NVidia GTX 680 4GB Video Card.Apple Mac Pro 3,1-5,1.FAST CUDA.Mojave/Catali na. 16GB 4X4GB memory for APPLE MAC PRO 8-Core/Quad-Core 2.8,3.0 & 3.2GHz Early 2008. Apple Samsung 256GB SSD Mojave Flash drive from 2013 Mac Pro 6,1 PCIE PCI-E. Apple Samsung 512GB SSD Mojave Flash drive from 2013 Mac Pro 6,1 PCIE. Details about nVidia GTX 680 4GB Video Card.Apple Mac Pro 3,1-5,1.FAST. Quad-Core 2.8,3.0 & 3.2GHz Early 2008. Flash drive from 2013 Mac Pro 6,1 PCIE PCI-E. Sep 01, 2020 Nvidia EVGA GeForce GTX 680 2GB Flashed for full Mac boot screen support Works inside of Apple Mac Pro (2008)3,1 (2009)4,1 and (2010-2012) 5,1. It does not work in Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1Metal-supported which means you can upgrade your classic Mac Pro to Catalina and Mojave.Great option if you want to upgrade to a much more powerful GPU while retaining boot screens.
This post is going to be a little nerdy but, I hope, useful.
IN the office one of the machines is an early 2009-Intel Xeon X5550 (4,1) maxed out with 32GB RAM an SSD boot drive and 8 CPU cores hooked up to a 30″ Cinema display. Day to day Creative Suite work and renders in FCPX, Motion and AE run really quick, however the original 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4870 was starting to show it’s age with some plugins and effects, most notably anything 3D or lighting/lens flare effects.
So new machines were considered, but a little research pointed me in the direction of a simple GPU update. Mac editions of the Nvidia GTX680 and the AMD Sapphire HD 7950 were available and had good reviews on BareFeats for the Apps we use.
After some more research, a GTX680 was decided on as it is the same card as the new (well reviewed for FCPX) iMacs, plus the CUDA cores work with Adobe apps. However the MacEdition was £140 more than the PC one! The Yorkshire in me kicked in, and after a little Google action, it seemed that the EVGA standard cards can be flashed into Mac versions, the firmware being the only difference. So onto Amazon and a PC EVGA GTX680 2GB was ordered.
Installing the PC card using the two power cables that were already fitted for the Radeon GPU, was easy. Turned on the Mac Pro – black screen but noises of booting? After a few moment the OSX login screen popped up. It turns out that this is normal behavious for PC video cards, you get no video (no grey Apple logo) during booting until OSX loads the video drivers. Not usually a problem but, if you want to hold down the ALT key during startup to change boot disks, have a password protected EFI or want to run a disk repair, you are stuck.
I also noticed in System Profiler that looking at the PCI bus info showed errors and no info, it could see the GTX card in Graphics/Display, but something was not quite right. I decided to flash the PC card into the MacEdition version.
The Flashing Process
You need to have bootcamp enabled and running on your Mac Pro as all the firmware flashing tools are PC only.
I was already running a windows 7 32bit bootcamp partition so this was no problem.
• The NVIDIA GPU flash utility required is, NVFLASH for Windows
• The Mac GTX firmware is available here. (Right click and ‘Download linked File as’ – This version is already unzipped and ready for flashing – Instructions below are for use with .BIN files you may have downloaded from elsewhere).
Geforce Gtx 680
*You need to Unzip the BIN then change the .BIN files suffix to .ROM – Unzipped file size should be 218,112 bytes, DO NOT decompress the .BIN file once unzipped, if you unzip the .BIN again and load this rom onto your card it will brick your GTX – black screen, no booting, dead machine (I did this and had more work to do to restore back to working order**)!
Download both of these files whilst booted into windows, place the unzipped and renamed gtx680mac.rom file in the same folder as the NVFLASH application.
Video Card For Mac Pro Nvidia Gtx 680 4gb Early 2008 2013 Ford
Launch the NVFlash app by opening the folder it is in, then holding shift, right clicking in the window and choosing ‘Open Command Window here‘ from the popup menu. In the command line that appears type the following;
“nvflash -b mygpubackup.rom” (NOTE: mygpubackup.rom can be any name you want followed by .rom – This backs up your original firmware to disk, just in case you need to restore a corrupt card like me!)
