Installing a Radeon Vega Frontier Edition in a 2010 Mac Pro
So it was just my birthday and my awesome wife got me a Radeon Vega Frontier. She's the best.
Anyway, my Frankenstein's Monster of a Mac Pro is pretty much complete now, I guess.
Previously added:
- New CPU riser with 12x 3.33Mhz and 64GB RAM
- USB3 card
- Areca ARC1882 IX 24 attached to
- 24x Ultrastar 3TB external in a RAID6 with 2 hot spares (60TB media array)
- 4x SanDisk Ultra SSD 1TB internal (4TB startup/media-cache array)
- 5x Ultrastar 3TB external in a RAID5 via USB3 (12 TB Time Machine)
- Sapphire Radeon R9 x290
- 2x BDR burners (hate me, I love Blu-Ray)
First, the unboxing. Ooooooo, pretty
The first order of business was installing High Sierra, which has the correct drivers. This was no easy task. High Sierra requires a firmware update for my Mac Pro, but the updater did not like either the R9 290x or that I was booting from the Areca card. So I had to clone my startup to a FW800 drive, replace the R9 290x with my original Radeon 5870 from Apple, boot from the clone, and then I could complete the upgrade.
Then, the Vega goes in:
What a mess, right? Can't believe this is a Mac, right? I can't
Anyway, the Vega draws too much power to connect the motherboard power cables, so you need a 2nd PSU. I got a Thermaltake 750W, mostly because it was the least expensive non-generic 750 I could find at $68 (bonus: super quiet fan). I also got 2x PCIe 1' power extenders to reach out the back of the Mac.
Speaking of which, here's the back of my Mac now:
A closer look at the back (you can see the red connectors of the PCIe extenders coming out the top left)
About this Mac and Sys Info
What a freaking mess. But is it worth it? I'm mostly concerned about OpenCL performance. I used the complex hotel lobby scene in LuxMark to test. The Vega saw a 2.5x increase in benchmark score and a much better score on image validation:
Now a real-world test. I took 5-min from a video wall installation I did that had lots of effects and motion and AE comps, and sent it from Premiere to Media Encoder to encode a 19 mbit 1080p MP4. The results
R9:
- Video: 1920x1080 (1.0), 29.97 fps, Progressive, 00;05;00;03
- Audio: AAC, 320 kbps, 48 kHz, Stereo
- Bitrate: VBR, 2 pass, Target 19.00 Mbps, Max 25.00 Mbps
- Encoding Time: 00:15:03
Vega:
- Video: 1920x1080 (1.0), 29.97 fps, Progressive, 00;05;00;03
- Audio: AAC, 320 kbps, 48 kHz, Stereo
- Bitrate: VBR, 2 pass, Target 19.00 Mbps, Max 25.00 Mbps
- Encoding Time: 00:08:48
A 71% increase in speed. NICE!
Anyway, seems to be running well, much less fan action than the R9 270x, and no glitches so far. Will update if that changes.
Finally, I'd like to point out how absurd it is that I need to go to these measures to get a Mac that suits my needs. I practically have a hackintosh at this point.
Mac Pro, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3), 2010, 12-core 3.33, 64 RAM
