Mac pro graphics card

[samsc]

Apple reports some stats for the graphics cards here:

http://www.apple.com/macpro/graphics.html

A comparison between quad g5 and mac pro is here:

http://www.barefeats.com/quad05.html

and here are more benchmarks:

http://www.geekpatrol.ca/blog/135/

[rosswill]

So which is the best card for Catalyst? Quadro FX 4500? And what about the hard disks available and on offer from Apple? Will more than a 1GB of RAM help?

Ross

[rosswill]

I see one review says "the X1900's specs and performance so close to the $1650 Quadro FX 4500 and so far above the GeForce 7300 GT that the choice is a no-brainer for most consumers and professionals" ...comments?

[samsc]

cant answer any questions about this until i have one.

[Spam Butterfly]

On the now obsolete PowerPC PCIe macs I would not have gone for a Quadro FX - it's not massively faster than the 7800 and occupies 2 slots. However, with the new Mac Pros they've sorted out the 2 slot graphics card problem by offsetting the other PCIe slots one slot, so you can have a massive graphics card without loosing valuable PCIe slots.

However, nVidia have traditionally only sold their grpahics cards with Macs and NOT retail.

Best wishes,

Hugh
Altered State Ltd

[samsc]

according to benchmarks this week. the ati 1900 has about the same performance as the 4500.

in my experience the 4500 card did not add anything.
whereas the difference between the 6600 and the 7800 was between night and day.
7800 clearly and significantly outperformed 6600 on even simple things.

----

how this pans out on macpro's remains to be seen.
no conclusion in the future should be drawn from past experiences.

[samsc]

both ati and apple are selling or planning to sell X1900 boards retail - possibly for both the PCIe G5's and intel.
different firmware needed apparently for each processor.

[rosswill]

I have come to the same conclusion reading through reviews. For £240 extra the x1900 is probably worth a go but comes with a 4-5 week wait. Any ideas about the hard drives on offer from Apple v. Raid/SCSI/external?

Ross

[samsc]

no idea about hard drives.

im trying to get a minimum machine vanilla machine to see how well it works.

[Spam Butterfly]

The X-Serve is actually a viable server - it has a Radeon X1300 with 64Mb RAM, and 2 PCIe slots. Enough for another graphics card and a Decklink Extreme. It also supports SCSI or SATA - the Mac Pro to my knowledge only supports SATA drives internally - unless you bodge the SCSI drive into the spare optical drive bay.

Interesting...

Hugh