These requirements were all especially important to me after recently upgrading to NVMe Storage (more on that in another article). It also requires no additional auxiliary power and will work in all versions of the cMP (Classic Mac Pro) from the 2006 1,1 to the 2012 version of the 5,1. No overhang – no large fan or heat sink sticking out preventing you from installing other cards.

What’s more is that it only takes up a single slot. Why this card in particular though? What’s so special about it? This card not only provides you a boot screen, but also provides you with the ability to boot into Snow Leopard and get full 3D acceleration (yes it’s a weak card – even for Snow Leopard overall, but it’s better than no 3D acceleration at all and gets you up and running when you need it to). In my case (and in the case of many others) just like I discussed in last year’s article, a great option for that secondary video card is the Radeon HD 2600 XT. NVidia Maxwell and Pascal cards (like the 980Ti and 1080Ti) unfortunately require these special web drivers (Kepler cards like the Titan Black 6 GB or GTX 780Ti however have native MacOS drivers and do not require dedicated web drivers). The fail-safe is to always have a backup low powered video card running “in tandem” in another slot that can produce a boot screen or boot natively with no special drivers. The only trouble is that with the NVidia cards running Web Drivers, if power is interrupted or if you ever need to reset the PRAM, the default goes back to the Mac Default driver, giving you a dark screen and no video when booting your Mac back up. It is a shame you can’t really push these cards any further. While I was fully aware of the limits of the NVidia web drivers last year (High Sierra was the end of the line), these 980/980Ti cards and their successors – the 10Ti are great options for the Mac Pro 5,1 running High Sierra with the NVidia Web Drivers. As fate would have it, I had been quite satisfied with the performance I was getting from the GTX 980Ti in my 2,1 last year and got another. This 5,1 is a very powerful machine and has been an incredible pleasure to own so far (grabbed for under $1000 shipped on eBay last year).

The GPU madness this year is a bit of a different story, but at the end of the day comes down to the same conclusion for my use case but with just 2 of those 3 cards being used.

That May 2020 article in itself was a bit of GPU madness with me employing 3 different cards for various purposes. This is a bit of a throwback to my article from May of last year – Tri-Booting a Mac Pro 2,1 – not long before I had just procured my Mac Pro 5,1 (well technically a 4,1 that was flashed to a 5,1 with dual Intel Xeon 5680 CPUs with 12 cores at 3.33 GHz).

Fastest video card for mac pro 5