ATI 5770 & Nvidea GT120 – cheapest option to get going?

[Jonathon Lee]

GT8800 has 112 CUDA cores.

[Sean Kapleton]

In terms of slot organization for the ATI 5770 / GT 120 / Extreme 3D combo what is recommended?

Right now I have the ATI in SLOT 1

the Extreme 3D in SLOT 4

[Dwaine Maggart]

Since you are not using a recommended or tested configuration, it’s hard to say what might work best. If you follow the Mac config guide, things should work well. If you go off guide, you are sort of on your own to sort out what works best, or at all.

Dwaine Maggart
Blackmagic Design DaVinci Support

[Sean Kapleton]

thanks for the reply on xmas eve!

Having followed this forum for the last couple months it would seem that the 120/285 combo is faster than the 120/4000 (without expansion in 7.1). Is this true or did I miss something about the new 4000 besides the higher price compared to the 285? I run CS5, C4D and a bunch of other apps and am also curious how these different card combos might come into play for my system performance. Unfortunately i have 32gb ram (4x 8gb sticks) but beyond that seem to have a pretty robust davinci-friendly system home setup.

Does it just make more sense to sell the ATI 5770 card my 12-core came with (amazon or ebay) and use $250 towards buying a 120 & 285?

any help would be awesome – I’m like my own santa today!

happy holidays
sean

[Dwaine Maggart]

Yes, it would seem that the 285/120 combo has better performance, and is certainly cheaper, than the 4000/120 combo. Note that if you have interest in rendering 4K images, the extra RAM on the 4000 and 4800 cards might be useful.

In a strictly Resolve centric context, it would seem like selling your ATI card and putting the money toward a 285/120 combo might make sense. However, I can not comment about the impact to the other apps you mention. It’s possible that the ATI card might be a better choice in relation to those apps.

Perhaps others in the community might have comments and/or suggestions to help you decide.

Dwaine Maggart
Blackmagic Design DaVinci Support

[Sean Kapleton]

One thing I have read involving other applications is about the color shift and possible performance hits when not running Apple Color off ATI. It seems a fair amount of people here seem to think its not noticeable with color running Nvidea only, but that one needs to be aware that color is different in each brand.

I would be curious to hear what others might say in this forum on my previou question and this, as well as exactly how to run the 285/120 combo when using both Color & Davinci on the same system – do any cards / inputs have to be swapped when switching – i cant remember exactly what needs to be done.

thanks for the help
best
sean