New Machines, New Questions

so fed ex just killed my two catalyst machines and i have to get new machines working in a short turn around.

i bought two brand new dual 2.26 ghz quad core with 8 gb ram with an ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards. they came pre installed with snow leopard.

questions if you have a sec and don't mind

-what is the status with triple heads and snow leopard? do they still only show two of the three outputs?

- have you used the ATI Radeon HD 4870 ? i hate the stupid mini display port adapter for the 2nd monitor but i plan to use that for the control monitor and use the tripple head on the dvi for the triple head. any comments positive or negative?

-i'm having a problem installing my two ssd drives into the new machines. they don't quite seem to want to go in and i'd had to force them and cause a problem i called apple and they say that they think there is no reason why the drives from the old machines shouldn't install easily by just pulling the sled from the old and installing in the new. have you had done this yet and if so what was your experience? part two of this is that if i'm unable to get these installed quickly my plan b is to install them in to an external esata interface and go in through a pci e sata card. is there any reason why this won't work that you know of? meaning is there a decrease in throughput using an esata cable into a pci card as opposed to going straight into the sata connectors of the machine itself?

thanks very much for your help!

Hey Craig

As far as I am aware, the driver issue is not yet fixed in SL - maybe someone else could confirm.

4870's seem to be the best bet at the moment - I have tested the GTX285, but the performance is not quite as good, although it does have two DVI sockets. I would use a miniport adapter to DVI - just use some cable ties to keep it in place.

The newer Mac PRO's have a different sled size to the earlier ones - longer side 'arms'. I supply the ones from Maxupgrades in the US - they do both sizes - so you could source from them. They are superior to most as the have a built in heatsink to help with drive cooling. Their part number is SZ-VRMACPRO9-01 - goto www.maxupgrades.com

I hope this helps

regards

Nev.

so just a quick update. turns out the drive sleds on the new machines are slightly (about 1/4") longer than the old ones so that was a pretty easy fix. also my digital triple heads worked fine and were firing on all cylinders.

Hey Craig,

Sorry I wasn't able to reply to your emaul yesterday.

Also, sorry to hear about the shipping issues. I know those very well.

Answers to your questions are as follows:

With a 4870 use the Apple Duallink DVI to mini display port adaptor. You wouldn't think so but I have seen issues running HD on the regular adaptors that went away on the Dual Link Adaptors.

Do not use the mini display port TH2G boxes. Use the TH2G Digital and connect it to the DVI on the 4870. You can connect the TH2G to the Adaptor but it's a total pain in the ass to get working and not something I would trust on a show were rebooting might be necessary.

This works with Snow Leopard for me. Make sure to download the Matrox Desktop application to configured your display. I have run 4x 1280x720, 4x 1280x1024, 4x 1024x768, and 6x 800x600 on the 4870 with TH2G-D boxes using snow.

Yes, the sleds are longer, yes this is screwed up because I swap drives between computers all the time. What Nev recommends is the same thing I do.