Graphics Card Upgrade for 2008 Mac Pro

[Andrew Stone]

I assume you are talking about the Mac Pro 2.66 Ghz aka Mac Pro 1,1. If so the ATI 5770 is a very good bet. It is not supported by Apple but more than a few of us have it installed and running without issue. Mine has 3 24″ monitors on the one card. It just works.

One caveat, you will need ONE dual-link DVI adapter if you are running 2 monitors off the display ports that are 24″ or bigger. The dual-link adapter goes onto one of the display ports but only hooks up to one of the monitors.

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Steadicam & Camera Operator

[Ryan Walker]

Hey Andrew,

I actually have the 2×2.8 ghz Quad core Intel Zeon…..but I would assume the 5770 would still be good to go? Thoughts?

Thanks.

[Andrew Stone]

I don’t see why not if it works in the older Mac Pro 2.66 Ghz machine.

Do a google on the 5770 and your machine. You should get the skinny from the search results.

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Steadicam & Camera Operator

[Bret Williams]

It works for all Mac pros. You can get the Apple one or buy different configs off eBay that are PC ones flashed to Mac. I ordered one with 2 DVIs, 1 regular display port, and 1 hdmi port. I have 2 DVI monitors and no need for mini display port, but HDMI comes in handy. Generally $200.

[Craig Seeman]

Bought 5770 from Apple for $249 for my MacPro 2008 and it works fine.

[Ryan Walker]

Awesome! Thanks guys!

[Steve Mitchell]

Using the Radeon 5870 and it works great as well.

27″ main monitor on dvi port, 24″ secondary monitor on one of the mini display ports

Final Cut X has limited options of what you can display on the 2nd monitor…. I use the viewer.

[Chris Kenny]

[Steve Mitchell] “Using the Radeon 5870 and it works great as well.”

FCP X also screams on a GTX285. Best bet for picking up a Mac card these days is eBay. We bought our 285 from this seller, and it has been rock solid in Resolve through many 10 hour grading days. The 480s available now should be even faster, but requires external power.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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[Andrew Stone]

Chris curious about how the NVIDIA GTX285 and NVIDIA cards in general play with other video apps when compared to ATI cards.

Would you say that someone who is going to be moving to a Premiere Pro / Resolve workflow should be looking at an NVIDIA card as opposed to an ATI card?

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Steadicam & Camera Operator

[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Stone] “Would you say that someone who is going to be moving to a Premiere Pro / Resolve workflow should be looking at an NVIDIA card as opposed to an ATI card?”

Absolutely, yes. Premiere’s Mercury Playback Engine only provides GPU acceleration via CUDA, which is NVIDIA-only. You will get no GPU acceleration in Premiere with an ATI card.

Resolve was CUDA-only until Resolve 8 (released literally yesterday); its CUDA rendering is still a fair bit faster than its OpenCL rendering, and there are still some CUDA-only features, like the new noise reduction function.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.