Now is the scary bit, updating the card with Mac firmware. Type the following command into the command line window;
“nvflash -4 -5 -6 gtx680mac.rom”
You will usually have to confirm a couple of items with a ‘Y’ or ‘Yes’ don’t worry this is normal!
Once the process has finished you will get a confirmation and are now ready to reboot into OSX with a fully working MacEdition GTX680
Worked for me and, other than the silly mistake with corrupt firmware upload, took about 20 minutes.
REMEMBER you follow my instructions at your OWN RISK, if it goes wrong it’s down to you!
A.
**NOTE: To recover the ‘dead’ GTX card after I uploaded the corrupted firmware I had to move the GTX card into another PCI slot and reinstall the original RADEON into the main bottom slot to get any video display back. I plugged the two power cables into the RADEON card, the GTX680 DID NOT have the extra power cords running to it so I was worried it would not be visible. Luckily for me the GTX card was active and could be seen even without the two additional power feeds. I was able to flash it back to its original PC firmware and start all over again! Flashing worked the second time around no problem – DO NOT unzip the bin file TWICE like me! Unzip once then rename with .ROM
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PART THREE: EVGA GeForce GTX 680
Mac Edition versus the 'Sharks' Posted Friday, April 26th, 2013 by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist In response to popular demand, here is the EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition compared to non-standard Mac Pro GPUs like the GeForce 580 Classified and GeForce 680 Classified. GRAPH LEGEND
GTX 690 = ASUS NVIDIA GTX 690 (4G GDDR5)
GTX 680C = EVGA NVDIA GTX 680 Classified (4G GDDR5)
GTX 680 Mac = EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition (2G VRAM)
GTX 580C = EVGA NVIDIA GTX 580 Classified (3G GDDR5)*
GTX 580E = EVGA NVIDIA GTX 580 (3G GDDR5)*
GTX 570 = EVGA NVIDIA GTX 570 (2.5G GDDR5)*
QK5000 = NVIDIA Quadro K5000 (4G GDDR5)
Q6000 = NVIDIA Quadro 6000 (6G GDDR5)*
Radeon 7970G = Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 7970 Gigahertz (3G GDDR5)
Radeon 7970F = HIS AMD Radeon HD 7970 925MHz (3G GDDR5)*
Radeon 7950 = Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 7950 GPU(3G GDDR5)
Radeon 5870 = Apple factory AMD Radeon HD 5870 GPU (1G GDDR5)
All Mac Pro GPUs above were in a in a 'Mid 2010' Mac Pro 3.33GHz Hex-Core running OS X 10.8.3. After Effects CS6 Ray-traced 3D render of an animated robot. Thankfully, AE measures and displays the render time. Since it can take many minutes, that's a blessing. Technically, you can render this project with an AMD GPU, but that could take literally hours. Recently we tried to render with a Radeon HD 5870. After 8 hours, it was only three-quarters done. If you plan to use the Ray-traced 3D render function often, a CUDA capable NVIDIA GPU is the preferred tool. (FASTEST GPU has the LOWEST time in MINUTES.) NOTE: The AE Ray-traced 3D animation we refer to at 'robot' was provided courtesy of Juan Salvo and Danny Princz. Danny sent us a link to a compilation of render times featuring up to three GPUs. Octane Render is a 'GPU only' standalone renderer that can process scenes created in Maya, ArchiCAD, Cinema 4D, etc. -- and does so in a fraction of the time it takes with a CPU based renderer. However, it only runs only on CUDA capable NVIDIA graphics cards. The DEMO comes with a scene called octane_benchmark.ocs. For our test we clicked on RenderTarget PT (Path Tracing). The render time is tracked and displayed in minutes and seconds. (FASTEST GPU has the LOWEST time in MINUTES.) CUDA-Z is a utility that collects information from CUDA enabled NVDIA GPUs such as core clock speed and memory capacity. It also can be used to measure performance. Here's the test results for both Single Precision and Double Precision Floating Point calculations. Note the shuffle in ranking that happens in the shift from Single to Double Precision. (LONGEST bar indicates FASTEST in Gigaflops per Second.) Diablo III -- 'Evil is in its prime.' Our