Mac Pro 2019 GPU Upgrade Guide in 6 minutes

in this video I'm covering all the GPU upgrade options for the Mac Pro 2019 and hopefully a few you may not be aware of I'm going to try and make this video as short as possible first off and foremost the Mac Pro 2019 upgrade guide will contain the latest information as support is bound to change if or when Apple decides to support newer gpus such as the AMD 7000 series the guide contains the entire list of compatible gpus with the Mac Pro 2019. for the first section let's talk about MPX and pcie the Mac Pro 2019 has many pcie ports Apple ships every Mac Pro with one MPX GPU pre-installed the MPX gpus are modified AMD gpus designed specifically for the Mac Pro they differ from regular gpus in three main ways first they can sport additional Thunderbolt 3 ports the MPX slots can be used as regular pcie slots they also allow for video pass-through to all the Thunderbolt 3 ports found on the Mac Pro lastly the MPX slots deliver additional power so you do not need to run power cables to these gpus those are the benefits of MPX gpus over regular off-the-shelf gpus for these three features you'll overpay quite handsomely of course the Mac Pro 2019 supports off-the-shelf consumer gpus permitted they fit in the Mac Pro the Mac Pro 2019 can house gpus that are under 305 millimeters or converted to Freedom Units Under 12 inches if you'd like a GPU that only uses two pcie slots look for one that is 40 millimeters thick for users coming from the old classic Mac Pros using a PC GPU will not affect the boot screen as the Mac Pro 2019 uses UEFI our next topic is powering gpus the Mac Pro 2019 can easily handle multiple modern gpus with this very beefy 1400 watt power supply I don't think most people have seen this power supply it's pretty cool for MPX gpus the macro 2019 doesn't require any additional cabling however if you elect to buy an off-the-shelf GPU you'll need to provide Power cabling the Mac Pro Sports two groups of conveniently located dual 8-pin power outputs and a single six pin output for a grand total of five outputs the problem is for some Appley reason these use low profile non-standard connectors thus require power cables with specialized connectors Apple sells a Belkin power cable set but OWC sells essentially the same cables without the Belkin branding for much cheaper installing consumer gpus is entirely a tool-less operation whereas MPX gpus require a Phillips screwdriver both MPX and non-mpx gpus follow roughly the same steps unplug everything open the case remove the brackets for MPX gpus you'll need to remove both sets of brackets unlock the pcie chamber using the mechanical switch and for MPX gpus hit the push button lock to unseat it and finally place the GPU in the pcie slot the Mac Pro 2019 does feature a grand total of four 16x pcie slots however only two of these slots 1 and 3 have direct CPU access the rest of the ports are behind the DMI or Direct Media interface thus use a shared bus now for the topic of GPU compatibility Apple has what you could best call a very long-standing view with Nvidia the last supported Nvidia gpus in Mac OS were the Kepler series cards from 2012. this leaves AMD as the only GPU option for Mac OS modern Nvidia gpus can be used in Windows and Linux I stuck one of the very old Kepler chipset cards in my macro 2019 and if you're really curious I made an entire video about it as of recording this video Apple has not supported the Radeon 7000 series these are the cards using the navi 31 chipset this means users are limited to gpus from the previous generation and older Apple's drivers are bundled with Mac OS so if or when these 7000 series gpus are supporting Mac OS it will be in the form of an OS update meaning you will not be able to use the newer gpus with an older Mac OS Apple currently officially supports gpus such as the 6800 6800 XT and 6900 XT using open core you can spoof the device ID so you can use gpus such as the 6650 XT and 6950 XT the later being the fastest GPU Mac OS unofficially supports as of recording this video open core is entirely its own topic so it's not covered in this video it is a bootloader that allows you to inject changes into Mac OS without modifying the system itself according to Apple's official docs the Mac Pro 2019 supports up to four gpus but I wouldn't be surprised if someone managed to stick more than four in it lastly the MPX gpus are compatible with Windows and AMD adrenaline software for anyone curious about Windows gaming and for our final topic What GPU should you get many of the consumer grade 6900 XTS will outperform Apple's w6900x and this is likely due to more aggressive fan curves and the often lightly overclocked firmware according to geekbench 6 Apple's 6900x scores about 210 000 in metal compute whereas my 6900 XT scores about 235 000 in metal compute for most users I highly recommend not buying Apple's MPX gpus the w6900x MPX module costs 6 000 the 6900 XT can be regularly found for under 700. if you're looking for gaming benchmarks using a Mac Pro 2019 I've also made a video comparing the 6600 XT and 6900 XT versus an M1 Max I also ran Windows benchmarks with these cards and compared them against modern gaming PC fees so check that out and I think this is a good place to end this video

Channel: Definitive Mac Upgrade Guide

Views: 7,357

Keywords: Apple, Mac, macOS, Mac Pro

Id: ZjGgLgl1EnE

Length: 6min 17sec (377 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023