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video cards in 2006 mac pro

twoodcc

twoodcc

macrumors P6
Original poster
Feb 3, 2005
15,307
26
Right side of wrong
now i have searched these forums and found some posts about video cards in the 2006 mac pro, but none that really answered what i wanted to know. sorry if you've seen a lot of these threads lately.

anyways, so i have the ati x1900, and i'm thinking about upgrading. looking at apple's site, they don't offer any options that will fit my mac pro. why is this?

why won't it work with the gtx 285? or the gt 120 or hd 4870?

now, if infact it would work with one of those, can i put more than one in my mac pro? i know the gtx285 uses 2 6-pin connectors or whatever, so i guess only one of those. but what about the others? can i put 2 in there?

will they work without flashing or anything?
 
twoodcc said:
thanks. can i put 2 in there?
Click to expand...

No. It's a dual width card and there is only one dual width slot in the MP. Also, the first card uses both power connectors on the motherboard. Lastly, having two of these cards would put you pretty close to what the PS can put out, possibly shortening its life.
 
akadmon said:
No. It's a dual width card and there is only one dual width slot in the MP. Also, the first card uses both power connectors on the motherboard. Lastly, having two of these cards would put you pretty close to what the PS can put out, possibly shortening its life.
Click to expand...

ok gotcha. what about the geforce gt 120? or is that card not even worth buying?
 
Considerably.

If you'd rather have a more up-to-date card, splurge on a PC 4890 (~$200 USD) and flash it, the topics about the 4890 here on MR should get you going quite easily.
 
akadmon said:
No. It's a dual width card and there is only one dual width slot in the MP. Also, the first card uses both power connectors on the motherboard. Lastly, having two of these cards would put you pretty close to what the PS can put out, possibly shortening its life.
Click to expand...

wrong wrong wrong...


two 4890's works fine, though it have not been done, several people here are running two 4870's, and one person is running 4890+4870. You simply power the first from the mobo connectors and the second from the superdrive.

since when does a crossfire rig consume 1000w ?

a system with 1 cpu and 1 7200rpm hdd and crossfire 4890's consume ~490w in load. that's 510w headroom for some extra drives and superdrive.


not worth in 06 mac pro though since it has to run in 8x PCI 1.0 which will cripple the card with 20-35% performance.
 
akadmon said:
GT120 will work. But it's a low end card. I would only get as a second card (if you need to drive more than 2 monitors).
Click to expand...

Wait.... Are you sure the GT120 will work in a Mac Pro 1,1?

From what I read and was told it wont work. Did SL change something?

I have a friend who has a GT120 and I want to put it in mine instead of buying a 4870/4890 because I don't really game and a GT120 would be a lot faster then the 7300GT in mine.
 
It is not recommended to run 4870 type cards from the ODD bay. The amps on those rails are much lower by design. This is the reason why the 12V supply to those cards is done on 12 pins.

To get a high number of screens the ATI 3870 Mac&PC would be a good card to look at. It provides two dual-DVI ports but will not have open CL capability. It takes about half the power of an 4870 but it is a bit noisy with the one slot stock cooler. It uses only one PCIe cable. I would consider it safe to run three of those in a MP1,1. With 2 slot after market coolers you can fit only two of these.

The original stock Geforce 7300GT is also available as a used card and would fit several times.
 
Depends on the slot it's in. You can allocate your bandwidth the way you like - my 4890 runs at 16x.
 
twoodcc said:
so can i run 2 video cards at 16x in windows?

will this video card fit? and if so, how many can i run in there?

what about this one? which is better?
Click to expand...

ONLY 1 slot is 16X , the rest will run at 8X even in windows

If you plan to ask all these questions and not read through the forum, how do you plan to flash these cards?
 
You don't, he missed that part.

But he is right, if you have two cards you can only run them both at 8x. Only post-2007 MPs can run two cards at 16x.
 
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