Mac Video card recommendations?

[Daniel Frome]

The quadro card will give you a bit more performance, but probably nothing strikingly better than the GTX285. The GTX285 is nearly impossible to find nowadays though.

I don’t know if it still exists, but there was a pretty big volume of ‘mac modded’ GTX285 videocards being sold on ebay. They were essentially Windows versions of the GTX275 or similar modded with the mac 285 firmware to allow the mac/Premiere Pro to utilize it. For what it’s worth I’ve got one of those modded videocards in one of my machines and it hasn’t given any trouble – and lets me use CUDA stuff with Premiere and it cost about $220. That’s strictly speaking of my own experience though.

[David Willey]

Daniel – thanks for your response. I’ll look into that. Yes the 285 is hard to find. I really like the 4000 and don’t mind spending the $$$ as long as it works well.

I read some reviews and frequent kernel panics were mentioned. Anyone have any experience with this? What about the Quatero 4800 for mac? The 4000 has more CUDA cores and the 4800 is double the price?

[Kevin Patrick]

I have the Quadro 4000 along with an ATI Radeon HD 5770.

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1
CUDA Driver 4.0.21
GPU Driver 7.4.10 270.05.05f01 (hey, that’s what it says)

I’ve had no issues at all.

However, when I upgraded to Lion, it was a clean install. New SSD drive. Lion install, not upgrade. Clean install of PP CS5.5 and then installed the CUDA drivers. Plus, I made sure no non-Lion friendly SW was installed. You can never be sure why some people have issues and others don’t. I think having a stable system has a lot to do with how you install and maintian things.

If you do wind up going with the 4000, or any CUDA product, make sure you install the CUDA drivers. The Mac OS should provide the latest drivers for the card, but not the CUDA drivers. I’m using 4.0.21, but I know NVIDIA is now up to 4.0.50, I think. But, nothing seems broke, so I’m staying at 4.0.21 for now.

The reason I also have an ATI card is that my Quadro is in slave mode. (I guess that’s what it’s called) the ATI card runs two Apple Cinema LED displays. While the Quadro sits around waiting for Premier Pro. I figure if I’m going to spend all that money on a Quadro, might as well make sure nothing else is bothering to use it. Both cards work just fine in my system. Again, no issues. Both run quite and cool together. Well, as cool as a Mac Pro with lots of stuff in it.

I did not get the 4800. Check out the comparison below. The 4800 costs a lot more, but runs slightly slower, for Premiere Pro. You can also see that they run the 4000 in slave mode with Divici Resolve and there is a difference.

https://barefeats.com/wst10g11.html

I did not get the 285 because you can’t. At least not new. I figured if I wanted kernel panic issues, then I’d buy a used video card.

Make sure you get the Quadro 4000 For Mac. The non-Mac version won’t work. I got mine at Newegg. Lowest price I found. Apple sells the same card for $300 more.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133367&Tpk=quadro%204000%20for%20mac

[Anthony Dodero dodero]

Hey Kevin,
I know your posting is quite a few months old, but I’m attempting the same setup that you have. My only problem is I can’t figure out how to power both cards in my Mac Pro (2009) desktop.

Was wondering if you could point me in the right direction.

All the best!
Anthony