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Sapphire Launches Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition Graphics Card for Mac Pro

Larry-K said:
Wow, those benchmarks aren't exactly awe-inspiring, of course I don't use any of that software.

Maybe I'll just keep my crummy 5870 for now.
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I have the 5870 now in my Mac Pro 3.1

I'm waiting for X-Plane 10 benchmarks. I do assume that X-Plane will benefit a lot, but I'm interested in the performance vs. the GTX 680 MX.
 
I ordered this card and it came in today. Easy install, fit easily. I bought it for WOW.

2009 MacPro 8x 2.26 with 32gb memory
30" 2560x1600 Cinema Display

FPS changes based on what's in view:

Ultra Settings:
In Org: 30-40 FPS, average around 34
Flying around Nagrand: 40-60.

High Settings:
In Org: 40-70 FPS, average around 55
 
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What I'm waiting for is to see if anybody with a 1,1 Mac Pro has this card working and has done so in 10.7.5. While I'd go to the trouble of reinstalling ML if I had to (if the card's throughput justified the expense that is), I'd rather not have to do that just yet.
 
Squishy Tia said:
What I'm waiting for is to see if anybody with a 1,1 Mac Pro has this card working and has done so in 10.7.5. While I'd go to the trouble of reinstalling ML if I had to (if the card's throughput justified the expense that is), I'd rather not have to do that just yet.
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Not going to work in 10.7.5 as it requires the drivers in 10.8.3
 
DesterWallaboo said:
Apparently their site says it will work with 10.7.5 but requires an optical drive to install the 'software'.

I'm assuming that's the drivers.
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I'm not sure how that qualifies as "not working with 10.7.5" just because it needs the driver CD that comes with the card. Seeing as every Mac Pro comes with an optical drive, that should be a non-issue.
 
simonmet said:
I'm not sure if this is enough of an upgrade to be worth replacing a Radeon HD 5870. It has a fair bit more graphics RAM, but why didn't they release a 7970 Mac Edition that has easily double the performance over the 5870?

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My first question was partly rhetorical because the 7970 requires 6 and 8-pin connectors whereas the Mac Pro only has two 6-pin power connectors available to the PCI slots. This is despite the Mac Pro's PSU being easily capable of supplying more, especially for single processor systems. People have done it successfully but their methods are far from elegant.

Sometimes Apple's design decisions baffle me. A cynic might even suggest deliberate crippling. Maybe they thought a 7970-class card would be too loud and hot and degrade the lifespan of other components in the system, but if you consider that the Mac Pro is one of the best, most spacious and well ventilated systems I know of then it makes that point a little less likely.

In Mac Pros the graphics card does sit under the hard drives so that could be their reasoning. I don't want my hard drives baking from a very hot card. Still, I would have definitely upgraded if they gave us a 7970 option.

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PS, my guess is that this will be the new base card for the next Mac Pro, which is actually pretty reasonable. If they can make a 7950 the base and 7970 the upgrade, then that is a big step up from the current systems as the 7950 outperforms the previous upgrade option.
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JM-Prod said:
Probably due to power constraints? The MacPro can at maximum support a graphics card of 225 watts, 75 watts from the PCI-slot and 75 watts from each of the 6-pins. However, I run a GTX580 3GB just fine, although drawing more power from the 6-pins than they are designed for.
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Atlantico said:
Indeed, though my overclocked 7950 matches and exceeds a stock 670 any day ;)

The 7970 and the 680 are pretty much neck in neck in my experience. Except the 7970 is cheaper and has better drivers (at least on the Peezoid, the Catalyst drivers are way better than what NVidia offers)

I'm really happy to see the 7950 arrive on the Mac, it's damn fine card :)
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Glad to hear about the 7950. Very fast card. But, I'm still confused about the 7970. Some say they are using it, others say that you can't. I would think they would have gone with the 7970 if the PSU allowed it, since it is 30% faster or so.
 
jnpy!$4g3cwk said:
Glad to hear about the 7950. Very fast card. But, I'm still confused about the 7970. Some say they are using it, others say that you can't. I would think they would have gone with the 7970 if the PSU allowed it, since it is 30% faster or so.
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There are various "hacks" that involve re-routing power, such as from an unused optical drive slot, but obviously these aren't officially supported. I wouldn't recommend overloading 6-pin cables with the equivalent of an 8-pin power draw.

