Friday, April 05, 2019

MacPro3,1 macOS 10.14.4 ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

This is a passable combination.

My complaint is the graphics is lacking or lagging in some cases.  I am not talking about editing 4K or any video editing at all.  I am talking about typing an URL at the address bar on Chrome.  It's slow.  And when I hit eBay to do some dumpster diving or rummaging, the page can look a bit torn toward the bottom, I don't know if it's some sort of script there that causes it.  My mid 2012 MBP doesn't exhibit these problems at all.  I understand this hack to put Mojave on unsupported Mac hardware has some graphics shortcoming, like dark mode or some sort doesn't play well.

I don't know if it's also because of the 256MB VRAM that's causing the general sluggishness.  This is the stock GPU that originally came with the MacPro3,1 or early 2008 machine.

The most popular GPU upgrade for this kind of Frankensteinish upgrade is the GTX 680 which still commands a some what high price on eBay "even" higher than the similar GTX 770 which supposedly is a marginally higher performance card.  But then again the GTX 680 is said to have a more consistent design across manufacturers making it more flash-able, which is what cheapskates do: buying PC GPU and flashing it to Mac using some ROM or firmware.  GTX 680 is considered very flashable whereas not so much for the GTX 770, unless you are some wizard.

GT630 has a 2GB version and I don't know if it would perform better.  It should be a simple install.
GTX680 or GTX770, more powerful GPUs for sure but you pay a higher price and you need to buy additional power cables to run from the MacPro motherboard to the card.

These cards designed for Windows will boot on a Mac but will not display the Apple boot up screen as they don't have the Mac firmware unless you flash the ROM to make them Mac if they're flashable at all.


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