Barefeats says "works" he really means, "works as long as you don't need boot-up screens".

In 10.8.6 and later, most PC cards "works" using that as the operational definition.