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ATI Radeon HD 4870 Coming Soon For Older Mac Pros, Requires Unreleased OS X 10.5.7

I'm not seeing the 10.5.7 requirement... :confused:

When I load the Apple Store page, it states:

"Compatibility:

  • Requires Mac Pro (Early 2009 with 1066MHz DDR3 memory) or Mac Pro (Early 2008 with 800MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM memory) with PCI Express 2.0 slot
  • Mac OS X v10.5.6 or later"

So... I'm not seeing where 10.5.7 is specifically required... 10.5.7 is no where mentioned on that page at all...
 
valdore said:
I have a first-gen '06/07 Mac Pro, with the lousy Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT. Both Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 are often slow and difficult dealing with it - can someone recommend me a good GPU upgrade?

System Specs -

Mac Pro - Clovertown 8 cores (1st gen) @ 3.0 Ghz
8 GB RAM
1.5 TB software RAID storage (JBOD).
Click to expand...
The 3870 is the best option you have. See if you can something flashed off eBay for less.
 
Any idea if this card will work under Windows/Boot Camp? Would it work without firmware update on a custom PC?

I'd like to be able to use it with the new LED displays.
 
I'll stick with the 8800GT in my early '08 Mac Pro.

Apple can KEEP their $400.00 4870 upgrade option, and stick it where the sun don't shine.

I'll wait until someone comes up with some hacked OSX drivers for the 4870, then plunk down $179.00 for one at Newegg, whilst giving Apple the finger.

It's one thing to markup an item, it's quite another to charge DOUBLE. Don't tell me the mini displayport costs that much to add in. Apple went with DisplayPort in the first place to save themselves money b/c the licensing is cheap.
 
For those of us that don't need a mini-display port, can a regular Radeon HD 4870 be installed instead?
 
haravikk said:
For those of us that don't need a mini-display port, can a regular Radeon HD 4870 be installed instead?
Click to expand...

I'm sure with hacked drivers it can be. I know they had PC versions of the 8xx series cards working in the Mac Pro before they were available from Apple like this.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

Am I the only one that sees the Apple event rumored for later this month as a possibility for Snow Leopard? If not, why would they add an upgrade option not available until a much later date? Just a thought...
 
tezro said:
I ordered my Radeon 4870 tonight here in The Netherlands.
315 Euro's and a 5-7 week wait. Also shows a 10.5.7 requirement.

Funny to see the US store doesn't even show a price, let alone a wait period nor the 10.5.7 requirement.
(Followed a link to it from barefeats.com)

I get this card to upgrade my 8800GT in my Early 2008.
Click to expand...

Hey tezro i am in the same position as you (2008 macpro with the 8800GT) and in the netherlands too, are you on any dutch mac forum aswell, so i can keep track of your findings with the new card ?
 
should I upgrade?

I currently own the early '08 Mac Pro and am trying to decide if this HD 4870 GPU upgrade is a good idea. Most of my work is inside of Apple's Pro Tools and Adobe products with minor gaming. I currently have 2x ATI HD 2600. What do you guys think?
 
dbbradle said:
I currently own the early '08 Mac Pro and am trying to decide if this HD 4870 GPU upgrade is a good idea. Most of my work is inside of Apple's Pro Tools and Adobe products with minor gaming. I currently have 2x ATI HD 2600. What do you guys think?
Click to expand...
I'd keep waiting unless you really want the gaming power.
 
Sad state of affairs....

I can't believe how satisfied some of you sound...the 4870 is a yr old card. And they didn't even give us the 1gb memory version which has been on the market for a while. The 4870 is known to draw more power and overheat. The Nvidia GTX260, which is the competitor version is overall better and faster. I've tested both and used both in the PC world. The revised GTX260 blows the 4870 away. But they're both old cards! As much as we pay apple why do we get yr old leftovers. If they can get Intel to give them chips before anyone else Im sure there capable of getting Nvidia to give it's user a current generation card like a GTX285. I woke up today and for the 1st time after owning every mac pro thought about selling it and getting a PC with Sli and current gen video cards for half the price and just using my MacBook Pro 17" for the rest. I cannot stress my disappointment in the GPU arena that apple has failed on continuously. They have the money and the foot hold w/Nvidia to deliver a current generation GPU rather then this yr old Ati garbage. And any gamer or pro knows for the last 2 yrs that Nvidia has been the way to go. The Nvidia 8800 was not new when it came out over a yr ago in the previous gen Mac Pro and Apple never upgraded. Lets face it...apple is about the consumer and integrating the home theater in the computer...Yes ..thats where the market is going but they are not concentrating on the pro world any more. Time to face it. Especially in a time where adobe and other pro apps or using the GPU as much as the CPU! Really disappointed me with this. I guess I'm buyin a windows GPU for the windows side. For $2500+ apple did not deliver anything new or innovative. And of course I'm sure our 4870 will be costly compared to the PC side which you can find for $160!!!
 
