Welcome to beats and brews. I'm your host, Greg, and this is the only channel where we talk about
the finest of hip-hop and the finest of craft beer.... or wait, I force you guys to listen to
my beets, and I drink beer while I make these videos. This video is about GPUs. This is the
video I assume most people, since they've been watching me, have wanted me to make this video
covering all the GPU grade options to make this a little saner. We're going to only talk about the
2008 2012 mac pro upgrade options, although if you stick around for the 2006 and 2007 most of
what I say will apply, so without further ado, I'll drop some beats, and we'll get into this.
You are now rocking to DMUG, the definitive mac upgrade guide series. This is the GPU episode, and
I hope you and yours are watching from the future, but right now GPUs are really expensive....
yeah that's putting it lightly. This puts a dampener on today's topic, but rather than
dwell on it let's just jump into a quick hardware overview. in front of me, I have the 2008 3,1
mac pro. This is a very similar layout to the more modern classic mac pros, the 4,1 and the 5,1. As
you can see, it has four PCIe slots, three of which in this computer are filled. This is a GPU,
and this is a GPU. The reason why I have two GPUs is that this GPU does not provide a boot screen.
We'll talk about EFI GPU boot screen compatibility and ways to work around it on the mac pros. Then
we'll also be discussing where to properly place your graphics cards because this is a 16x slot,
this is a 16x slot, this is a 4x slot, and the one above is a 4x slot. That means that you will not
get the maximum bandwidth for your GPU if you use the top two. Next, we're also going to talk about
the power situation because that's the topic in itself. You have two power leads on your mac
pros motherboard that are capable of providing about 130 watts per cable which is enough for
most GPUs but not all GPUs. So we'll discuss strategies for those GPUs that require more
also, as you can see, this is not an AMD GPU. There's a whole thing with NVidia versus Apple,
and basically, only very old GPUs will work in mac pros with modern mac os.
That is to say, they have metal compatibility, which is the latest greatest API for mac os and
the only thing that's supported in mac os Mojave 10.14 or above.
Now, this is where I wish I actually had a 4,1 or 5,1 still at my disposal. I sold them.
This is my original 3.1, and it does not have one that features the four comma ones and five
comma ones, and that is a little bar that is a recessed bar that the GPUs hook onto
you have to hit a little button to release and push back inside the computer to push
the bar back so you can unseat the GPUs there's nothing that special about it, and you can see
demos of people doing it online or instructions, but it's just important to call out if it's your
first time in one of these computers because it's unlike any other computer I've seen in that regard
just a forewarning this is going to be a bit of a dry episode.
A long time ago, I wrote a guide on how to install a GeForce 700 series
in your Mac Pro. This surprised a lot of people as they didn't realize you
could buy aftermarket GPUs meant for PC computers and stick them in your mac pro.
The problem is this doesn't apply to every GPU, and I'm going to explain in the next few sections
why that is and which ones you can, and which ones you can't use in your classic Mac Pro.
Let's start with a really brief history. Back when mac os ten was originally conceived,
its default graphics API was OpenGL. over time, the shortcomings of OpenGL became apparent
as other graphics APIs, most notably Microsoft's DirectX, surpassed it in a number of ways.
Back in the 2010s, apple read the writing on the wall and developed its own graphics API for ios
known as metal. This happened back in 2014 before Vulkan, the OpenGL successor, was released. Metal
would be ported to macOS, el captain in 2015 but wasn't made the default graphics API until Mojave
and apple as a benefit got to do its favorite activity, which removes support for something
many graphics cards that were supported in high sierra were no longer supported in Mojave
as they did not receive drivers for metal. Also important to understand is that apple
bundles graphics card drivers with the os, and they are not backward compatible,
so to translate that if you got a Radeon 5700 XT, it requires mac os
10.15.2 Catalina or anything above that. For example, you cannot use this GPU in high sierra
or Mojave by now. If you're wondering how do you know which GPUs are supported under mac os,
don't ask apple. I've actually created a guide. It's probably the most comprehensive out there of
metal-compatible GPUs. You can find this on the definitive mac upgrade guide, and I will have
this linked in the description below now. It's time to muddy things up and talk about Nvidia.
At one point in time, Apple used both AMD and Nvidia for its graphics cards and graphics
chipsets, then apple and Nvidia had a falling out that was epic. For years Nvidia produced
drivers known as web drivers that you could download and install into mac os to allow you
to use modern Nvidia GPUs in your mac. This is pretty familiar to anyone who's used windows.
Then out of the left-field, Apple decided that it was time to kill this by revoking Nvidia's
developer license, so it could no longer sign its code to make it executable under mac os
so at the end of mac os high sierra was the last time that you could run
modern invited GPUs. The last GPUs that apple used from NVidia were based on the Kepler chipset.
Thus, those are supported under metal. The outcome is that only very old invited GPUs can
be used under modern mac os. I still might make a video about this topic because it's interesting,
although I don't have any insider info. Now to make this more confusing,
we're going to talk about boot screens. When you turn on your computer,
your mac has stored in its firmware graphics card drivers. These are really basic drivers.
The mac pros use EFI, short for extensible firmware interface. This is a specification
designed by Intel to replace bios as the method to interface between the operating system
and the platform firmware. It is important to understand that this is not the same as UEFI,
which would come out later and be adopted by the industry as a whole, including apple.
Apple's early EFI used universal graphics adapter protocol to communicate with the GPU UEFI replaced
UGA with graphics output protocol; thus, most pc graphics cards never supported UGA ... so what
the hell does that even mean? Well, it means you don't get a boot screen when you turn on your mac.
