worthynax.blogg.se - 2008 mac pro 3.1 specs

Installing the Radeon 5770 was straightforward: First plug it in, then connect the Molex power cable from the motherboard to the card.Īfter connecting all the cables back to the Mac Pro, it was time to see if my $121 investment worked. (PCI-e cards that require additional power from the motherboard need to go into Slot 1 or Slot 2.) Included in the box was the card, a color booklet on how to install the card, a DVI -> VGA adapter, and a power cable to connect the card to the Mac Pro’s motherboard.Īfter disconnecting all the cables from the Mac Pro, I installed the new video card into Slot 2 on the Mac Pro, keeping the existing Radeon 2600 card in Slot 4.

After about three weeks of “window shopping”, I scored an ATI Radeon 5770 XFX 1GB video card for $121, with free shipping.Ī week later, the card arrived. What I really wanted this time around was a ready-made solution – a pre-Flashed PC video card that would plug and play as a Mac card without any voodoo on my part.Īs of this writing, a 1GB ATI 5770 Radeon flashed PC video card for the Mac Pro costs between $120 – $160 on eBay, which is substantially cheaper than the official ATI 5770 “Mac Pro” branded model, which retails for $249.

In my mind, the benefits outweighed the drawbacks, with one caveat: difficulty.Ībout a year ago, I tried flashing a PC Radeon card ( a 4870 model, to be precise) as part of a DIY challenge, but failed.

ATI’s “Crossfire” technology should work on Windows Boot Camp partitions, but the Mac won’t take advantage of it.

You may not see the gray Apple logo boot screen if you are directly connecting two DVI displays.

Of course, there are also potential drawbacks:

There are more card options to choose from.

It’s cheaper than buying a Mac specific video card.

The act of taking a PC based video card and converting it into a Mac version is a popular sub-culture among certain Mac Pro users. Eventually I was brought back to the world of flashed PC video cards. The past few weeks I have been researching GPU options for my Mac Pro. Nowhere is this more evident than when running Photoshop CC, which requires a minimum of 512MB of VRAM to leverage the extra processing power of the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). Though the ATI Radeon 2600 has served me surprisingly well over the past few years, as of late, it was really beginning to show its age. My early 2008 Mac Pro came with the stock ATI Radeon 2600 video card, sporting a paltry 256MB of VRAM. Unsurprisingly, these “Mac Pro only” cards also come at a hefty price premium over their PC video card counterparts.

Enhancing an early 2008 Mac Pro: The GPU Upgradeĭespite the fact that the “cheese grater” Mac Pro has always been touted as an expandable device, one of my biggest frustrations with it has been the anemic selection of available video card upgrades.