Make it faster!

[Clayton Brown]

Alright, so I am in the midst of purchasing a new GFX card and am hoping for some final thoughts before I make a call.

I am debating between the ATI Radeon HD 5770 and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800. The 4800 is much faster but is $40 more and is a refurb, however the ebay seller is rated 100 w/ 2710.. The 5770 is straight from apple, new @ $250.

Also: the 5770 has 3 displays while the 4800 has only 2 & I do run 3 monitors.. I would leave an extra card in for the third monitor with the 4800. I also dont know if it would help or hurt performance with multiple vs. a single card.

This would be my first ever refurb purchase and I really don’t want to waste three bills.

(Thanks T. Payton for the 5770 Suggestion and Tim Jones for the 4800)

Options spec pages: https://www.ebay.com/itm/NVIDIA-Quadro-FX-4800-1-8-GB-Video-Card-Mac-Pro-2008-11-Cinema-30-FCPX-Lion-/151053331083?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item232b7aea8b
& https://store.apple.com/us/product/MC742ZM/A/ati-radeon-hd-5770-graphics-upgrade-kit-for-mac-pro-%28mid-2010%29

[Tim Jones]

The YoyoMarv units aren’t really “refurbished”. They are flashed with the Mac-compatible EFI firmware. As I mentioned, we’ve now got 6 of them in our stable and have had zero issues in over a year of buying them.

Based on our tests, you will see higher performance with the Quadro 4800 for 3 reasons – it’s faster, offers more cores and has 1.8GB of RAM instead of 1GB on the 5770. We replace 2 5770’s with the YoyoMarv cards.

Oh, and the Quadro offers really great framerates in Borderlands 2 🙂 !

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Clayton Brown]

Almost sold on it…

My only remaining concern is that although I have not encountered any issues (noticeably with my current 2 cards), I have heard that running the machine with two GFX cards is bad for the mac OS & will slow things down… Hence I really do want a card with 3 displays..

Might have to look for a third option…

Thanks!

[Clayton Brown]

Ok so for those of you interested:

Updating to 9 made a slight difference (and fixed another issue) but ultimately the new graphics card is the main fix. I ordered the Nvidia 4800 quadro saturday, got it yesterday, installed this morning and BOOM! Hello speed. Much quicker. Ken burns and color matching are scream thru the render process and I am back on track! Thanks for all the advice to everyone!

FYI though, eventually I will install SSD’s, just dont have the time right now to reinstall all my programs.