Getting an Nvidia 1070 (or similar) GPU working on a Mac Pro 5, 1

Victory!

I’ve been using a chipped Radeon 7950 in my 2012 Mac Pro for several years (it was a serious upgrade to my original 5770 or whatever it was that came with it) but eventually my Dell 2715Q (a 4K display) stopped working reliably with it at full resolution and I had to drop down to 1080p. Then it stopped working in 1080p.

I was pretty sure the problem was with the display (which also wasn’t working properly with my Macbook Pros), but the GPU had always been twitchy (sometimes not working on boot, and not driving all its display ports) so when Nvidia announced drivers for its latest GPUs, I figured what the heck?

Anyway, here’s the correct process along with gotchas from not doing it this way, since I found zero reliable guides online to help me.

Warning: if anything goes wrong you’ll need to screenshare into your Mac Pro from another Mac to see what’s going on, so make sure your Mac’s network connection is robust and you can screenshare into it before you do anything you’re going to regret. Luckily for me (since I fucked all this stuff up multiple times) our Macs can all “see” each other (mainly so I can get at parental controls on other Macs easily).

  1. Update your Mac to 10.12.4 (or whatever is current).
  2. Go to Nvidia’s website and download their out-of-date Mac OS X drivers, install them, and then update them in the control panel. I don’t know when you’re reading this but you want your drivers as up-to-date as possible.
  3. You may also want to install CUDA drivers, but that’s not critical.
  4. Shut down, unplug, power off, remove the Mac’s cover.
  5. I got a 1070 bundled with Mass Effect Andromeda. (Don’t care about the bundle, since I’ve got it for PS4 and hate Windows, but it was $50 cheaper than the same card without Mass Effect Andromeda. I don’t think much of Mass Effect Andromeda, but it’s definitely worth more than -$50.)
  6. The 1070 is physically a total pain to get into the Mac Pro (the 7950 seems to have been just as bad, but I have cheerfully lost all memory of it). Be careful to remove all the rubbery covers so that they don’t fall off on top of the PCI slot and cause you enormous consternation.
  7. The Mac Pro comes with two 6-pin power cables for graphics cards. The Nvidia 1070 takes one 8-pin cable, but there should be a 2x 6-pin to 8-pin adapter cable in the box. You’ll need that. Sadly it creates a lot of slack in your cables that will be snaked inside your otherwise tidy (if horribly dusty) Mac Pro.
  8. Make sure everything is securely hooked up. Close the box, plug it in, plug in displays, and boot. (If you’re using a wired network, make sure that’s plugged in.)
  9. Power on, wait for the chime, and hopefully you will be golden.

Troubleshooting

Here are the ways I fucked this up.

First, I didn’t realize the current version of Mac OS was 10.12.4, so I had 10.12.3 and installed the (January) version of the Nvidia drivers which then claimed to be up-to-date.

After I installed the card my Mac wouldn’t display jack shit from any port at any resolution. After trying two different displays and four different ports, I screen-shared into it and verified (a) it was working properly, (b) it could see the video card and recognize the vendor but couldn’t do anything with it, and (c) that the Nvidia panel could see the video card but not do anything with it.

I then found a post showing someone had successfully installed a 1080 on their Hackintosh with 10.12.4. Whoops! I installed 10.12.4 and rebooted. No dice. I went into the Nvidia panel and found it no longer claimed to be up-to-date, so I installed a new version, rebooted, and my Dell monitor came to life at a resolution I’d never seen it in before. (Easily fixed. I am now looking at my Mac Pro’s desktop in glorious 1440p, as God Steve intended.)