Can 2 Sonnet PCIe cards blow my Mac Pro 5.1’s GPU?

[Duncanc]

Looks like my Sapphire 580 Pulse GPU has fried in my Mac Pro 5.1 2010.

It was running fine on Mojave 10.14.6. Then I put in these two Sonnet cards:

Allegro USB-C 4-Port PCIe Card

Fusion Dual 2.5-inch SSD RAID card

Note: the Fusion Dual card is designed to have 2 SSDs on it, which it can either RAID 0, RAID 1, or JBOD. I don’t have the SSDs yet - they come today - so I put it in empty to see checked it fitted (its quite long) and showed up. I hope putting it in empty isn‘t a ‘no-no’!

I started the Mac and all seemed fine. Checked the hardware and all 3 cards showed up with speeds of 5Gbs.

i installed Avid Media Composer software which needed a restart and this time the neither of my 2 displays came on - black screens! I can hear the hard drives working away, but no displays. I’ve since swapped the Sapphire 580 for the original GPU, an ATI Radeon 5870 HD and got to recovery mode (I believe the Mac won’t start because Mojave doesn’t work with the NON-metal Radeon 5870).

I’m now restoring High Sierra to my SSD HD, but I suspect that the Sapphire 580 will still be ‘black screen’, meaning it’s fried. I’d previously tested Mojave with the 580 running the Avid software on a bootcamp partition and all was good. The only thing that changed this time round was the addition of the 2 sonnet cards (and I did a Mojave Security Update!).

So my question is one, or both of these cards have blown the 580 GPU? Could the combination of these 3 cards have blown the 580 GPU?

Any theories are gratefully received, since I’ll have to get another GPU of some kind and don’t want to blow that one up too!

Cheers

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

Not sure, but I guess it could be possible. I would think they wouldn't fry the 580 just by being installed. The 580 could have fried since it wasn't installed in the bottom slot at one point, or static electricity damage if proper ESD guidelines weren't followed. It could also have failed since it officially isn't a Mac-compatible card, didn't have the proper power supplied to it, or there was an overheating issue.

As I mentioned in your other post, I don't have any experience with non-Apple graphics cards, so hopefully someone else here will chime in if they do.

Sorry,

C