Installing a Graphics Card In Your Mac Pro 1,1, 2,1, or 3,1 (2006 or 2008) Begin by disconnecting your Mac Pro's power cable and any display monitors currently connected to the back of the Mac Pro. Remove the side panel of the computer by lifting the tab with a picture of a lock.
The default video card, GeForce 8800 GT, in my Mac Pro 3,1 Early 2008 wasn’t performing well for games, so I decided to replace it. After extensive research, I decided on the. This card, built on the ATI Radeon HD 6870 platform, has far superior performance to the Apple default GeForce card. It is most likely the quietest card due to the large heat sinks and two fans (instead of 1 like most video cards), and has two DVI, two mini DisplayPort, and an HDMI port. Customer comments confirmed it was quiet and ran cool.
More reviews confirmed it ran on the Mac Pro 3,1 (Mac Pro early 2008 running 10.6.7). Now that it is finally working, I can attest that it is a silent card, as quiet as the GeForce 8800 GT that it replaced. Below I explain what it takes to get the card working. Installed MSI HD R6870 Twin Frozr II After the card had arrived, I realized the sites I had reviewed were from people booting Windows natively on their Mac Pros. I had no idea so many people are running Windows on the Mac Pro. I spent the next several hours trying to find out how to get this card working. I read articles on how to flash it, various articles on downloading a variety of programs to change parts of Mac OS to get the card working.
Finally, after extensive searching, I found the. This posting is a “how-to” guide and hopefully easier to find than the posting where I downloaded the. Note, these drivers aren’t required after Mac OS X Lion. The best price I found for the MSI R6870 was on, and you need to order the from Amazon along with it. If you are running Yosemite, you can download and install the while you wait for the Amazon order to arrive. The GeForce 8800 has a power cable that runs from the motherboard to the video card. You will notice that there are two 6 pin connectors on the motherboard right next to each other (visible in the top left corner of the picture below).
![Pro Pro](https://everymac.com/images/other_images/mac-pro-upgrade-video-cards.jpg)
The new cable will plug into the empty connector to provide two power cables to the new card. Disconnect the power cable, unscrew the bar that holds the PCIe cards in place, and pull out the 8800 video card. Note that on the PCIe connector on the motherboard there is a plastic catch that you will need to pull up to remove the card. If you don’t, you will break this off.
Not the end of the word, but not ideal. Remove the blue plastic cover over the PCIe connector before installation. Slide the new video card into the bottom slot. Connect the two power cords and replace the bar that holds the PCIe cards in place. Close up the Mac and turn on. When booting you don’t see the standard boot screen.
The screen stays black until the Mac is booted then you see the login screen. I started my career at a start-up, Sun Microsystems, and have been at start-ups ever since.
Small companies are always short on people giving me the opportunity to travel extensively for both business and pleasure. Two foreign assignments in the UK led to 9+ years living abroad and accelerated the travel my family, and I was able to do. Although I have worked in Asia (including a year working for a Singapore HQ’d company), the Middle East and Africa, most of my foreign experience is in Europe, the CIS, and Russia. Thanks for the info!!!
I found this page recently via Google search. I have the same model Mac Pro & recently installed the same video card. It works fine, but I have some concerns dues to the absence of a boot screen. Have you tried using Boot Camp for one of the hard drives? I want to install Windows 7 on one hard drive in order to play some Windows PC games, but I am a little worried that I may not be able to boot back into Lion afterward.
Any thoughts or experiences with this? Any help would be greatly appreciated!! I’m using a XFX 6870 – flashed it with a custom ROM (regular + EFI-Part). Card works great but there are a few issue: 1. On MacPro 3,1 the card mounts only as PCIe 1,1 (both OSX and Windows) – regardless if the card is flashed or not! Should be PCIe 2.0.
You can check this in the system profiler, PCIe 1,1 = 2.5GT/s, 2.0 = 5GT/s 2. Systems (iMac, MacBook, MacPro) with Radeon 4xxx, 5xxx and 6xxx have an issue in Lion 10.7.3: low gfx-performance after sleep mode, approx.
Only 1/3 of the usual performance. Boot-Screen only shows when Monitor is connected to the upper DVI-Port – only affects flashed cards. A friend gave me his MSI 6870 twin frozr when he switched to an Nvidia card for his PC.
I have a Mac Pro 3,1 running the most current Lion and it works well with the ATY-Kext. However, I’m not sure the 6870’s fans are able to change speeds (spin up when I push it hard) when running Lion. When I run bootcamp, the fans will speed up when the card is pushed hard. Have you noticed this in your set up running Lion? Will flashing the card for the Mac make the 6870’s fan change speeds according to GPU temp? I’m concerned that if the fans don’t speed up I could end up cooking the 6870 while running Lion and playing steam games.
So ive been using this card for a while now with bootcamp without problems. I never installed the aforementioned drivers and things just worked. When i first installed the card, the system had SL, and then ive upgraded to L and ML without problem. Then, a few days ago, the fan started going intermittent. Now, it flat out doesn’t turn on when im booted in to OS X. If i boot into windows, i get it going on and off, but not always on. I really don’t know if its the mac’s power supply that isn’t powerful enough, drivers that could bad (in both win and mac tho?), or if its a busted fan/card.
I think im going to reach out to XFX to see if i can get it replaced but I was curious if you had seen anything like that in your travels. I am wondering if there is any point in flashing a 6870 card, when the login screen fails to appear ever. Well, this is a 6870m for imac of late2009 and the card is originally from an alienware laptop. I had the impression that with maverics the card should work without separate download of drivers. All, I get is black screen though.
