Mac Pro and video cards...

[crab]

A few weeks ago I was given a Mac Pro with dual G5s. I liked it, but it was ultimately just too old. Its old AGP Radeon couldn't push 2560x1600 to my 30" Cinema Display, and wasn't realistic to upgrade. It also couldn't run anything newer than Leopard.

I bought a used Mac Pro with dual 2.66 Xeon chips, threw 10g RAM in it, and installed Lion today...runs okay, holds its own.

I'm wondering what is compatible as far as video upgrades. Is it even PCI-Express? Do I need something specifically Mac designed, or would one of my cards laying around work (like a GTX 480)?

I'm so out of touch with these things its incredible lol.

 

[gmaster456]

Yes its PCI-E. As for what will work or not, I'm under the impression that any card could work provided it had the correct drivers, though, I could be wrong. I haven't worked on enough macs to know for sure.

 

[TheStu]

The cards have to have the correct firmware. There may be a way to flash cheaper PC cards to work on Macs, but I am really not sure. And I don't think that the hackintosh methods would work here.

 

[Bateluer]

Pretty sure its PCIe. Safest route to go would be to look on eBay, CL, or Newegg, etc, for a Mac compatible card for that Mac pro model.

 

[Zaap]

Pretty sure its PCIe. Safest route to go would be to look on eBay, CL, or Newegg, etc, for a Mac compatible card for that Mac pro model.

...and prepare yourself for the cringe reflex to kick in.

One fine day, the sad and sorry pretense will end that there's anything special about "Apple hardware", and you'll be able to just buy the same graphic cards for a Mac Pro as you would a PC.

Or...

...Apple will just stop making systems with upgradeable graphics altogether. <-- more likely.

 

[JSt0rm]

New macpro is coming. They already seeded drivers for ati 7xxx series. Soon we will kill the rumor off completely.

 

[alizee]

Mac Pros require video cards with the correct firmware. Yours is a first-gen Mac Pro, and it should work with most any Radeon, but as for Geforce, there is a particular 8800GT that will work in it.

Check out the archives here: http://barefeats.com/
Looks like you would be able to use the Radeon 5870: http://barefeats.com/wst10g7.html

And as was already said, prepare to cringe. The cards always command a premium. If you get a PC Radeon 5870 that looks like the "stock" 5870, you can flash the firmware. However, it can be risky. You may also be able to get another PC video card to work, good resource: http://netkas.org/

As for buying anything other than an official Apple video card, be prepared to spend some time on it. It does come down to whether it's worth more money or more time.

 

[alent1234]

...and prepare yourself for the cringe reflex to kick in.

One fine day, the sad and sorry pretense will end that there's anything special about "Apple hardware", and you'll be able to just buy the same graphic cards for a Mac Pro as you would a PC.

Or...

...Apple will just stop making systems with upgradeable graphics altogether. <-- more likely.

we have Sun servers from the late 1990's that cost some insane amount of money at the time. the RAM and hard drives are your normal server variety. nothing special

when Apple was PPC the only thing different from wintel was a CPU and a few chips on the motherboard. your point?

 

[lokiju]

You can use a bunch of aftermarket cards but just have to do some homework to see if it's either out of the box supported or can be flashed.

It's just PCI-e

Search through here and I'm sure you'll find your answer http://forums.macrumors.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1

 

[vailr]

Double-check that any required 6-pin video card power adapters are present in your Mac Pro's power supply. The Mac Pro's EFI motherboard bios requires (during boot-up) that the video card to also include an EFI compatible firmware. There are some Mac Pro video card firmware chips that use a larger storage capacity than their corresponding "generic PC" video card firmware chip. Thus making (most?) cross firmware flashing not possible.

 

[Zaap]

we have Sun servers from the late 1990's that cost some insane amount of money at the time. the RAM and hard drives are your normal server variety. nothing special

when Apple was PPC the only thing different from wintel was a CPU and a few chips on the motherboard. your point?

What was your point?
None of this has a thing to do with the fact that the Mac Pro using 'special' versions of graphic cards with custom firmware is a 100% artificial limitation imposed by Apple. It's borne of the belief there's something special about what should be as standard as switching a hard drive or any other off the shelf component.

