New Mac Pro released – upgraded

[Jeremy Garchow]

That’s interesting. According to this the new ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, PCI Express 2.0, and two dual-link DVI ports fits in to the 16 lane PCIe graphics slot of the Mac. So it appears that only 16-lane cards are supported, even though they are PCIe 2.0? I don’t get it.

[Sean Oneil]

I just did some more research. There’s no such thing as a “PCIe 2.0 card”. No cards or motherboards use a x32-lane slot at this time.

PCIe 2.0 on the new Mac Pro just means more combined bandwidth on the bus, which is great. But that’s all it means.

The language on the Apple site is misleading. The new cards are x16, just like the old cards.

[Chris Irving]

My biggest question is whether or not it will allow you to load Tiger on it or not.

I know that may seem blasphemous, but our SAN software (not to mention After Effects and the rest of the Adobe Family) will not work in Leopard yet, so we need to stick with the tried and true.

Anybody have thoughts or links?

-Chris

[Ben Holmes]

Previously, new Macs have not allowed older versions of OSX to be installed than the version they came pre-installed with. This is presumably due to firmware versions and issues. I would imagine these new Mac Pros will be the same and not allow Tiger.

Ben

[Roy Schrodt]

I don’t know if we’re running something different than you but we just upgraded to Leopard on all our Macs wen we moved up to Studio 2. We upgraded our artist’s OS at the same time and he runs After Effects and Photoshop and interacts with all of us with no issues. He’s running on a G5 dual 2GHz with 4 Gig Ram. Our editors are using same machine with the exception of the new one that has the 2 X 2.66 GHz Dual Core. He offered to share any info if it helps.

[Winston A. cely]

LOL!

I’ve actually got the X1900 XT in mine already, so my new stupid question is: Where are the comparison tests between the X1900 XT with 512MB and the HD 2600 XT with 256MB? And maybe the same test with the Nividia card?

Winston A. Cely
Editor/Owner | Della St. Media, LLC

“If God could do the tricks we can do, He’d be a happy Man.” – Peter O’Toole – “The Stuntman”

Mac Pro 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
4 GB RAM | Final Cut Studio 5.1.4 | Aja Kona LHe

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thank you, Sean, for posting this.

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Sean,
Actually both chipsets and graphics cards are available. Intel and Nvidia both have PCI Express 2.0 compatible chipsets with Apple using on of Intel’s chipsets. The 8800 GT is PCI Express 2.0 compatible today.

PCI Express 2.0 has a theoretically doubled bandwidth for each slot not double the number of slots. Not sure how this will factor into real world performance though.

That NForce 780i Chipset looks like it might rock for a DIY system.

Gary

https://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_780i_sli.html

https://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/x38/index.htm

https://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8800gt_faq.html

[Sean Oneil]

[Gary Taylor] “PCI Express 2.0 has a theoretically doubled bandwidth for each slot not double the number of slots. Not sure how this will factor into real world performance though.”

I never said anything about doubling the amount of slots. I said the combined bandwidth was doubled, which is correct.

I think I was wrong though about “PCI 2.0 compatible cards”. It does seem some newer cards are claiming PCI 2.0 compatibility. But I’m not sure what that’s about since cards and buses are supposed to be backward compatible. From Wikipedia again:
“PCIe 2.0 is completely backwards compatible with PCIe v1.x. Graphic cards and motherboards designed for v2.0 will be able to work with v1.1 and v1.0, and vice versa.”

So maybe it just means that these new cards have been tested and certified to work w/o problems. Even though any card theoretically should still work.

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Sean,
Sorry about that; I misread your statement about the x32 slot. I didn’t realize you were answering someone else question and I read your two sentences together.

It will be interesting to see how these PCI-e cards perform. I guess it depends on whether on not the cards are bandwidth constrained.

I am pretty psyched about the idea of the x4 slots being as fast a x8 card. It makes for some interesting RAID and capture options once vendors start to release new cards.

Gary