ATI 5770 vs 5870

[Tutor]

Clean up

 

[skiffx]

I believe its either 950 or 1000 watts.

Strange, that looks like more than enough to power a 3 way SLI/CF configuration. Maybe apple didnt want to order a modified PSU with extra cables to power up more than 1 5870 than uses 2 power connectors.

 

[sirnh]

I have been thinking that each PCI-E slot is supplied with 75w of power. There are 3 more slots to use on the Mac Pro, so it would be great if someone created a PCI-E card that did nothing more than provide another 6-pin PEG connector to drive another 5770. You could probably throw on SATA and USB 3.0 onto the same card and have enough wattage to drive the 5770.

 

[barefeats]

On a related note, do either of these 2 cards work in a MacPro 1,1?
.

Yes. Both 5770 and 5870 work on all Mac Pros. What is not certain is whether Apple will restrict sales of kits to owners of 2009 and 2010 models only.

The beauty of the 5770 is that it is close to the 4870 in performance but requires only one power feed. And if you are a Boot Camp gamer, two of them can be CrossFired -- assuming the jumper connector is not covered.

 

[Topper]

And if you are a Boot Camp gamer, two of them can be CrossFired -- assuming the jumper connector is not covered.

Can the psu of the 2008 Mac Pro handle two 5870s?

 

[crw]

What I would really like to do is to put two 5870s in the MP. One would be used for OS X but I would like to CrossFire the two under Windows for gaming. To do this we would need to understand the following:

• Power: How can power be supplied to two 5870s? Is there a way to get the power from the MP PSU (it seems beefy enough)? Another alternative is to use an auxillary PSU for one of the 5870s -- like the 5.25" drive-bay PSU at NewEgg.
• CrossFire: Will the Apple-supplied 5870s physically support CrossFire?
• OS X Support: How will OS X handle two 5870s with the CrossFire connected? I think it is likely that it will just see them as two individual cards and ignore the CrossFire cable.

Thoughts?

 

[jewett18]

where to buy?

I am interested in purchasing either a 5770 or a 5870 but the apple prices are insane

plus I would rather have 2 dvi ports then a display port

any suggestions of what specific card to get?
thanks
Jamie

 

[mattbatt]

Apps have to be rewritten to use OpenCL anyway, so FCP's antiquated architecture isn't really relevant...

I've heard FCP is getting a rewrite, it's possible they'll use OpenCL. Adobe is certainly using a lot of CUDA in Premiere.

FCP certainly does use a lot of OpenGL though, so you can't go wrong with getting a good GPU. Motion is also heavily OpenGL dependent. I know a lot of people, however, who don't bother with OpenGL under After Effects.

Not sure why you say desktop graphic design doesn't require more than two cores. If anything, video and imagery makes the BEST use of multiple cores, more than any other sort of software. Photoshop, however, sucks at using multiple cores, but that has more to do with Adobe having their heads up their asses rather than a failure of multicore computing.

Thanks, here is hoping to a great re-write of FCP!

I said that desktop - meaning print - design doesn't use much more than two cores because we are talking about: InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

When I do video, yes, more cores are used. And processing RAW files, sure, but it is still very bad technology. Like Digillyd was saying, for batch RAWS, would it be too hard for the software to tell each core to grab a specific image file?

Instead they bounce around working on one image at the same time, not doing too much work.

 

[skiffx]

What I would really like to do is to put two 5870s in the MP. One would be used for OS X but I would like to CrossFire the two under Windows for gaming. To do this we would need to understand the following:

• Power: How can power be supplied to two 5870s? Is there a way to get the power from the MP PSU (it seems beefy enough)? Another alternative is to use an auxillary PSU for one of the 5870s -- like the 5.25" drive-bay PSU at NewEgg.
• CrossFire: Will the Apple-supplied 5870s physically support CrossFire?
• OS X Support: How will OS X handle two 5870s with the CrossFire connected? I think it is likely that it will just see them as two individual cards and ignore the CrossFire cable.

Thoughts?

You will have all these answers when people start getting their macs and start playing around with them. ATM nobody can answer for sure.