Well, not me personally, but my dad does and I haven't been paying attention to the newest crap out there.

Anyway, my dad is a photographer and he owns a film studio. Yesterday when I was there, the video editing guy was complaining that the Intel MacTower they use for Final Cut Pro is kind of choppy. So I looked in the settings and found that for video it uses two GeForce 7300GTs. Whoever at Apple thought that this should be the default configuration with two Intel 2.5 Ghz Xeon processors should be backhanded. Epic bottleneck.

So anyway, the question I have to the more computer-literate people out here is, what kind of video cards (need two of the same one :p) should I replace them with? I kind of stopped following video cards two years ago, and don't know much beyond the Nvidia 8000 series, and the ATI x series.

Thanks!

Strictly speaking, depending on how much your dad wants to spend, just get the best Nvidea cards you can afford in my opinion. But you seem to be pretty pro at computers, so I'm sure it won't be a problem to figure out something good.

Just be careful with power consumption of the cards. Mac Pros have a 300 Watt limit to the PCIe bus, so if you get 2 cards that require a combined total of over 300, you won't get the full output of the cards. That's probably why he had the 7300s in there.

I would try overclocking both cards with rivatuner, and do the stress and benchmark to make sure its stable. Then SLI the cards, you will probably get a performance equal to 7600gt.

Some issue: Not sure if intel mactower mobo supports sli, then again 7300GTs is just blah.


I can tell you right on the market HD 4870 1GB is awesome for it.

Originally Posted by reeves

Just be careful with power consumption of the cards. Mac Pros have a 300 Watt limit to the PCIe bus, so if you get 2 cards that require a combined total of over 300, you won't get the full output of the cards. That's probably why he had the 7300s in there.

I think reeves knows his sh*t when it comes to Mac stuff.

Originally Posted by Taunton

I think reeves knows his sh*t when it comes to Mac stuff.

7 years as a Product Specialist for Apple makes it a requirement.

Originally Posted by reeves

Just be careful with power consumption of the cards. Mac Pros have a 300 Watt limit to the PCIe bus, so if you get 2 cards that require a combined total of over 300, you won't get the full output of the cards. That's probably why he had the 7300s in there.

Why would Apple design it this way? Aren't they aware a 7300 is worse than what you get in a lot of crappy consumer PCs? Pretty dumb considering these machines are pretty much made for video editing... don't PCs get around this with the extra 6-pin plug in the back of the card? I forgot to check if the tower had any of those...

Originally Posted by Bobby66

I can tell you right on the market HD 4870 1GB is awesome for it.

heh, that would be nice, but I don't think it needs quite that much power :p

I'm pretty sure video editing is no where near as intense as gaming in terms of strain on the graphics card.

Originally Posted by Ownaginatios

Why would Apple design it this way? Aren't they aware a 7300 is worse than what you get in a lot of crappy consumer PCs? Pretty dumb considering these machines are pretty much made for video editing... don't PCs get around this with the extra 6-pin plug in the back of the card? I forgot to check if the tower had any of those...

Does he HAVE to have 2 cards? if not, the HD 4870 would be sweet. If he does though, 2 4870s aint gonna happen, especially for photo manip stuff at high rez.

btw, the extra 6 pin Molex connector still draws from the PCIe bus, so even that wont help.

I personally prefer Nvidia hardware but ATI has been rolling out cards with good power at good prices. if your dad doesnt need something as powerful as the HD4870, might i recommend the 4850 series (Although the 4870 is in a similar price range).

compared to the nvidia 8 series, I would say the 4850 is close to but better performing than the 8800gt (G92).

http://canadacomputers.com/index.php...id=VDC.243.272

as for Nvidia cards. the 9800 cards are getting really cheap (keep in mind the 9 series is the 8 series equivalent (9800gt is essentially an 8800gt with a 9 in front, tiny bit more power, and triple SLI compatibility)

EDIT: the 9800GTX is a prettied up 8800GTX but still a great card for the money
http://canadacomputers.com/index.php...id=VDC.243.390

Originally Posted by reeves

Does he HAVE to have 2 cards? if not, the HD 4870 would be sweet. If he does though, 2 4870s aint gonna happen, especially for photo manip stuff at high rez.

Well, the thing is connected to four monitors, so it pretty much has to have 2 video cards.

Come to think of it though, the guy was only complaining about the video output on the TV being used as a monitor (It's a 42 inch 1080i LCD). I'm not sure if mixing different video cards is a good idea... but I guess it would be alright as long as their all the same brand (Nvidia or ATI).

Anyone know how the GeForce GT 250s are? The benchmarks seem pretty good online :p.

My understanding is that the GeForce GT250's are the same as the 9800GT which are the same as the 8800GT, performance is virtually identical between the three chips. Getting two of these cards should be cheap and fairly light as far as power draw is concerned on the PCIe bus.

However checking the system requirements for final cut pro 7 on apple's website doesn't seem to indicate that its heavily reliant on discrete graphics for any sort of rendering. That said I would also investigate the possibility of faster hard drive configurations (RAID, Raptor drives, SSDs, etc) as that may pose a bottleneck in playback of large video files.

Well, I got more information from my dad, and the editor apparently forgot to mention that the video playback used to be alright, but then there was an error message one day that said something about the video card and showed bars (like bars that show the percentage of something from 100?). He isn't very computer savvy outside of the video software, so he had trouble explaining exactly what happened. Now I'm starting to think that maybe there is a hardware problem with one of the cards. If that is so, I'll just replace it with a 9800GTX, since they are relatively cheap and seem to be widely available (might as well upgrade :p).

Mark, does the error described above sound at all familiar to you? Sorry for such vague details :p

Originally Posted by Ownaginatios

Well, I got more information from my dad, and the editor apparently forgot to mention that the video playback used to be alright, but then there was an error message one day that said something about the video card and showed bars (like bars that show the percentage of something from 100?). He isn't very computer savvy outside of the video software, so he had trouble explaining exactly what happened. Now I'm starting to think that maybe there is a hardware problem with one of the cards. If that is so, I'll just replace it with a 9800GTX, since they are relatively cheap and seem to be widely available (might as well upgrade :p).

Mark, does the error described above sound at all familiar to you? Sorry for such vague details :p

Not at all. Ive seen all kinds of errors, but no errors with a percentage bar type thingamajig. Normally, if its a software error on a Mac though, it will be a description followed by a negative number (-36, -0, etc), so I'm thinking its a HW error too. He should have an Apple Hardware test disk. Comes with all Macs. I'd suggest he run it to see what happens.