Are you sure 7970/7950 is only 1.3? It should be a bit more than that? Tom's Hardware is great for FPS benchmarks.
 
simonmet said:
Are you sure 7970/7950 is only 1.3? It should be a bit more than that? Tom's Hardware is great for FPS benchmarks.
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So many benchmarks, it is pretty hard to grok the entire gamut. Not to mention variations such as 7950 OC, 7970 GHz edition, and so on. Eyeballing a few benchmarks, I would say 1.2-1.3 is probably the statistical knee or something, but, it really all depends on what you are doing.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7950-overclock-crossfire-benchmark,3123-6.html

Of course, not to be outdone at the high end, Nvidia has answered with the new, extremely fast and expensive Titan:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-performance-review,3442-3.html

(Impractically expensive though.)
 
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HurtinMinorKey said:
You only need the emulators if you want the old windows start button, but everything else will default to mouse and keyboard if you don't have a touchscreen.
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Yeah, but it's hardly sensible. "Upward right-jerk" seems to be the mouse action required in order to get the menu that allows me to go to Settings -> Power -> Shutdown. This seems a) excessively complicated for turning off my Win 8 VM, and b) not very obvious as far as human-computer interaction via a mouse goes.

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Clubber said:
I ordered this card and it came in today. Easy install, fit easily. I bought it for WOW.

2009 MacPro 8x 2.26 with 32gb memory
30" 2560x1600 Cinema Display

FPS changes based on what's in view:

Ultra Settings:
In Org: 30-40 FPS, average around 34
Flying around Nagrand: 40-60.

High Settings:
In Org: 40-70 FPS, average around 55
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Thanks for the confirmation it works Clubber. Shall get one for my 2009 Mac Pro too then!
 
Order yesterday and arrived from Overclockers UK today, looks great, can't wait to get it installed in next couple of days.
 
About to return the 7950...

I got the card yesterday... The drivers are already included on Mac OS X 10.8.3.
Like I said before I am not a gamer or do much video.
I am a Pro Photographer and use Photoshop CS6 and Aperture 3.
My Mac Pro has the fastest SSD in the market, the 1TB OWC accelsior and 32GB of RAM hooked up to 2 27" Apple LED Cinema Displays, one rotated at 90-degrees.
I had some flickering and stuttering on the vertical display with my old Radeon 5770. It is faster on the 7950 but it still struggles.
I don't know if the problem is the "Old" 2010 5,1 Mac Pro with PCIe 2.0 vs the card's PCIe 3.0 but until Apple decides to upgrade the Mac Pro Line, $500 for a little faster video card doesn't work for me.
I ran some Xbench and Geebench tests and the numbers are almost identical. Even some video tests are actually faster on the 3 year old 5770 with just 1GB.
I hope NewEgg doesn't charge me the 15% restocking fee.. :(
 
Put one in a 2008 model...

Works fine, but no boot screen in OS X, running 10.7.5. Installed drivers, etc. and works fine once you get to the login screen. Anyone else seeing this problem, or know a solution?
 
I don't know if the problem is the "Old" 2010 5,1 Mac Pro with PCIe 2.0 vs the card's PCIe 3.0 but until Apple decides to upgrade the Mac Pro Line, $500 for a little faster video card doesn't work for me.
I ran some Xbench and Geebench tests and the numbers are almost identical. Even some video tests are actually faster on the 3 year old 5770 with just 1GB.
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Your tests mirror MysticalOS's tests in that some were worse on the new card than the old card. It seems that the new card's drivers, while "good", aren't all that optimized yet. Performance in games on anything but the higher clocked CPU Mac Pro 4,1 and 5,1 results in performance that's worse than the GTX 680, which is already worse on those machines (i.e. not 4,1/5,1) than the 5870 is.

So right now this card is a mixed bag, especially with the inability to boot into 32-bit mode despite the drivers having 32-bit code in them and EBC in the Mac-specific ROM on the card.

