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Upgrading old Mac Pro to 8800 GT graphics?

I ask again, since I didn't get a response: How about the noise level of the card? Is it 100% silent when not gaming?
 
nurfen said:
I ask again, since I didn't get a response: How about the noise level of the card? Is it 100% silent when not gaming?
Click to expand...

I don't have the card yet, but a review of the card on Tom's Hardware site said the following: "It's small, consumes less than a GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB, and the 8800GT is also quite silent despite its single slot cooling system." Here is the link to the entire review:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-8800-gt,1714.html

They gave the card their best bang for the buck award.
 
jrnewhouse said:
I don't have the card yet, but a review of the card on Tom's Hardware site said the following: "It's small, consumes less than a GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB, and the 8800GT is also quite silent despite its single slot cooling system." Here is the link to the entire review:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-8800-gt,1714.html

They gave the card their best bang for the buck award.
Click to expand...

I have a few of these cards in machines and they are very quiet. Only during heavy game play do I even slightly hear it.
 
Ok. Do you want the good news or the bad news?

Brothers and sisters, we have won the battle, but we have yet to win the war.

I received and installed my 8800GT (1st Generation Mac Pro) this morning. Before I did it, I took a couple of benchmarks with the old Radeon X1900XT to see how it compared. This was more for my own information than for publishing on a site, so I only tried 1 game and 1 app. This is not an exhaustive test. If you want more in-depth coverage, go and ask one of the big hardware sites to do something about it. I also only benchmarked under Mac OS because I think the performance gains under Windows are well documented and available all over the place.

The Good News

This card is quiet. In fact using the word 'quiet' would be insulting to the 8800GT because it's practically silent. It simply doesn't make a sound. During the long flight WoW benchmarks (see below) the X1900XT sounded like a hovercraft was driving through my room. It was almost unnerving to do exactly the same flight with the NVIDIA card and not even hear a gentle hum. During normal desktop use, when I would normally have a gentle sound of rushing air in the background, now there is literally nothing at all. My Mac Pro makes the same amount of noise as my iPod Nano (i.e. none).

The Not-Too-Bad but Not-Too-Good News

There is an improvement in gaming on Mac OS X. Since we're not exactly spoilt for choice in the gaming world, I went for WoW because it's probably the one game that a fair few Mac owners play without rebooting into Windows. You can see from the benchmarks provided by WoW's own internal test, with the 8800GT installed, there was an average improvement of about 14 frames per second. While any improvement is welcome, 14fps is not good enough. There should be a significant difference between the two cards and Apple needs to address this.

The Bad News

The pro-apps situation is still bad. In Cinema4D (a 3D modeling application for those not familiar with it), you can see from the real-time rendering benchmark (the one underlined in red in the image) that the 8800GT actually drops in performance. Not by a huge amount, but any drop is inexcusable for a significantly more powerful card. We should be seeing a big jump in the score. This is simply unacceptable, and both NVIDIA and Apple should be thoroughly ashamed. Ironically, on the Mac page of the NVIDIA site they actually have a graphic proclaiming:

"Apple Mac Pro - Featuring NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT - incredible performance for intensive creative applications"

Incredible? Absolutely. I find it incredible that the 8800GT is being soundly beaten by 2-year old technology.

Conclusion

Apple and NVIDIA have got to address this, and address it quickly. This is an outstanding card at a reasonable price (for Apple), but the Mac OS drivers are clearly not up to scratch. The outlook is not all doom-and-gloom, because from the couple of benchmarks I've run, you're not losing that much performance in pro-apps, and the gaming performance is slightly better than before. Add to this the significantly reduced noise-factor, and the well-documented performance improvements under Boot Camp/Windows, and you're getting an overall better package. But... and this is a big but... THINGS COULD BE SO MUCH BETTER.

Apple... NVIDIA... are you listening? This is not the end of this story. Not by a long way.

benchmarks.jpg


System Specifications for benchmarks:

Mac Pro Quad 2.66 GHz
4 Gig RAM
Apple Cinema Display 23"
2x500 GB, 1x250GB Disks
Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2
 
Its been over 24 hours since people started receiving the card and no one posted the rom? Shame on you guys. :D
 
You should be able to just go in and add that card's VID & HID to the inf file and it'll install with no problems. Please post the damn precious already.
 
AdeptRapier said:
I installed my new 8800Gt this afternoon and it works great under os 10.5.2, but Windows XP cannot find the hardware and no driver that i can find so far fixes the problem...
Click to expand...

Similar problem here. I have Vista (32bit) running under Boot Camp - I did a clean re-install. So far I've not been able to get it to recognize the 8800GT as anything other than a "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter". This is also stopping Windows from being able to detect my Cinema Display.

I've got it running in 1920x1200, but that's as far as it goes so far. I'm sure a fix will either surface, or I'll be able to figure it out, but so far downloading the drivers from the Nvidia site has not worked. When installing it exits, saying it can't detect anything to install the drivers for. We're still a long way from an ideal situation.

Update:

For Vista I downloaded these drivers:

http://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-174.85-Beta-driver-Vista-32-bit-download-1895.html

The XP drivers are here:

http://downloads.guru3d.com/ForceWare-174.74-XP-(32-bit)-WHQL-download-1890.html

They are BETA drivers, but clearly they're working. Vista's own performance measuring tool now rates my graphics card score as 5.9 (the maximum score obtainable is.... 5.9!) Before installing the drivers, the score was 1.0.

