Questions about flashing graphics cards.

[fifthmanstandin]

Couple of questions. I'm interested in buying a second graphics card for my Mac Pro. I'm running the early 08 model. I am under the impression that in order to effectively use dual cards, one must have matching brands (nvidia or ati) in order to support their "crossfire" or "sli" on a PC. Is there any truth to this on the mac. The second thing I'm interested in is flashing the bios on a windows intended graph card and replacing it with a mac compatible EFI, there's a lot of resources floating around but none of them I've seen say anything about supporting Nvidia cards, all I ever hear about is ATI Sapphire cards. Anyone know if Nvidia is also supported by this flashing process?

Edit: I should probably also state that my intent by running two is to utilize the second card in taking some strain off the first one. I'm running the Nvidia 8800 GT card and being about 3 years old it's starting to run a little hot and heavy even after a very serious de-dusting of the entire rig and cards. I'm worried it's going to crap out and I'd like to go ahead and run two and inevitably move the second one to primary.

 

[ActionableMango]

There is a lot of talk about this in the Mac Pro forum, you should look around at existing threads there.

Your two card strategy doesn't make any sense. Adding a second card doesn't "take the strain" off the first card, whatever that means.

You specifically mention SLI/Crossfire, but those don't work in OS X.

 

[holmesf]

Adding a second card doesn't "take the strain" off the first card, whatever that means

It is possible to "take the strain off" the first card if you are running OpenCL applications. But unless you're a research scientist that probably isn't the case.