My Mac Pro has the fastest SSD in the market, the 1TB OWC accelsior
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There's a "catch" to that "fastest SSD" bit - I'll lay them out for you (though it is decently fast for what it's intended to do)

1) It's not a single SSD. It's two SSDs, each with its own controller, in a RAID. Stick two Vertex 4s in a RAID on any SATA3/SAS2 HBA and it'll smoke that Accelsior. I know - I have just such a setup of 2 x 256 GB Vertex 4s on the NewerTech 6G-1i1e card (basically a rebadged RocketRAID 2721 with special Legacy passthrough mode).

Even on my Mac Pro 1,1 I can reach 1 GB/sec on incompressible data. Good luck with that on the Accelsior since it's using SandForce controllers, which are absolutely craptacular with incompressible data (they drop to about half their rated speeds in that scenario).

As a plus though, the Accelsior is bootable, and even on a 1,1 Mac Pro's PCIe 1.0 slot it'd smoke the internal SATA bays any day.

2) It's a PCIe 2.0 card, but has a flat ceiling of 500 MB /sec max throughput when encountering incompressible data. That means that even if OWC gets better SSD blades that when combined can reach >1 GB/sec, that card will never get those speeds. PCIe 2.0 link width maximums are 500MB/sec, and that card's connector is an x1 link width. All of its speed comes from compressible data. That works for a boot drive, but not so much for games, whose data is almost always incompressible (as in it is already in a compressed format).

Barefeats had the Accelsior sitting at the top of its charts in most tests, but that was with compressible data in a synthetic environment. It loses nearly all its advantages when dealing with incompressible data in the real world, and would handily lose to an HBA whose link width is at least x4 and two good SSDs like the Vertex 4 (remember, the Accelsior is a RAIDed pair, so comparing it to a single SSD is apples to oranges and only serves to skew the data in favor of the Accelsior, which becomes obvious when comparing to a like setup of real world SSDs).

It's bootable though, which is nice.

I'll be impressed once OWC moves away from SandForce controllers and has something with better than x1 link width for bandwidth.
 
rGiskard said:
Fixed costs don't affect price? Really? So the cost of materials and labor has nothing to do with the final price?
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Cost of materials and labor (for assembly/shipping anyhow) are not fixed costs. Those are per-unit costs.

Fixed costs are things like the cost to design the board prior to putting it into manufacturing. The cost of your building's lease. Stuff that doesn't change as you produce and sell more units (i.e. doesn't scale with # of sales).

And the comment is correct. Mathing out the fixed costs into your product's price is complicated, and doesn't really get you anywhere. Instead, you pay the fixed costs out of the margins on the product. You treat the fixed costs as fixed, and figure out how to sell some number of units of your various products to cover them (setting what amounts to a break-even point). And this is probably only a rough description, and may be using terms wrong.
 
Why didn't they add a backplate to this card? It's a little trivial, I know but then again they put so much time and effort into the "looks" of the heatsink cover... :rolleyes:
 
bhuel said:
Works fine, but no boot screen in OS X, running 10.7.5. Installed drivers, etc. and works fine once you get to the login screen. Anyone else seeing this problem, or know a solution?
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Would imagine the switch isnt in the correct position
 
Atlantico said:
You don't need to use the Tiles UI if you don't want and you can use alternative text rendering engines, such as MacType to get the same experience as on a Mac. :cool:
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You mean I don't have to use the Tiles if I install a third party Start menu? How can I otherwise avoid it?

Thanks, I didn't know about that font renderer. Will try it and se how it works.
 
Drinahn said:
Yeah, but it's hardly sensible. "Upward right-jerk" seems to be the mouse action required in order to get the menu that allows me to go to Settings -> Power -> Shutdown. This seems a) excessively complicated for turning off my Win 8 VM, and b) not very obvious as far as human-computer interaction via a mouse goes.
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I guess i won't be able to get you to use keyboard shortcuts...
 
alfistas said:
Why didn't they add a backplate to this card? It's a little trivial, I know but then again they put so much time and effort into the "looks" of the heatsink cover... :rolleyes:
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The most common 7950s sold by OEMs do not have backplates.

Hell, even the 7970 doesn't have a backplate.
 
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