timothyjay2004 said:
I'm not seeing the 10.5.7 requirement... :confused:

When I load the Apple Store page, it states:

"Compatibility:

  • Requires Mac Pro (Early 2009 with 1066MHz DDR3 memory) or Mac Pro (Early 2008 with 800MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM memory) with PCI Express 2.0 slot
  • Mac OS X v10.5.6 or later"

So... I'm not seeing where 10.5.7 is specifically required... 10.5.7 is no where mentioned on that page at all...
Click to expand...

Pretty sure this was changed in the last few hours. I definitely read the 10.5.7 requirement earlier today.
 
I was previously asking whether or not this was worth upgrading from the 3870 to the 4870 and the reason I'm asking is, aren't they both 512mb? Isn't more memory by default faster? like 1GB vs 512mb? Why isn't Apple jumping on the 1GB, 2GB video card band wagon? (I'm asking because I am a noob when it comes to that stuff)
 
chewietobbacca said:
No doubt that RIGHT NOW, because Nvidia has pushed all its effort to GPGPU lately (and ignoring GPUs pretty much), CUDA has made their cards better off, but I see nothing wrong with wanting OpenCL since it will utilize both sides and ATI will have the higher throughput in all likelihood of those cards offered when things get rolling (soon enough).

Also, not offering the GTX series is also likely due to power consumption issues, as well as using ATI as a bargaining chip against Nvidia being the sole provider
Click to expand...

Probably you are correct regarding apple using ATI as a bargaining chip with NVIDIA. But the rest of your conjectures make little sense, though. Power-wise the GT200 parts (esp. with the 55nm switch) seem to have much better power profiles, esp. at idle.

Some people have to solve problems NOW. Since there is no OpenCL stack out there to play with (ironically NVIDIA are the only ones with a working one, albeit in beta state)and we have no clue when snow leopard is coming out. Heck, if I have to wait... I would wait until quantum processors take over and thus avoiding the nightmares I am going through parallelizing our code. That does not seem like a good business practice though... what I am supposed to do in the ensuing decades?

Besides, it makes no sense to claim ATI has the highest GPGPU throughput in OSX, since their current throughput is 0 due to lack of programming stack for the mac. NVIDIA at least provided CUDA.

By the time snow leopard comes out, it is more than likely NVIDIA and ATI will have a new architecture out. It makes little sense to use the theoretical GPGPU performance of a product, which right now can not execute any GPGPU code on the MAC, as a barometer for anything. Much less where performance will be by the time snow leopard comes out.
 
valdore said:
From the first generation, '06/07 Mac Pros? Because that's what he was talking about.
Click to expand...

From what I read only early 2008 Mac Pro's and early 2009 Mac Pro's can use this ATi 4870 but I could misread the info but first we need the software update Mac OS X 10.5.7 in order for the card to work for older Mac Pro's, only time will tell but i'm definitely getting this card so that I can use the LED 30 inch when it's released
 
guzhogi said:
You sure? I've heard that, but I've also heard that people can just use Boot Camp & boot up in Windows, & it'll work fine. So I think it's more than just something low-level like BIOS/EFI differences.
Click to expand...

The difference is that nobody is writing drivers for OS X, so you have to live with what Apple gives you. The joys of being dependent on one vendor for everything.
 
Grimace said:
I'm guessing not, but here's to hoping!
Click to expand...

There is no technical reason why they wouhldn't. It is also possible that ATi could realease a version that is cheaper than the Apple Version a la the 3870 that you could buy from retailers.
 
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