GPU-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4 GB on iMac

Hi,
I am keen to start the fastAI Deep Learning Course
But, I am not so well versed with the computer hardware…pls help me with the following question:

I have an iMac with the following specs:

  • iMac: (27-inch, Late 2013)
  • Memory: 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
  • Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4 GB

As Jeremy mentioned in Lesson-1(2020) that Mac is not the best option to run Jupyter Notebooks locally on Mac hardware as it makes use of NVIDIA GPU.
Based on my iMac specs which has NVIDIA GPU- can i use this machine in this fastAI course(2020) rather than going to some cloud option (Colab, etc)

Please help me to understand better.

Many thanks for your kind help.
Absar

Hey Absar!

It’s up to you, but I wouldn’t recommend it - your GPU is old and therefore it’s slower, has less memory, and won’t be compatible with new versions of software. Colab would probably simply be a lot faster.

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Many thanks Orendar…

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I don’t think the required versions of CUDA will run on that iMac. You can try installing CUDA 10.x on the Mac but it will probably fail.

In addition, you will have to compile PyTorch from source because there is no binary you can download for the Mac that has CUDA enabled.

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Thanks Matthijs…i agree…