Can the new Mac Pro support additional video cards?

Question

Can the latest Mac Pro support more graphics cards?

Answer 1

No, newer models of Mac Pro possess any option for adding extra video cards. The Apple silicon harbors a GPU, while the PCI slots are designed for different types of expansion cards other than the GPU. That is, if you put a powerful AMD Radeon card into the new Mac Pro, it would not be detected or used at all. The PCI slots of the Mac Pro would rather be used for other kinds of expansion cards that serve some purpose in some specific professional fields.

Comments

For those wondering just what kind of sound cards you might put in an M2 Mac Pro. AVID HDX cards are hugely important to film and television post production where 2-3 Mac Pros will be connected together with these cards to provide all the low latency audio processing necaseary for mixing movies and TV. There are also other high bandwidth (128+ channel) MADI / Sync cards that allow composers to offload some of the work of virtual orchestras to secondary machines. There may not be many customers for this product but the ones that do exsist are likely to be buying multiple if not fleets of these for studios and workspaces

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Tons of TV and local news stations across the country have been waiting for this new Mac Pro to drop.   They load them up with AJA cards for capture and fiber cards for their SAN.   I worked for a company that setup these Macs at hundreds of these locations across the US.   This system is a big deal for them.

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I really hope they add further expansion capability to their SoCs; dumbfounding that it still doesn’t support GPU expansion

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When you try to take the case off the Mac Pro, it ramps up the fans to make sure air flows over the parts it needs to while being in the open air. It’s similar to blowing down a tube at something far away vs blowing at it in the open. You need to blow harder in the open.

And the last one actually did do that. I believe Snazzy Labs was one of the first to discover that when he hacked the case off it while keeping it plugged in.

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I'd like to see a performance comparison between the Mac Pro with a card in a PCI slot, and the Studio with the same PCI card in an external enclosure connected via TB.

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Its about the card slots on this one. Its for people that need proprietary pci cards for their work and jobs. Funniest part was when Marques points out you still may want the older mac pro cause it supporters GPUs for GPU cores.

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The mac pro not supporting cards with that many PCIE slots is just wild to me.. It makes an extremely niche product just even more niche. I feel that a lot of the 'features' here could just be replaced by a server, and then you use the mac studio if you really need to use apple silicon.

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I'm glad someone finally said the obvious... simply PCIE slots.
I'm glad you brought up to one complete failing with this and that's not being able to install other GPU's to do other work loads.
Could live with it only being the M2 that could be used for screens but would have been nice to be able to use other GPU's for background rendering.
I'm more looking for the music side of thing... I did notice the Avid HDX PCIE card in your examples and it would be this and the native one I would have installed... along with one UAD card and also the storage option much like you will have... if, there's a need to go this far with it.
Maybe there's a better option coming with the M3 line??

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It seems weird that it doesn't support gpus, even just for the compute capabilities of the GPU? What if I want to render a ton of stuff, so I use 4 Nvidia gpus to assist? It seems weird to not allow compute over pci express.

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I agree with this completely. The PCIe cards I need to use typically could work within a Thunderbolt enclosure, except some of them need more than the x4 lanes that Thunderbolt sends. I can't bond multiple thunderbolt links together. So the only solution is the Mac Pro.

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The only use case for PCIe I can think of is fast storage expansion. Other things should work just as well with thunderbolt.

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Hey, very cool content, small error: you call the pcie slots pci slots and well that's an immense performance difference, not to mention the fact that the slots are physically different, won't matter to most people, but still important to mention

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Buy an eGPU (Thunderbolt 3) and use it with Mac Studio to add PCIe cards. Keep in mind the speed in limited to x4 Gen 3.0 PCIe but it's worth it for Pro.

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The reason the fans spin up when you take the case off (or the machine thinks you’re taking the case off) is because it knows it can’t cool the processor optimally without the thermal dynamics of the case, so it goes into overdrive to over compensate. A good safety feature.