[Marshall Colley]

Hi Walter,

Well, I found a Mac GTX 285 a few weeks ago when a slew of them showed up on eBay and even Amazon. They went fast, but I got one. It works flawlessly in my 2008 3.1 Mac Pro.

The new drivers for the Quadro 4000 (also other listed cards, including the GTX 285) gave better Open GL performance then the older drivers they still recommend for the Mac 285. nVidia says you don’t need to load the Q4000 drivers, but my tests showed they gave about an 12% boost in Open GL on XBench. The sad thing is that my lowly ATI 3870 is 20% Open GL faster than the GTX 285! , which shows the drivers for Open GL released by nVidia really haven’t improved all that much. However, I went with the 285 to get Mercury Engine acceleration in Premier CS5, which it now shows as active. I haven’t done any editing, but there are plenty of posts regarding the CUDA processing improvements.

So, it looks like I lost a little speed on Open GL applications for increased speed in rendering. Perhaps when apps are written for Open CL there will be better improvement, especially since the 3870 doesn’t support Open CL. As to using both cards, my passive cooler on the ATI 3870 took up all available PCI space so either other planned cards had to go or I put the stock single slot fan back on which was horrendously loud. I’ve decided to just get a Black Magic Intensity card to view my footage on both the Sony professional CRT monitor and the Plasma and use my MBP to interface with my Plasma for Netflicks and all other entertainment.

All is well. I look forward to seeing how fast real time editing is now in Premier CS5 with the Mercury Engine engaged. Nice to see it’s the fastest in Resolve should I go that route too.

[Marshall Colley]

Thanks Walter.

I pretty much came to the same conclusions. Since the GTX 285 runs at much faster clock speeds, it will be interesting to see real world application comparisons in CS5P and other apps not written for CUDA. Currently I’m using an ATI 3870 with a passive cooler which has been a great card. It’s fast with core apps and even outperformed the 5770 in some tests I ran. I was hoping, however, to be able to run both cards together, since the 3870 has component and S-video out which I’d like for movies on my plasma TV and my Sony Pro analog video monitor. I realize the GTX 285 requires 2 power adapter cables and the 3870 uses one, so unless I go up to the optical bay and tap into that power connector, I’ll be short on connections on the MB.

This has raised overall power concerns with my 2008 3.1 Mac Pro. I’m currently running 4 hard drives (system drive & BU + 2-1T Apple RAID. In addition, I plan on buying a Blackmagic Intensity Pro for compositing and playback.

Do you think the MP power supply will be enough to keep up with the power demand, should the 3870 work with the 285?

[Marshall Colley]

Great a Fermi-based Quadro 4000 for Mac! It sure pays to read this site before one purchases anything. I’ve been hunting high and low for a GTX 285 Mac Edition to run the Mercury Engine in Premier CS5 on my 2008 2.8 Ghz, 16M RAM 3.1 Mac Pro. I’ve been leaning on making a decision to shift to Premier CS5 from FCP 7 because I use PS and AE and want to simplify learning curves and edit real time from a Canon 5D mark III (when it comes out..soon I hope). I scuba dive and want one camera and editing system to do it all. I love FCP, but Adobe’s really moving ahead in many respects with CS5. I keep thinking Steve has something up his sleeve which will blow Premier CS5 out of the water with the next FCP Studio version, but right now, the water is looking pretty good for diving with CS5 and the Canon 5D.

I just snatched up a new Mac Edition GTX 285 for $450 on eBay 10 minutes ago and then come across this post that it will be “obsolete by the end of this month” to be replaced with the new Fermi-based Quadro 4000 for Mac. To think that I’ve written nVidia more than a couple times this past month asking about Mac support for my Mac Pro and they said nothing about this new card.

Where’s my Irish luck? I guess I’ll look up the info on the new Quadro 4000 for Mac and see how much is it’ going to cost? I don’t do 3D or play games, I wanted the GTX 285 for Premier CS5’s Mercury Engine and any OpenCL improvements. Is the GTX 285 still a good buy or have I just blown $450 when a much better and cheaper card is right around the corner? 🙁

UPDATE: Well, the Quadro 4000 costs a cool $1,200 ! Phew, my savings will most likely pay for half of the 5D Mark III (hopefully) and also from what i’ve read, the clock speed on the Quadro is clearly much less than a GTX 285, or a 5770/5870:

Quadro 4000:
Memory Bandwidth: 89.6 GB/s
Core Clock: 375 MHz
Memory Clock: 700 MHz
at a max W of 142 (power)

GTX 285 (Mac version – which was slightly underpowered):
Memory Bandwidth: 159 GB/s
Core Clock: 648 MHz
Memory Clock: 1242 MHz
at a max W of 204 (power)

5870:
Memory Bandwidth: 153.6 GB/s
Core Clock: 850 MHz
Memory Clock: 1200 MHz
at a max W of 188 (power)

So, unless the applications have been written for Quadro acceleration, the GTX 285 should perform better in many 2D apps, etc. and may still provide close to the same CUDA acceleration with it’s 240 Cuda cores vs 248 on the Quadro…not really that much of a difference….it seems?

Any thoughts on the matter? Since I’m on a limited budget, am I better off with the GeForce 285 or should I sell it and save up for the Quadro 4000?

[Marshall Colley]

” Changing the oil” is an interesting analogy but a bit too simplistic and not really accurate….maybe comes close if you’re using synthetic oil and changing the filter every month. There’s no doubt doing a clean install and wiping the drive is the safe way to go, but reinstalling all your other apps including endless updates and the reorganization of your computer where you have already spent countless hours….will only take more time then most of us have.

Digits aren’t like used oil and aren’t always clogging up your system, especially if you do periodic computer maintenance. I did a simple SL 10.6 upgrade on my Mac Pro workstation with it’s 28 Gig of applications: FCS3, CS4 Suite, Office apps, including many graphic and audio apps, some of which are still PowerPC (I custom installed Rosetta) and everything works except for a few apps, some of which are on the Apple incompatibility list such as Director MX 2004.

Everything went as smooth as a baby’s butt with the system as rock solid as before. Of course, I’m not a heavy user like many of the pros here and haven’t put the system through the “stress test” that the banks supposedly went through 🙂 but things look good and it only took a little time compared to what a clean install would require. Of course, BEING SMART, I used Super Duper to clone the 10.5.8 system to another hard drive which I will keep for a while until the stress test is over.

My advise if you have a ton of apps, and fret at starting from scratch again, is try the update first, if your system seems tight and everything’s working to specs you’ve saved your self whole lot of headaches and time reinstalling everything. On the other hand, if it chokes and performance is down and problems start popping up, change the oil or boot from your back-up until you have to time to deal with it.