Upgrading a 2009 mac

[Wolfrider]

Hello, I know that discussions about macs are not common on overclocking sites, but I have come to trust this site when it comes to 

computers and in particular graphic cards. The thing is, I want to give my brother a PC where he finally can game with a decent frame rate,

because right now he has trouble playing fallout 3. 

Now, I don't have the cash available to buy an entire new system, thats why I tought it would be more efficient to upgrade the old mac pro my dad still uses for work.

 

The specs of this machine are as follows:

Mac pro early 2009

2.66 Ghz Intel xenon quad core

6 Gb 1066 Mhz DDR3

gt 120 512 Mb DDR2

 

The monitor he uses is a mac cinema display with 1920x1200 with a mini displayport. The question is, what gpu can this mac handle

without bottlenecking itself? Corrunt OS is snow leopard (10.6.8), should I upgrade this to be able to handle gtx cards? Are there any 

other things I could upgrade to increase performance? My brother uses the mac with bootcamp, but like I said it is struggling with games

that are from before tha mac was bought.

 

Any help would be appreciated,

Wolf

[IVIYTH0S]

If he were to run a true dual boot, I would think he could use any graphics card he wanted, for windows anyway

[bp9801]

So long as the power supply could handle it, I would imagine any NVIDIA card from the GTX 570 on up would work. The 2009 Mac Pros should have at least two 6-pin PCIe cables coming from the motherboard, considering it came with HD 4870s, so a GTX 570, 670, 770, or the like could work. The HD 4870, 5870, 6970, and things should work, too, but I don't know if something like the 7950 and thus the R9 series would work. Can't go wrong with the HD 4870 or HD 5870.

 

One thing to be aware of is the fact that NVIDIA cards are Non-EFI, so you'll need to upgrade to at least 10.7 or Mavericks in order to get support for anything above the GTX 500 series. You could always flash the cards with an EFI ROM so you can view the boot screen, but up to you. Non-EFI does mean you lose access to the on-screen interface for Boot Camp, so you'll just have to go into the system settings and change the target drive whenever you want to switch over.

[Wolfrider]

Well the thing is the card should also work in mac mode, so my dad can still user it for work (He'll get mad at me if it doesn't). 
I will probably buy an upgrade to maverick, because gtx support is only available for mountain lion and up. Regarding the boot screen, 

could I still change between partitions by means of alt & arrow keys?

I know you won't be able to see anything, but this is not really necessary

because my brother knows the timing by heart. i read that apple has support for the 500 and 600 series, so I was thinking about a 670, but are you saying 

they also support the 700 series? Would a 680 bottleneck the system? Also the mac has 3 modules of 2 gb ddr3 memory, would 2x 4gb increase performance

enough to warrant 40 euros? Since 2 lanes are better than 2+1

[bp9801]

The GTX 680 runs on two 6-pin PCIe connectors, so yes. The GTX 770 should, too, although you probably need the NVIDIA Web Driver.

 

What I mean with the Boot Camp mention is anytime you want to switch from Mac to Windows or vice versa, you have to fully boot into whichever OS and then switch over from within it. That is only if you have a Non-EFI card, but you can flash the ROM to support EFI and not have any problems. People have successfully flashed the GTX 500, GTX 600, and GTX 700 series, and I think even the TITAN, so it is certainly doable. You can flash the ROM yourself or go through MacVidCards to get it flashed. You can also just buy a card there ready to go, provided it'll support your system.

[Wolfrider]

Thanks, that helped a lot. I'm planning to buy a 680 2gb reference card now, because I already downloaded the ROM to flash the card to EFI,

and i found a few sites stating that I is doable without much problems. 

(link) http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/confirmed-and-possible-flashable-gtx-680-models.1578255/(link)

If it isn't bottlenecked by my cpu, than this is the way to go.

 

Thanks guys, you made it a whole lot easier to decide  

[bp9801]

You're welcome! Yeah, flashing the BIOS shouldn't present too much of a problem, since I believe you can just do it from within Windows and it'll work out just fine.

[potatochobit]

you need to be very careful installing graphic cards in a mac

 

make sure you check online if they are compatible

 

mac OS is heavily guarded and you may or may not find universal drivers that apply to any model or your graphic card