(Credit to Joseph Reafsnyder on the Apple Support Forums for finding these drivers)
 
Here is the one I'll be using next week some time. Got Vista 64.....here:

http://www.2manydownloads.com/index...nvidia/GeForce_174.93_beta_WinVista_64bit.zip

OH btw, currently my machine scores a 5.9 with the ati x1900 installed under Vista 64......The utility in Control Panel/System.......gives my Mac Pro a score of 5.9 in everything but the HD
performance which scores a 5.4 I hope there is a driver fix for Mac soon.....How could they abandon selling the x1900 in their new Mac Pro's, only to offer a slower "pro apps" card.....they MUST
have a fix in the works. Are we expected to go grab a coffee or something while waiting for a filter in photoshop, or FCP to do its magic?

One more interesting thing........Right now I get significantly better scores on Vista 64, running Cinebench...for my ati x1900 than I do on Leo 10.5.2
Seems this normal in comparing OpenGL speed with the 2 major OS's
 
Cindori said:
Oh, get less dramatic, will you? It's already been stated that the 8800 have specs that are less desirable for Pro apps then the X1900. Stop whining.
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Firstly, that's ridiculous. It's a much more powerful card and should be capable of a lot more. If you want to accept second rate performance from a decent piece of hardware because the drivers simply aren't up to snuff, that's up to you. It works fine under Windows. Why not Mac OS X?

Secondly, thanks a lot. I spent some time putting together a short piece to try and give people a bit of a picture of how things stand with 1st Gen MP's and the 8800, since there's very little other information available on the 'net (most of the previous benchmarks were for early-2008 machines, and things could have changed since then anyway). But you just pick out one sentence which was more of a light-hearted intro than anything else and decide to flame me for it. Apart from coming into this thread to make occasional sarcastic comments what have you done to help anyone?
 
dreamof3d said:
OH btw, currently my machine scores a 5.9 with the ati x1900 installed under Vista 64......The utility in Control Panel/System.......gives my Mac Pro a score of 5.9 in everything but the HD
performance which scores a 5.4
Click to expand...

That's interesting. I'm pretty sure I used to get a 5.0 for the X1900 (it certainly wasn't 5.9), and when I looked into it, apparently points were knocked off because it's not a Direct X 10.0 capable card. Not sure how you managed to get it to score so highly. I don't get a max score for the RAM speed either. Since it's pretty much standard Apple RAM and likely the same as yours, your results sound a bit weird.
 
Cindori said:
Oh, get less dramatic, will you? It's already been stated that the 8800 have specs that are less desirable for Pro apps then the X1900. Stop whining.
Click to expand...

You've got to be kidding. The hardware is WAY more powerful, so it' inexcusable that the performance is less. It would be like putting a 3.4ghz processor into a 2.0 ghz machine and it slowing down.

Yes it's been posted before, but I greatly appreciate the benchmarking and think apple needs to get on the ball here - basically they're cutting their performance probably at least 20-25% which is a HUGE drop.
 
Snowshiro said:
Secondly, thanks a lot. I spent some time putting together a short piece to try and give people a bit of a picture of how things stand with 1st Gen MP's and the 8800, since there's very little other information available on the 'net (most of the previous benchmarks were for early-2008 machines, and things could have changed since then anyway). But you just pick out one sentence which was more of a light-hearted intro than anything else and decide to flame me for it. Apart from coming into this thread to make occasional sarcastic comments what have you done to help anyone?
Click to expand...
Ignore him. I'm very grateful for the results, and I'm looking forward to more testing and results from both OS X and Vista.
 
pprior said:
You've got to be kidding. The hardware is WAY more powerful, so it' inexcusable that the performance is less. It would be like putting a 3.4ghz processor into a 2.0 ghz machine and it slowing down.

Yes it's been posted before, but I greatly appreciate the benchmarking and think apple needs to get on the ball here - basically they're cutting their performance probably at least 20-25% which is a HUGE drop.
Click to expand...



http://www.barefeats.com/harper10.html

Get 8800GT for games.

If the drivers really are causing it, well Good Luck getting Apple to fix it. They are really fast on delivering graphic solutions.
 
Snowshiro said:
That's interesting. I'm pretty sure I used to get a 5.0 for the X1900 (it certainly wasn't 5.9), and when I looked into it, apparently points were knocked off because it's not a Direct X 10.0 capable card. Not sure how you managed to get it to score so highly. I don't get a max score for the RAM speed either. Since it's pretty much standard Apple RAM and likely the same as yours, your results sound a bit weird.
Click to expand...

Actually I get a 5.8 for games and a 5.9 for aero. Here it is:
MyMac.jpg


I did install the latest bootcamp drivers that ship with the NEW Macs.
 
power cable enclosed?

Hi,

just a short question regarding the upgrade pack.

Was a new power cable enclosed or do I need to use the power cable of my current card, the X1900?

I need this information because I already sold my X1900 on ebay but I haven't received the 8800 by now....

Thank you in advance!!!
 
ok mine arrived this morning. Was about to install when I read you need leopard for this.:mad: Ok.. annoying but I'll do it anyway. My question is do I put this in the x16 slot where my 7300 currently is? and when I do, where do I put my 7300 if I want to keep it in the machine? in a x4 slot?

thanks
Makka
 
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