GTX780 6GB in Mac Pro?

I'm about to put a 780 in my 2012 Mac Pro. Anybody else done this? I need the skinny on power as in how to power this beast. Thanks in advance.

I have one in my 2012 12 core. Got it flashed from Macvidcards—I believe as long as it's not the Ti, the internal power is sufficient. I did have to move to Mavericks for the drivers to work, BTW.

I popped one into my 2009 MacPro. Was already running Mav so cannot speak to earlier OSes. Updated to Yosemite last night. Works well.

Yeah I have the same setup and it's awesome. Looks like macvideocards has some fancier options now than the 780 too.

Mike, did you have yours flashed? From what I understand, the power mod he does is simply govern the power to reduce max wattage to 225w from 250w.

I have an unflashed 780 4gb running just fine in my 2010 macpro

How did you manage the 8 pin power?

Had to run a 2nd mini 6pin connection (right next to the power cable already there from the original graphics card) and needed 2x 6pin to 8pin adapters.

Like 15$ total for all 3 on amazon.

Since it is not flashed, I do not get the apple boot screen meaning I cannot dual boot, but that is something I have no interest in anyway.

Well...I installed 780 and just decided to use an external power supply. easy enough. just running with the side door off. on a fresh install of 10.9.5 and resolve 11.1, i'm getting 20-25fps render of 5k red raw at full premium debayer with average corrections. no blurs, basic primary, qualifiers, windows, etc.

problem is, i get just a short way into the render and the external PS shuts down and my computer freezes. i'm thinking bad power supply. i did buy a cheap 500w one but i figured it was only powering a gpu so...


is there any other reason this would be happening?

UPDATE: i think i've ruled out software issues. if i limit my render to 10FPS, it runs smooth. all things point to when the card is put to work, it draws too much power for this PSU. it wouldn't be pulling too much from the slot itself would it? i know apple's limit on the slot is 75w. but it seems unlikely that this card would try to pull from the slot when it has two power connectors going to it.

My card was flashed and came with a power cord that I connected to the MB.

i know apple's limit on the slot is 75w. but it seems unlikely that this card would try to pull from the slot when it has two power connectors going to it.

Did you make sure to wire the connections on the power supply to account for the lack of motherboard connection? For details on what I'm talking about see: http://aphnetworks.com/tutorials/psu_paperclip_trick

If there's no power actually coming into the card from the external PSU, it forces the card to draw all power from the internal slot. Based on the behavior you describe, I would say that is exactly what is happening.

I've got an external power supply connected to the dual Nvidia cards on my Mac Pro and use a little app called iStat Menus (easy to find on the app store) to monitor how much power those GPUs are drawing from the internal slot. Occaisionally the PSU will not cycle back on when I power up my Mac Pro in the morning and iStat Menus immediately alerts me when that happens because I can see clearly when the GPU is drawing too much power from the internal slot.

No it was pulling power from the PSU I bought. I did the jumper trick using a copper wire pulled from the center of a coax cable. The card won't even power up and get recognized by OS X with PCI slot power only.

Anyway, my new PSU came today. Got an EVGA 750w modular one. That did the trick. Now the card does just fine during render. On the plus side, the modular power supply means I don't have a bundle of cables hanging around. Just hooked up what I needed. The other big plus is it has two more jacks available for PCI power so I could add a second 780 and ditch my GT120. Dunno though. It screams already with just the one 780. Getting 18-22fps render of 5k raw to prores hq 1080 at full premium debayer with 4-8 nodes of correction. No blurs or NR.

We recently installed a flashed GTX780 6GB card from macvidcards in our 2012 Mac Pro 12-core and it worked pretty well without an external PSU but we were having intermittent crashes and other issues. So, we bought a 1050W external PSU, hooked it up (using the short wire trick) and it works flawlessly now. Dropping no frames with raw RED Dragon 4K and 5K footage at full quality in Premiere Pro CC 2014.

I LOVE that this $800 card refreshed our Mac Pro tower and saved us from having to buy a $9000 trashcan that stutters 4K in Premiere Pro CC because of the AMD GPU's. Not saying this is a long-term solution, but for now, we are happy campers.

Good luck!

I'm using non-flashed PC card (Asus Strix GTX 780 6GB) with external 500W PSU. No problems at all, it works like a charm. Firstly I was a bit afraid of working with no bootscreen, but after some tests I figured out that I don't need bootscreen at all: Boot disk can be easily changed via system preferences, system reinstallation works smoothly, I've done a clean install of Yosemite from SD card - monitor works through the whole installation process. So bootscreen is not a problem at all.

P.S. I used a paperclip trick for PSU to work properly, and also PSU fan 12V to 5V trick to make it really quiet.

Now it's a pleasure to work with 2,5K and 4K RAW, 5K RED is not so lightning-fast, but good enough for comfortable grading in Resolve and VFX work in Nuke.