I use a 5,1 Mac Pro (the "cheese grater") in my home office...specs are decent: 2x 2.26 quad core Xeon processors, 32GB (1333MHz) RAM, but a terrible GPU (GE Force GT120 with 512MB RAM).

I'd like to upgrade the GPU to something that provides passable performance for SETI @ home (and other similar applications) as well as allows for 4k video output for the TV in the room.

I'm trying to keep my budget low as I just bought a monitor for the computer, so used cards would be best.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Define “low” budget. Put a number on it. That way we can better recommend what level of card you should get. There are cards available at every price point and you will generally get more performance with more expensive cards.

Also do you have any size or power restraints? Do you have PCIe power connectors available? Can you fit a dual slot GPU?

You want to stick with nvidia, but need the above questions answered to really give you a recommendation.

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

I'd like to upgrade the GPU to something that provides passable performance for SETI @ home...

It all depends on which OS you are running. If Mojave or higher you are restricted to AMD. If High Sierra you can use nVidia, but, the Best, and only, CUDA App requires you to jump through hoops to run. If Sierra you can use the best CUDA App with the same hoops, or, run the Older, slower CUDA App without any hoops. My best machine running MacOS, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=6796479, the 2nd best running MacOS, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=8097309

My Mac Pro tops out at 10.11 (El Capitan).

Define “low” budget. Put a number on it. That way we can better recommend what level of card you should get. There are cards available at every price point and you will generally get more performance with more expensive cards.

Also do you have any size or power restraints? Do you have PCIe power connectors available? Can you fit a dual slot GPU?

You want to stick with nvidia, but need the above questions answered to really give you a recommendation.

$200ish dollars. If the card is really worth it I can spend perhaps $300.

I don't know of any power restraints save for the stock PSU. My Mac Pro has PCIe and can fit dual slot GPU's; as in the picture below:



Thanks!!!

My Mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1 is on High Sierra, 10.13.6 with current Security Update. (17G8037)

I have one Mac Flashed NVIDIA GTX-970 4GB GDDR5 VRAM Card, (used), that I paid $329 for off of e-Bay. I also have one off the shelf EVGA GTX-1050 2GB GDDR5 VRAM Card. The 1050 is Low Power and pulls directly from the Motherboard up to 65 Watts, (75 Max), and I don't remember what the wattage is on the GTX-970, BUT the 970 REQUIRES dual 6-Pin Connectors - the 6-Pin Cables come with the Card.

MacVidCards STILL sells the GTX-970, BUT is MUCH higher priced at $375 - AND is out of stock at MacVidCards. Silver NVIDIA GTX-970 4GB Card, 3 DP, 1 DVI, and 1 HDMI - $375.

The Mac Flashed EFI is IMPORTANT for a Real Mac Pro 5,1 in order to have Boot Screen, (with Apple Logo and Progress Bar), visible. An ordinary off the shelf GTX-970 Card WILL work, BUT NO Boot Screen... Video WILL become available at Login.

I use TBar's CUDA90 App on both my Mac Pro 5,1 AND my Hackintosh with MacVidCards' GTX-1070 8GB Card AND a Secondary EVGA GTX-1050. As TBar mentioned, to make use of the NVIDIA Cards, the Mac Pro CANNOT go above High Sierra. IF a more modern and up to date OS is important to you, you MUST go AMD/ATI and could install a Sapphire Pulse RX580 8GB Card. This WILL allow you to take the Mac Pro 5,1 up to Mojave, BUT NOT up to Catalina. Apple has seen fit to kill off the cMPs with Catalina making Mojave the LAST OS that a 5,1 can take.


ymmv


Good Luck.


TL

[EDIT:]

MacVidCards' Flashed Sapphire Pulse RX580 8GB Card - NEW in Retail Packaging: $374.95.


TL

[EDIT 2:]

My Mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1 is Dual Xeon 2.4GHz CPUs, 64GB ECC DDR3 1066MHz RAM, the GPUs mentioned above, one Samsung VNAND 860 EVO 1TB SSD with High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G8037 - HFS+) with NVIDIA Web Driver 387.10.10.10.40.131 and NVIDIA CUDA Driver 418.163, one Samsung VNAND 860 EVO 1TB SSD with Sierra 10.12.1 - (HFS+), one Samsung VNAND 860 EVO 1TB SSD - BootCamp Win 7 Pro x64, and one Western Digital Black SATA 2TB HD - one 1TB Partition for Time Machine, and one 1TB Partition for Blizzard Games, both Partitions in HFS+ Format. One Apple Cinema Display - 23".