Not until the os has loaded the proper drivers will you see anything coming
out of your mac. that means any aftermarket upgrades you do will not have a boot screen.
There is an asterisk here and very few, and I stress this very few graphics cards
had Mac versions that had a firmware that had EFI drivers on them for UGA. That means
you can download these firmwares and put them on your pc graphics card to turn them
essentially into a mac boot screen compatible GPU. Then there's also MacVidCards which is
some guy out of his garage who developed his own custom ROM sets and will flash your graphics cards
if they're compatible for a very high price... and you can look at that on your own time.
There is some great news though there is a way to get the boot screens using software hacks.
There's the Open Core bootloader which will load the appropriate graphics card drivers so
you can get a boot screen with your pc GPU. Since this channel isn't about OpenCore, I'm going to
recommend you check out my man Jeorg's videos on this, and also, I'll link some other sources
if you're interested in using OpenCore. There are more features to it than just what I mentioned.
Now there's one more thing to cover, and that is power requirements with the GPUs,
which i briefly mentioned before. On most PCs, you plug your GPU directly into the power supply.
The mac pro is different because there are pass-through power cables on the motherboard to
make this a little cleaner of a setup, and it is an elegant solution. It uses a very non-standard
mini PCIe power cable 6-pin, that means you need to buy special power cables to connect your GPU
to the power supply. In the description of this video, I have some links to these.
I don't give any money, so i don't really care if you use these links
or not. Now the elegant solution does have another major drawback
and is that it wasn't designed for the modern GPUs that are super beefy and draw a lot of power.
If a GPU draws too much power on the mac pro, it'll trigger an immediate shutdown to protect the
computer. This is not because the mac pro's power supply cannot provide enough power for these GPUs.
In fact, it's only because they use higher gauge wiring to these connectors, and thus this is to
protect the mac pro from frying these. clever hardware hackers discovered that they could
route the power directly to the GPU, bypassing these leads. This is known as the Pixlas mod,
and it is the most popular way to power super high-power GPUs. There aren't that many GPUs
that require this. The name a few it's the Vega 64, the Radeon VII, and the 5700 XT. Again to go
back to the definitive mac pro upgrade guide, I have charted which GPUs require the Pixlas mod.
in order to use. Performing the Pixlas mod seems scary, but it's not that bad. I did
it. I'm not super electrically inclined, and I managed to pull it off quite easily.
That is because I followed Jay's (aka House of Moth's) Pixlas mod guide. He has a video,
and he has a written form of it. It's excellent, and they're linked in the description of this
video. So now it's time to do a recap because there's a lot of information I just threw at you.
1) your GPU needs to support metal
if you want to run the latest mac os most Nvidia GPUs are not supported by macOS.
2) Aftermarket GPUs do not support the boot screen,
but you can get around this using open core.
3) Some GPUs require additional power to power them properly.
4) graphics card updates are distributed through os
updates. you cannot use newer GPUs in older os's as there is no way to install the drivers
5) use the definitive mac pro upgrade guide to help you identify what GPU
you can use in your Mac Pro. There is a lot of information there, and I suggest you read it.
I understand GPUs are confusing if you have in-depth questions, I highly recommend reaching
out to one of the communities. There's the Reddit group, there are mac rumors forums,
and there are the groups on Facebook. All these are fairly active, and people can give you
pretty solid advice. If you do reach out to me, I may or may not reply, so try those groups, please.
Now comes the bad news part that I've already made a video about, and I'll have linked as of
recording this video. Even running hacks like Open Core, you cannot reliably run the latest macOS Big
Sur or Monterey reliably without encountering a bug eventually that will corrupt your hard drive.
You can boot macOS Big Sur 11.2 but not above. The problem is the latest
AMD GPUs were not supported until Big Sur 11.4. you cannot use the Radeon 6800,
6800xt, or 6900 XT, which are all supported under the latest mac os's.
So, what GPU should you buy? Well, that's a question between you and your wallet,
and GPU prices are always fluctuating. The best-supported GPU for the classic mac pros is the
Radeon VII. it absolutely rocks at compute, and it's also one of the fastest for 3d performance.
It is also supported under mac os Mojave which was the last officially supported os for the classic
Mac Pros, and it can run 32-bit applications, which is important for some legacy software users.
The bad news is thanks to the pandemic. It is really goddamn expensive,
I mean, seriously expensive. It was never cheap, to begin with.
The second best graphics card is a toss-up between the Vega 64
and the 5700 XT. The Vega 64 is better for things like editing because of the higher compute power.
The 5700 XT is faster at gaming-type activities. The third best is probably the most
attractive overall as you don't need to Pixlas mod your computer to use it. It is the vega 56,
but if you do Pixlas mod your computer. You can overclock the GPU using the vega 64 firmware
and get pretty close to vega 64 performance. I made a video about it. No one watched it,
but you can check it out below if you're not running mac os, the world's your oyster. You
can run Nvidia GPUs and the latest AMD GPUs. The caveats are the power situation still applies,
and you can't use the 3000 series embedded GPUs as the mac will refuse the boot. I have
seen some users who use GeForce RTX 2080s in windows and have a separate GPU for macOS.
The mac pro 2008s have the caveat of having an older CPU that doesn't support later instruction
sets that are required by the AMD drivers. The community has created a solution that emulates
these instruction sets so you can then use the latest AMD GPUs. This video is already quite long,
so you'll have to read about that in the definitive mac pro upgrade guide; hopefully,
you found this video useful because it took me a while to create, and it is time for the outro