I have an 06 Mac Pro that was in need of a video card upgrade. The unit came with a Nvidia 7300GT and I bought an ATI Radeon HD 2600XT to add to it. I have the ATI Radeon on lane 1 so it will get the full X16 and put the 7300GT on lane 4 to drive my second monitor so it will get x8 instead of x4 on another slot. My question is, the 7300GT sits with the heatsink nearly touching the hard drives above it, does this cause overheating issues with the card at all? If so should I move the card to another slot? This would either give me x4 on the 7300GT or I could configure the slots to give x8 each, but that wouldn't allow the 2600XT to run at x16 full performance. Another question, running 2 separate cards for each monitor would give me better performance if I use the better card for graphic intensive apps/games than driving both monitors off the 2600XT correct?
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2006 Mac Pro Dual Graphics Cards Heat
- Thread starter motox25
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Right on last question
About overheating, not an issue. Hard drives are like 30-40c. Won't overheat the card. And the card will probably raise the hard drive temps maximum 5-8 degrees.
However, both cards really suck. Get a single 5770 to replace them both. It will run all your displays and the performance will be night and day.
About overheating, not an issue. Hard drives are like 30-40c. Won't overheat the card. And the card will probably raise the hard drive temps maximum 5-8 degrees.
However, both cards really suck. Get a single 5770 to replace them both. It will run all your displays and the performance will be night and day.
Ok thanks for the feedback. I would've opted for a better card but I got a good deal on two of the HD2600s. So, should I use two of the HD2600XT cards for each monitor or 1 HD2600XT and 1 Nvidia 7300GT? Would using 2 of the 2600XT cards cause a heat issue?
No, 2 x 2600 will not be an issue. I will second the post above, those are really limited cards so I'd recommend selling them and buying the one he recommended above. Its probably 10x faster, even when driving two monitors. If you can sell the 2600s for any kind of decent money it will be well worth your time.