TL

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TimeLord04
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My Mac Pro tops out at 10.11 (El Capitan).

Well, that makes it easy. The highest NV card you can use in El Capitan is Maxwell. Your choice would be between a single GTX 980 or 980Ti, or Two GTX 970s. The single cards will run cooler, but produce less work than two 970s. The Upper 970 will run around 80c in the MacPro, but will still give full speed. El Capitan can't use any version of CUDA above CUDA 8.0, so, you would have to use the older CUDA App 'setiathome_x41p_zi3v_x86_64-apple-darwin_cuda75' which is still twice as fast as the OpenCL Apps. Also, the best cuda driver for El Capitan is 8.0.71, there are newer versions, but they are much slower than 8.0.71. The only problem with the older CUDA App is it will use close to 2GB of vRam, so, you need at least 3GB or higher, the 970s have 4GBs. I bought My 970 FTW off eBay for $105, on the rare occasion I need the Boot screen I replace the 970 with one of my flashed ATI HD6850s until the problem is solved.

My Mac Pro tops out at 10.11 (El Capitan).

Actually, I found your System on iBuildMacs.

You have a 2009 4,1 possibly Flashed to 5,1 and are on El Capitan. (Based on your 2.26GHz CPUs...) You CAN upgrade to Sierra 10.12.6.

Look here at the 2009 4,1 2.26GHz CPU Hardware Upgrade Possibilities...

AND, your RAM SHOULD be 1066MHz, NOT 1333MHz - BUT, IF it's 1333MHz the System is slowing that down to 1066MHz.

TBar is RIGHT about the Limitations of El Capitan; BUT, IF what I've found IS true for your System - AGAIN, you SHOULD be able to get to Sierra 10.12.6 and be able to run CUDA90. TBar can confirm and give you proper assistance with that modification.


TL

[EDIT:]

OH, unless TBar can confirm whether a Flashed 4,1 to 5,1 status will allow you to Upgrade to High Sierra... I'm NOT sure about that...

IF you can get to High Sierra, THEN you can run the Cards I have which I mentioned in my last Post in High Sierra.

TBar is best to state what your System can and cannot run.


TL

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TimeLord04
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Would something like this work: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sapphire-Pulse-Radeon-RX-580-OC-8GB-GDDR5-Graphics-Card-/202319914808?_trksid=p2349526.m4383.l4275.c10#viTabs_0

My Mac Pro tops out at 10.11 (El Capitan).

Actually, I found your System on iBuildMacs.

You have a 2009 4,1 possibly Flashed to 5,1 and are on El Capitan. (Based on your 2.26GHz CPUs...) You CAN upgrade to Sierra 10.12.6.

Look here at the 2009 4,1 2.26GHz CPU Hardware Upgrade Possibilities...

AND, your RAM SHOULD be 1066MHz, NOT 1333MHz - BUT, IF it's 1333MHz the System is slowing that down to 1066MHz.

TBar is RIGHT about the Limitations of El Capitan; BUT, IF what I've found IS true for your System - AGAIN, you SHOULD be able to get to Sierra 10.12.6 and be able to run CUDA90. TBar can confirm and give you proper assistance with that modification.


TL

[EDIT:]

OH, unless TBar can confirm whether a Flashed 4,1 to 5,1 status will allow you to Upgrade to High Sierra... I'm NOT sure about that...

IF you can get to High Sierra, THEN you can run the Cards I have which I mentioned in my last Post in High Sierra.

TBar is best to state what your System can and cannot run.


TL

I flashed my MP from 4,1 to 5,1. It allows the computer to address (is that the right word?) 1333MHz RAM, as opposed to the 1066MHz limit on the 4,1. It also allows me to upgrade the processors to 6 core from the current 4 core. Not sure how wise it is to buy used Xeon processors, but they're going for about $50 a pop, so...

