If you still want a more powerful card or one that is overclocked there are a few solutions. I’ve seen many people get the 8 to 6 pin adapter, but that’s risky and you may pull too much power from your motherboard resulting in damage to your Macpro, or an underpowered graphics card. Many of them now have at least one 8pin power ports. This only poses a problem if you want a faster Overclocked card. As long as you get a graphics card with one or two six pin PCIe power ports you should be fine. There are however two 6-pin mini PCIe power plugs built into the motherboard. Powering The Cards – What You Need To KnowĪ Mac Pro doesn’t have a traditional power supply units like a PC does. You can literally get just about any card you want, keeping in mind that you have to power it. Or you had to buy the way overpriced Mac specific EFI cards.īut today with the new Mavericks OS, Apple and Nvidia have added support for most modern 3d cards. You could only use very specific cards that were supported by the OS that sometimes used custom drivers. Upgrading Your Graphics Card On An Old Mac ProĪ few years ago you couldn’t just upgrade your graphics card in a Mac. Not only will a new graphics card give you support for the Mercury Playback Engine and CUDA, but it will also enhance many tools in Photoshop. So in order to get more life out of my old Mac Pro I upgraded its graphics card. You need a Nvidea GPU with at least 1GB of video ram to use its Mercury Playback Engine. I’ve recently had to make the switch over to Premiere CC on my home Mac Pro, but my old 2009 tower didn’t cut it.

Upgrade graphics card in macbook pro