Starting up in safe mode and zapping P(V)RAM did not help and that’s about all I can think of doing to fix it. I checked all the connections and nothing obvious seems to be wrong inside.
Please excuse my ignorance on this topic (guess that's why I'm here) but I am in the market for a new video card and am finding my options limited (not a surprise considering Mac but more so then expected). I have the following Mac Pro running 10.6.6: Model Name: Mac Pro Model Identifier: MacPro3,1 Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz Number Of Processors: 2 Total Number Of Cores: 8 L2 Cache (per processor): 12 MB Memory: 2 GB Bus Speed: 1.6 GHz Boot ROM Version: MP31.006C.B05 SMC Version (system): 1.25f4 Hardware UUID: 76806C42-F824-5794-907A-F976638CB73E I am running a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (512MB). I am going to put another 4GB of memory in when I purchase a new card. I've found the ATI HD 5770 offered by the Apple Store (the only one offered) and the Nvidia website is advertising the 'new' GTX 285 for Mac. I've noticed that Macintosh compatible video cards are coming out a couple years after the same model PC card is released (in the case of both cards above). So being that these cards are a couple years old, and seem to be the best (only?) upgrade options available,.my questions is.: Are these somehow tweeked to be faster than their original PC incarnation, or are they essentially the same 2-year old card in terms of performance?
Can the benchmarks run on the PC cards give me an idea on how these cards will perform? Do I have other options available to me as far as getting an equivalent to the newer PC cards (such as the ATI HD 6950)? Thank you for your time and patience! They are just standard models with Apple boot ROMs.
Nothings revamped, nothings beefed up, they are fine for gaming although are probably out of date already. But since you've done your research you already know that. If maximum gaming performance is your desire then you need the much more expensive Nvidia Quadro cards. These and the 5870 appear by simply selecting the Displays & Graphics link from the Apple Store main page -.
If you want to game in Windows you can always install a second card designed for Windows. It will only work when you run Windows. Thank you for your responses! I was unaware the 5870 was available for Mac being that it did not appear in my Apple Store search.
Gives me an additional option over the 285. To clarify: I have done the research and am aware that only those cards supported by Apple will work in OSX, such as the two cards I mentioned. My question is not will they work, but being that they are copies of older PC cards,.I am wondering if their performace is that of the PC cards or if they have somehow been 'revamped' upon release for Macintosh to compete with current PC cards? Am I buying a copy of an older PC card?. I am not suggesting that these cards will not perform or are bad.they are very nice cards and the 5870 is only about a year old (for PC's anyways); just trying to get an idea of how long these cards may last me being that the gaming industry bases their minimum requirements on the most current PC cards, not Mac, and what is released today is quickly eclipsed by another 6 monhts down the line. And.if the Mac cards are in fact copies of the PC cards I will essentially be a couple years behind the graphic requirements of the latest and greatest games. (That being said perhaps I am better off purchasing the newest PC card for the same price as the 5870 and running it with Windows 7/bootcamp, with the proper power cable?) Thank you, and hope that makes sense.
They are just standard models with Apple boot ROMs. Nothings revamped, nothings beefed up, they are fine for gaming although are probably out of date already. But since you've done your research you already know that. If maximum gaming performance is your desire then you need the much more expensive Nvidia Quadro cards. These and the 5870 appear by simply selecting the Displays & Graphics link from the Apple Store main page -. If you want to game in Windows you can always install a second card designed for Windows. It will only work when you run Windows.
Hi Kappy, I am a great admirer of your posts on the Mac Pro pages, and much of the information you have provided in your replies has been invaluable to me in the past. However, I am somewhat confused by what seems to be conflicting advice between your reply here:. If maximum gaming performance is your desire then you need the much more expensive Nvidia Quadro cards. And the Bare Feats website:. You can still order the Quadro FX 4800 for $1800 from the Apple Store (or $1680 at OWC) but the Radeon HD 5870 looks like a much better buy for overall graphics intensive needs. That's not to say that certain applications benefit from its 1.5GB of GDDR3 video memory but you certainly don't want to pay that much for faster gaming - which would be a double mistake since it was so slow running games, I didn't want to embarrass it by publishing the results in the game graphs. I do nut use my system for gaming, but I am just curious nevertheless.
Regards, Bill. Hi EmAliasX,. I am not suggesting that these cards will not perform or are bad.they are very nice cards and the 5870 is only about a year old (for PC's anyways); just trying to get an idea of how long these cards may last me being that the gaming industry bases their minimum requirements on the most current PC cards, not Mac, and what is released today is quickly eclipsed by another 6 monhts down the line. And.if the Mac cards are in fact copies of the PC cards I will essentially be a couple years behind the graphic requirements of the latest and greatest games. It is a fact of life for us Mac enthusiasts/fanatics that Apple is always at least a generation behind with its releases of graphics cards, compared to those available for the PC market, particularly with regard to the ATI products. However, the graphics card is only one part of the equation, and, with gaming as the most notable exception, Macs, with earlier generation cards, often outperform their PC counterparts, with the latest graphics cards, for most applications. It is the sum of all parts which make Apple Macs so good, not just the graphics card.
The combination of Apple hardware, software, and Mac OSX is, in my opinion, unequalled by their PC counterparts. Mac users will always lag behind in some areas (blu-ray, eSATA ports, 6G, USB3.0 ports, the latest graphics cards for instance), but now and then Apple surprise us all by being the first to the market, with ThunderBolt being a prime example. There is nothing that would ever persuade me to abandon my beloved Mac Pro for anything the PC market has to offer. Only a future generation Mac Pro might tempt me in years to come, and the emphasis is on the word 'might'! Regards, Bill. Apple Footer. This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only.
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