Larry_The_Great Posted November 16, 2014 Share Posted November 16, 2014 Hello everyone, I am in the process of upgrading my hackintosh which duel boots OS X and windows. I currently have one GTX 760 in my build and it simply isn't powerful enough when I game on windows. I was thinking about getting two GTX 970's and running them in SLI because apparently two 970's run much better than one 980 and for only a little more money. I have heard that OS X doesn't support SLI natively so I was wondering if anyone knew of any drivers that would fix this, or if it would even boot with two cards in SLI? I'm hoping that if there is no way to support SLI then the hackintosh will automatically only use one of the GPU's and windows will use SLI. Can someone please clear this up for me as I want to buy the GPU's when they go on sale just before christmas. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theconnactic Posted November 16, 2014 Share Posted November 16, 2014 FCPX (10.1 and newer) will use two AMD cards in a way that's quite reminiscent of CrossFire on a MacPro - don't now if that's also true for a Hackintosh. Unfortunately, that's the only know example of such a function on OS X, and I suppose it's more third party developer's fault than Apple's, since Apple's FCPX can use it's particular form of CrossFire. Theoretically, OS X could support both CrossFire and SLI, since it supports out of the box using as many GPUs as your computer can handle, but they work as individual cards - i.e.: if you have two GTX 970 cards, you can plug one or more monitors to each card and boot OS X normally with this setup (without need to use a SLI cable), but the apps will only use the GPU that's connected to the monitor where their main windows are open, as far as I know. If you're asking if OS X would boot with a SLI cable connected, well... I'm not sure it would, but if it's the case, simply disconnect the cable when booting to OS X, and keeping it connected when booting to Windows. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamiethemorris Posted November 17, 2014 Share Posted November 17, 2014 I haven't heard of anyone having problems related to the sli cable specifically, I don't think that makes a difference, but dual cards in general can be problematic. One problem I've read about a few times is that os x will only want to display on one card, and the card it chooses will be random on boot. I don't know if there is a solution to that currently but it seems to be a problem specific to the GPU/mobo combo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Larry_The_Great Posted November 18, 2014 Author Share Posted November 18, 2014 So if I set up the bios so that I have both GPU's connected via an SLI bridge and connect both my monitors (I have two monitors) into the motherboard IO instead of directly into the graphics cards does anyone know what would happen? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamiethemorris Posted November 24, 2014 Share Posted November 24, 2014 So if I set up the bios so that I have both GPU's connected via an SLI bridge and connect both my monitors (I have two monitors) into the motherboard IO instead of directly into the graphics cards does anyone know what would happen? it would use the cpu's integrated graphics. The nvidia GPUs would still be detected and could be used for some things that use cuda. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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