It was the video card that failed, it is replaced and everything is working great

So after some posts online at various forums, it seemed to be that my crashing issues were what I feared. My EVGA NVIDIA GTX 680 4GB was causing the crashes.

Unfortunately MacVidCards seems to not have had any stock since September 2016, so I wasn’t going to get a flashed replacement card.

So I started looking for a PC NVIDIA GTX 980 4 GB with 2 6 pin power supply. This was much easier said than done. There are still quite a few new 980’s out there, but most of them either have 2 8 pin, or 1 8 pin and 1 6 pin for their power supplies. Looks like with the 10 series out (even though those won’t work in a Mac since NVIDIA hasn’t bothered writing drivers for them) that the 6 pin 980 have become rather sparse.

Finally I was able to find a ZOTAC NVIDIA GTX 980 4GB AMP! Edition which had the requisite 2 6 pin adapters, and a bit of a speed increase over stock along with 3 fans instead of 2. I had never even heard of ZOTAC before, but most reviews seem like it is a pretty good company.

I got the card and installed it, no startup screen of course, but it runs great. And speed tests show it is about 100% faster than the 670 I had installed, and it works great, the crashes are gone. And Premiere Pro runs great!

Message now works on my Mac and all it took was resetting my PRAM! Some NVIDIA weirdness though.

I can’t believe I had not tried that, but Apple support got me and now Messages works in El Capitan

There was some strangeness though, and it is to do with my NVIDIA Geforce GTX 670 I mentioned in my previous post. After resetting the PRAM the computer came back up, but all the blue was orange again, and this time I took screenshots, but they looks correct once the problem is fixed! And to fix the issue I had to re-install the latest NVIDIA web drivers, though they were showing as already installed. Next time I will take a physical picture.

10.11.2 El Capitan update did not require NVIDIA web driver to boot (though it looks crazy)

I run a NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4 GB of RAM in my MacPro, and it is not flashed. So when I update the system I have to use VNC to sign into my Mac and update the NVIDIA Web drivers and restart before my Mac shows anything on the monitors (or I have to swap my old GTX 270 and do the Update).

This seems to have changed with 10.11.2. In fact it showed the updating screen before the Desktop, and then came to the desktop. Of course it was not normal, in fact all Blue Colors were Orange! I wish I had though to take screen shots, as after the update I upgraded the NVIDIA web driver and restarted and everything was back to normal.

This is awesome news if this continues in the future, as it makes it much easier to upgrade to the latest NVIDIA web driver. I hope it just wasn’t a fluke.

NVIDIA GTX Titan Z released

So NVIDIA’s new flagship GeForce GTX Titan Z has been released, and as I have said before it is a beast! A dual Titan Card with 5760 CUDA cores! Damn I want to see how this would run on Premiere Pro. Probably only be able to use One Core for now, but if you could use the other to run your monitors, that would rock! Still $3000, youch!

Makes me want to build a PC for my next editing machine. Still can’t believe the new MacPro’s make me want a PC!

NVIDIA announces next gen Pascal GPU’s and $3000 Titan Z Graphics Card

PC World has this exciting news.

Pascal will use NVLink, to enhance the PCI connection between cards, and allow for 5x to 12x speeds over PCI Express. And with 3D stacking of chips to increase bandwidth between components we will have serious powerhouses here.

And the Titan Z has 12GB of memory and 5760 CUDA Cores! Wow, think of the CUDA accelerated editing with that! And Pascal will be even faster than that. AWESOME.

And this is why it was insane for Apple to give up on user expandable PCI Express cards in their computers. By limiting graphics to only specific AMD cards they have done their customers a huge disservice, and this is likely why I will end up with a PC someday.

NVIDIA has updated the Titan to the Titan Black

titan-black-4

After updating the GTX 700 series, NVIDIA needed to put the Titan back on top, and it has with the Black!

With 2880 CUDA cores and 6 GB of 7.0 Gbps Speed Memory this thing should fly! It can perform single precision at 5.1 TFLOPS and double precision at 1.3TFLOPS so should be beating the GTX 780i for professional applications.

Personally I was hoping my next computer had 2 of these, and certainly not AMD cards!

Flash a PC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 to the Mac Edition

Oh the irony, since the new MacPro will leave out the awesome NVIDIA graphics cards completely. Check out the article at FCP.CO, which actually says it is to speed up FCPX and Motion, though is actually more about the upgrade and flashing the card.

He even used a PC model like my 670 (though I did a 670 because of possible power issues with a 680, so though the Mac Version would be safer), though he was able to flash it into the Mac version so he gets the boot screen.

And honestly this is better for Adobe software as you get great CUDA support with it.