lonely traveler is on the path to adventure stopping occasionally to zap the undead. Settings are 2560x1440 Fullscreen, vSync OFF, Best Quality, Anti Aliasing enabled. (LONGEST bar indicates FASTEST in frames per second.) Civilization Vis now on Steam. By entering '-LeaderBenchmark' in the Properties > Set Launch Options, it runs through multiple animated sequences of the various World Leaders. Though it does not simulate real game play, it is GPU intensive. Resolution was 2560x1440 with FullScreen ON. Quality settings were on 'Medium' with one exception -- Texture Quality was set to 'High.' vSync and High Detail Strategic View were both OFF. (LONGER bar means FASTER.) Unigine's Valley 'flies' through forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains. It's a bird’s-eye view of 64 million meters of extremely detailed terrain down to every leaf and flower petal. It features advanced visual technologies: dynamic sky, volumetric clouds, sun shafts, DOF, ambient occlusion. (It is cross platform. For Windows users it is a test of DirectX.) We used Extreme preset: 1600x900 windowed resolution with 8x Anti-aliasing, Ultra Quality for Shaders and Textures, and with Occlusion, Refraction, and Volumetric Shadows enabled. (LONGER means bar means FASTER AVERAGE frames per second.) FurMark is a Cross-Platform, OpenGL-based GPU stress test (also called GPU burn-in test). It makes it possible to push the GPU to the max in order to test the stability of the graphics card leading to maximal GPU temperatures (and therefore fan speeds.) That’s why FurMark is often used by overclockers and graphics cards fanatics to validate an overclocking, to test a new VGA cooler or to check the max power consumption of a video card. FurMark is now included in a collection of GPU stress tests called GPUTest. REACTION
When it comes to CUDA accelerated apps, the EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition is beaten by its more muscular 'siblings,' the GTX 690 and GTX 580. It's only slightly slower than the overclocked 680 Classified with twice the amount of video memory. With the exception of the FurMark test, the GTX 680 Mac Edition was second only to the 680 Classified in the OpenGL tests. COMING SOON
We are working on more challenging Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, X-Plane, and Cinema 4D tests. Stay tuned for those results in a future posting. Comments? Suggestions? Email , mad scientist.
Follow me on Twitter @barefeats WHERE TO BUY THE EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition: - Order Direct from EVGA
- Other World Computing (MacSales.com)
- Trans International (TransIntl.com)
- The Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition is available from OWC and Amazon.
- The Radeon HD 5870 is avaiable from OWC and Apple Store USA.
- The NVIDIA Quadro K5000 for Mac is available from OWC and Amazon.
- The NVIDIA Quadro 4000 for Mac is avaiable from OWC and Apple Store USA.
WHERE TO BUY NEW APPLE PRODUCTS
USA readers can help us earn a commission by using this Apple Store USA link or by clicking on any Apple display ad. For GPUs, click the left side bar option for 'For Mac > Displays & Graphics' to find the GPU kits available. Or if you are buying a new Mac Pro, you will find options when you configure your order. For UK readers, visit Apple Store UK. WHERE TO BUY FACTORY REFURBISHED MACS
Apple Store USA has refurbished Macs with 12 month warranty that can be extended to 36 months with AppleCare. Pay attention to the GPU it comes with. LOOKING FOR ADOBE SOFTWARE?
Order your copy of Adobe Creative Suite (or any portion thereof) direct from Adobe USA. Or click these links to Adobe France, Adobe Germany, Adobe Sweden, or Adobe UK. (Clicking our links helps us earn a commission.) COREL PAINTER LITE for $19 or try the full version of PAINTER 12 for 30 days then get a $130 off on new purchase or $70 off the upgrade. Has Bare Feats helped you? How about helping Bare Feats? copyright 2013 Rob Art Morgan
'BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS'
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