EVGA Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 FTW works in 2008 Mac Pro

EVGA Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 4GB FTW works in 2008 Mac Pro

This is mainly information and conformation for the Mac Pro users who are wanting to upgrade their graphics card to give their machine a new lease of life, and keep it in line with current & future technology.

I'm using a 2008 2.8ghz 8-core 3,1 Mac Pro. OSX Yosemite 10.10.2 with Nvidia CUDA driver: 6.5.46 and Web Driver 343.02.02f01 (will also work with 10.10.1 with previous CUDA and Web Drivers for 10.10.1).

This card will ONLY work on Yosemite, anything earlier will not work.

One thing which is great about this card is that it only uses two 6 pin PCI-e cables, as opposed to a lot of high end cards having either one 6pin and one 8 pin or two 8pins. The GTX 970 only uses 145W.

I installed it in PCI-e port 2.

I have tried both DVI ports and the HDMI port and can confirm they work (simultaneously), don't have a display port adaptor to test the display port, but I'm sure it probably works.

The only main disadvantage to using these non Mac cards is that you lose the boot screen, which isn't much of a problem, and if your like me, and have a SSD, you probably only saw the boot screen for about 3 seconds anyway. If you need to boot into recovery mode for any reason, you will have to put in the original graphics card to access recovery mode. So if you were thinking of selling the original card, you might want to think twice! Also when upgrading from 10.10.1 to 10.10.2, I had to put the original card back in to upgrade the Nvidia drivers.

Some quick benchmark figures from Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0:

Original 8800 GT 512mb (Old Card) Vs New GTX 970 FTW 4GB - Basic Setting:

8800GT:

FPS: 20.6
Score: 518
Min FPS: 6.8
Max FPS: 42.4

GTX 970 FTW:

FPS: 54.0
Score: 1360
Min FPS: 10.0
Max FPS: 98.4

GTX 970 FTW 4GB - Every setting maxed out 1920x1200 Full Screen (8800GT couldn't manage 1 FPS so no results)

FPS: 38.3
Score: 965
Min FPS: 8.0
Max FPS: 79.2

The card is capable of more than this, but its probably because it is limited to PCI-e 2 on the Mac Pro, and the drivers will not be as comprehensive as those for Windows.

Hope this helps people who are deciding on upgrading the graphics card in their Mac Pro.

Any Questions feel free to ask!

Stuttering on my Mac

I've got this same graphics card in slot 2 (with a SSD velocity x2 Duo in slot 1). I installed nvidia web driver and card seems to be working correctly until gaming. In games I get stuttering every few seconds. The card normally make a slight buzzing sound when under load, and the buzzing stop each time the games stutter. I tried the card in Windows on another tower and no issue. (Buzzing is still there, but constant) Any idea what the issue may be? I have the Mac Pro 3,1 2008 with 3.2ghz 8 core, 16gb ram. Are you using any other PCIe cards? As is, its not useable in my Mac pro.

What operating system Noctifer.Some advise only using that card with OS X.8,5 or later. And Chris update to OS X.10.5 as there are security and network fixes after OS X.10.1.

10.10.5 newest available, also newest web driver from nvidia

Hi Noctifer

My Apologies for the late reply. I don't have a solution I'm afraid, as I am no longer using the Mac Pro anymore, I ended up building a Hackintosh with the Graphics card. I know this doesn't solve your problem, but I felt like I needed to extend the courtesy of a reply.

Maybe try a full backup of your OSX (Carbon Copy Cloner is amazing) and install El Capitan and see if the updated Nvidia driver for that fixes the problem. Other than that, I can't really offer anything else, As I never gamed with the Mac.

Hope you've found a solution!

We don't allow the discussion of Hackintosh on these forums as that violates the OS X EULA! We are done here.