Would something like this work: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sapphire-Pulse-Radeon-RX-580-OC-8GB-GDDR5-Graphics-Card-/202319914808?_trksid=p2349526.m4383.l4275.c10#viTabs_0

The AMD 5xx series will Not work in El Capitan, they will work in Sierra. But, the NV Pascal GPUs also work in Sierra. Just for a comparison, I have an AMD 570, it is Slower running OpenCL than an Old nVidia GTX 750Ti running the CUDA App. The AMD 570 uses over 100 watts while crunching, the NV 750Ti uses around 30 watts while crunching and is Faster, consider the Power Savings. I think the Flashed 4,1 will run High Sierra, but there isn't any great advantage over Sierra for SETI work, and Sierra will run the Older cuda App where High Sierra won't. From what I can see, there isn't much difference between the 570 & 580 and I paid $100 for my 570.

I decided to pull the old MacPro 3,1 out of the corner and refresh my memory on the GPUs that worked. It's was replaced by a Hackintosh a few months ago after the power supply started acting strange. I suppose after 7 years of 24/7/365 SETI work the power supply may get a little tired. Funny thing is, after a few weeks in the corner it seemed to be back to normal, but, it's still more economical to use the Hackintosh. Then the fun started, seems one of the old system partitions had something DU and DiskWarrior called a 'hardware error'. On a single partition. The rest of the disk passed all the tests....strange. So, I ended up cloning the Mountain Lion partition to a different partition on the same disk...which solved the problem. That particular system is the one that was used to compile a good number of the SETI Mac Apps, and I noticed the last compile was the old CUDA Special zi3v cuda75 App. Then the real fun started.

I decided to recompile the App with a slightly different setting since that setting seems to be a little faster with the newer Apps, plus, it was a good test for the new clone, and it was all setup. So, the new App is about 4-5% faster on the BLC tasks. Not bad for just changing one number, even though there are probably Very Few people using the app in El Capitan. I then switched to Yosemite to recompiled the zi3v cuda90 App for Sierra with the same results. Then it was time to compare the old zi3v App with the newer V0.98b1 App in Sierra. The older App didn't stand a chance, the V0.98b1 version was almost twice as fast on the BLC tasks. Too bad you have to jump through hoops to run the newer App while the older App works fine using the same driver. Anyway, I just had to compare it to the OpenCL App using similar GPUs.

For the test I decided to use a NV GTX 1060 against the AMD 570 since they are pretty close in eBay price and crunching power usage. BTW, the 570 will Not work in El Capitan but works fine in Sierra on the MacPro 3,1. As expected, the 1060 running the Newer cuda App humiliates the 570 running the last OpenCL App. It's well over three times as fast, approaching 4 times as fast. The Older zi3v isn't quite twice as fast as the OpenCL App, but it's getting close to twice as fast. I set it up to run a few tasks on this host, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=7199204. Some of the NV tasks are using the older App, some the newer App. It's a shame Apple and nVidia can't seem to come together on the Newer OSes.

Hello all. Thank you for all of your help, knowledge and input. It is much appreciated. I decided to buy a used Radeon RX 580 8GB on eBay for a bit over $100. It's from a reputable vendor and I got a 6 month warranty. If it fails, I'm only out $100 and I still have the stock card I can use. Also, going by a YouTube tutorial, I purchased two mini 6 to 6 pin connectors and one dual 6 pin to single 8 pin connector for power.

Just to be clear I should be able to run the latest available version of OSX yes?

Hello all. Thank you for all of your help, knowledge and input. It is much appreciated. I decided to buy a used Radeon RX 580 8GB on eBay for a bit over $100. It's from a reputable vendor and I got a 6 month warranty. If it fails, I'm only out $100 and I still have the stock card I can use. Also, going by a YouTube tutorial, I purchased two mini 6 to 6 pin connectors and one dual 6 pin to single 8 pin connector for power.

Just to be clear I should be able to run the latest available version of OSX yes?

You SHOULD be able to get to Mojave. (Catalina WILL NOT run on a cMP!)

