Please help me buy a Video card for my Mac

So I am figuring out that I have a Macpro1,1 and I think I cant support any video card that is going to support Mercury Playback. Can some one confirm. It looks like my choices are to get the ATI 5770 or sell this MAC and get a newer model...

CRAP CRAP CRAP....
 
As far as I know, you can run a 200 series GTX card, including GTX 285, on the Mac. If there's a built-in hardware limitation in your machine, I don't know about it.

Or you can get a Win7 64 machine which will support any CUDA card. CS5 runs a bit better on Windows anyway.

Or maybe run Windows with BootCamp on your current machine, but I don't know of anyone who's done that for CS5, so I don't know how well it runs.

There are also older cards
 
David Jimerson said:
As far as I know, you can run a 200 series GTX card, including GTX 285, on the Mac. If there's a built-in hardware limitation in your machine, I don't know about it.

Or you can get a Win7 64 machine which will support any CUDA card. CS5 runs a bit better on Windows anyway.

Or maybe run Windows with BootCamp on your current machine, but I don't know of anyone who's done that for CS5, so I don't know how well it runs.

There are also older cards
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The macpro1,1 models will not support any of those cards. My only choice is to sell my model and upgrade.
 
I don't see why it wouldn't work in Windows with Bootcamp.

Even so, even if you upgrade, you won't be able to use the GTX 300 series and up, because there are no Mac drivers.
 
If you can find at 8800GT with >= 768Mb of RAM that works on a Mac Pro, then this is what you need. I happen to also have the same Mac Pro as you, and so far, the fastest card I've found and bought was the 8800GT. Unfortunately, it only has 512Mb.

I see on the Nvidia site that a GTX or Ultra 8800 would have 768Mb, but I don't see one for the mac. I have not found a solution yet myself.
 
gtx 285 mac edition. you need at least 1 gb of video memory for mercury playback. the card is near impossible to find, even reflashed pc cards with EFI firmware to work on macs. they all got eaten up in the market since da vinci resolve came out. and they discontinued the card. next thing you can use is quadro 4000, and quadro 4800. you are very limited with your choices for mac. you should check ebay there are still some refurbed gtx 285's. can't vouch for them though.
 
Looks like some of the Quadro's might be an option, but wow, $800 for the 4000 for mac on eBay. Still trying to find someone online that is talking about using the 4000 in an early Mac Pro.
 
Looking further, no, it looks like none of them will work in the first gen mac pro like I have. All need 64 bit EFI. Looks like I'd have to upgrade my mac pro as well.
 
Yea, I just didn't do enough research when I bought this Mac. You have to admit that it is a weird situation and very isolated. At this point I think I would be better off selling this Mac on Ebay and upgrading to a Macpro3,1. Or take the same amount of money and build a 24MB I7. I do love my Mac but if I really am looking for a Machine to run CS5, building up a PC is the best option by far...
 
Well I bought mine brand new in 2006, so my mac pro options were limited to exactly what I bought :) But, from what I read you the CPU is used for decoding of the H.264. Once I upped my machine to 15G of ram it is awesome now. While I would love the CUDA support, AE doesn't use it either and the editing I do in a NLE isn't as intensive as what I do in AE (I do a lot of compositing and 3D work so there tends to be A LOT of layers in there).

I think I am going to wait till next year till whatever comes out past the i7 lines and see what happens with the next version of OSX. Also, waiting to see what happens to Final Cut soon as well.
 
grimepoch said:
Well I bought mine brand new in 2006, so my mac pro options were limited to exactly what I bought :) But, from what I read you the CPU is used for decoding of the H.264. Once I upped my machine to 15G of ram it is awesome now. While I would love the CUDA support, AE doesn't use it either and the editing I do in a NLE isn't as intensive as what I do in AE (I do a lot of compositing and 3D work so there tends to be A LOT of layers in there).

I think I am going to wait till next year till whatever comes out past the i7 lines and see what happens with the next version of OSX. Also, waiting to see what happens to Final Cut soon as well.
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Well that is good to know. I have 6 gigs of Ram now. Maybe I should consider upgrading Ram and Getting the ATI 5770. I would think even without Mercury Playback that ATI with 1 Gig of DDR5 would be lights out faster than the 7300
 
For After Effects, RAM made a HUGE difference. The thing is, I am not sure the video card beyond CUDA support is the bottleneck. When I put in the 8800GT, and benchmarked it with Xbench, it was about the same speed, and even a little slower I noticed. However, I went from 2 7300GT cards (I run 2x30 apple cinema displays) and one of the cards was in the fast slot, and the other wasn't, so now that I run both 30s off the 8800GT, they BOTH as an additive benchmark are faster (which for me was good).

I think for around 500 you can even replace the processors with 2.66x4 x2 to get up to 8 cores. I am waiting for it to get around 300 and might do it. (Mostly for Maya that I can render twice as fast).
 
David Jimerson said:
I run a 460 as well, and it's probably the best card I've ever had. AND, it runs the coolest.
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Mine runs cool but I have seen so much feedback (mostly from the gaming community to be fair) about problems with my specific card and problems like the fan spontaneously exploding it makes me nervous when i run long or intensive renders...
 
There are several hacked GTX 280 videocards modded to work on a mac. They cost around 200 and give you great CUDA acceleration without any adobe hacks (they are, as far as the OS/software knows, a legit 280GTX). I bought one off ebay and it's been working great.
 
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