 

[JSt0rm]

Ok we get it. U mad because of apple prices.

 

[Seeruk]

Honestly just buy a normal version of any graphics card that is a reference design - flash it and then you are golden

I did it with a 5870, took about 10 mins to read up which to buy, prepared the files while I waited for delivery, then it took 10 mins from it being out of the package to flash it and boot it.

netkas forums are also a great source of info.

5870 on my mac 2009 mac pro (1 x 2.66) with 6gb ram and I play BF3 on full settings 1680x1050 (when booted into windows of course )

 

[vbuggy]

The best you can get (somewhat laughably for what is supposed to be a flagship) is the HD5870.

I've been craning my neck in anticipation but given that the Quadro 4000 is all that's come out in the meanwhile (an even sorrier state than last-generation, when the GTX285 came out well after the card was already kind of obsolete, and that really was no great shakes driver-wise), that's not going to get you any really meaningful boost in terms of everyday consumer applications - especially as ATI writes better drivers - such as they are - for the Mac than NVidia do most of the time.

 

[Ka0t1x]

I still don't think this generation's going to be an off the shelf card.. because of thunderbolt. I'm going to go out on a limb and say 3 thunderbolt ports per card .. making 6 displays/card... But they could be the same cards for PC..

I was also thinking about if AMD/ATi would use the PCI lanes to pass through to thunderbolt.. so that if a PC were to have the 7xxx cards they would also have working thunderbolt ports.

 

[alent1234]

What was your point?
None of this has a thing to do with the fact that the Mac Pro using 'special' versions of graphic cards with custom firmware is a 100% artificial limitation imposed by Apple. It's borne of the belief there's something special about what should be as standard as switching a hard drive or any other off the shelf component.

like nvidia and ATI don't "bin" their cards on the PC using firmware as well? most of the cards of a given generation are the exact same chip with some circuitry disabled. in some cases they mark it as a lower card just because their financial software says they need to sell more cheaper cards

 

[KeithP]

What was your point?
None of this has a thing to do with the fact that the Mac Pro using 'special' versions of graphic cards with custom firmware is a 100% artificial limitation imposed by Apple. It's borne of the belief there's something special about what should be as standard as switching a hard drive or any other off the shelf component.

I am not familiar with the technical end of what makes an Apple (Mac Pro) compatible video card different. You seem very acquainted with it. How about a quick breakdown on what Apple did with their cards and why it was so unnecessary to do for the Mac Pro?

Oh, and "they make the cards use custom firmware" is not an adequate explanation. You are saying the limitation is "artificial" so I am expecting a detailed explanation on why it is artificial.

-KeithP

 

[alent1234]

Mac's use EFI firmware and not BIOS. intel originally designed it but i think it's open now.

you need a custom firmware on the graphics card to talk to EFI

 

[vbuggy]

Yup. And of course that no-one writes drivers / sells an EFI'd version for any reasonably current card (bar the aforementioned 4000, and even that's not exactly leading edge). One of the many aspects of the Pro which makes any pretence to it's expandability a bad joke. Not to mention the ridiculous hoops (and of course making a complete mockery of that form-over-function design) you have to wade through to get a second card in there.

 

[alent1234]

i was thinking of building a hackintosh system until i read about the part where apple controls which video card drivers are in the OS

 

[TheStu]

i was thinking of building a hackintosh system until i read about the part where apple controls which video card drivers are in the OS

You are sort of restricted on a Hack, but not terribly so

 

[dave_the_nerd]

You are sort of restricted on a Hack, but not terribly so

But that's the long and short of it. If you card doesn't have a driver available, it's never going to work. Since Apple only offers and validates drivers for the cards it sells in its machines, we're kinda screwed.

Used to be, you could a non-apple-rom card just fine if you were in Boot Camp (booted into Windows) - if that's true, I guess it's one more reason to keep using os x for productivity and win7 for gaming.

...as if the ridiculously better fps you get running Windows on the same hardware wasn't already reason enough.

 

[crab]

Thanks for the help, guys. I don't game on this machine, so I'm not going to put all of this extra effort or money into an upgrade. The 7300 will suffice