By using the AMD/ATI Radeon RX580 8GB Card - NOT Flashed, you MAY encounter a Black Screen at Bootup and will remain Black UNTIL you reach your Login Screen. This CAN be remedied by sending in your new-used Card to MacVidCards to be Flashed with Mac-EFI Boot ROM. Once Flashed, you will THEN be able to have Boot Screen in Mojave.

Flashing Service is $150 for that Card. Flashing Service from MacVidCards for RX580 8GB Card.


TL

[EDIT:]

AND, in Mojave, OpenCL has been Deprecated along with OpenGL. ONLY Metal Support is provided by MacOS Mojave. So, NO Crunching that I know of in Mojave.

You'd do best to stick with High Sierra 10.13.6 with Latest Security Update "005" - 17G8037. THEN you WILL have OpenCL Support along with OpenGL AND IF you go with an NVIDIA Maxwell or Pascal Card at a later date you will also be able to use CUDA.


TL

[EDIT 2:]

TBar will probably confirm all of this, and I believe he recommended you stick with Sierra 10.12.6 for your System.

Good Luck.


TL

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TimeLord04
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OpenCL still works in Mojave, there are quite a few Macs still running the OpenCL App, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=8618166&offset=380 It's just not any better than it was back in El Capitan when Apple last 'updated' it. They will probably support it for a few more OS versions, then one day it will just stop working, and you will see Many posts about it here. All the newer OSes do is remove any recent NV support, which is a show stopper for a number of People.

I posted the new CUDA Apps at Crunchers Anonymous , the newer 0.98b1 is quite a bit better than 0.97 on the Arecibo tasks even though it has the same problem as 0.97 with the displays. The best fix seems to be to run a Hackintosh and use the Intel GPU for the monitor. One of my Macs setup that way has a current uptime of 37 days without having to mess with anything. The Intel GPU does everything I need to have done, and doesn't steal a GPU slot from the working cards.

TBar,

Just FYI, the Blizzard WoW Forums for Mac Tech Support have been on the OS Changes for a couple of years. It was there that I first learned of MacOS Mojave Deprecating OpenCL. Mojave is the LAST MacOS to ALLOW OpenCL to run. Catalina is NOT supposed to have OpenCL at all.

Also, Mojave is the LAST MacOS to allow 32 Bit Apps to run, with warnings popping up that the Apps are NOT "Optimized"...

AND, I agree with you 100% that for NVIDIA Maxwell and Pascal that High Sierra is the LAST MacOS to utilize NVIDIA Web Drivers for these Cards.

In InsanelyMac Forum, it is still in HIGH hopes that Catalina will offer the "possibility" of NVIDIA releasing new Web Drivers that NOT ONLY allow Maxwell and Pascal Cards to run, BUT also Turing... Now that Catalina has made Public Release, it's just a wait and see game, now.


TL

[EDIT:]

Thanks for the pointer to 98b1. Just Updated my cMP and Hackintosh to 98b1 for High Sierra.


TL

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TimeLord04
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Well, this machine is running Catalina and it's showing OpenCL, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=7988896
He isn't showing any GPU tasks yet, so, we'll just have to wait. The only problem I see is the GPU app was built with flags for SSSE3. If there is a problem with SSSE3, the App may need to be recompiled with flags for SSE41.

Didn't have to wait. Here is another machine running Catalina and he is running GPU Apps, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=8461718&offset=160
It seems a little slow for a RX580 though. Maybe I'll compile an App with SSE41 flags and see if someone wants to test it in Catalina. It does show Low CPU usage though, he could be just starving the GPU.

Well, this machine is running Catalina and it's showing OpenCL, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=7988896
He isn't showing any GPU tasks yet, so, we'll just have to wait. The only problem I see is the GPU app was built with flags for SSSE3. If there is a problem with SSSE3, the App may need to be recompiled with flags for SSE41.

COOL!!! Maybe AMD/ATI made waves with Tim Cook and the Developers to keep OpenCL going... OpenGL, though, is pretty much dead on MacOS in favor of Metal/Metal2.

Found this OLD Forum on the OpenCL and OpenGL Deprecation in Mojave: OpenCL and OpenGL Deprecated in Mojave.

I REALLY hope that they decide to keep OpenCL in MacOS; ESPECIALLY if the Apple/NVIDIA War keeps going...


TL

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TimeLord04
Have TARDIS, will travel...
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