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iamMacPerson

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jun 12, 2011
3,488
1,927
AZ/10.0.1.1
So today I finally got the last piece to get my Mac Pro going, the ATI Radeon HD 5770. I bought the official Apple card, because the flashed one I got on eBay arrived half dead. It runs perfectly, and now I'm going to make some videos while I still have access to my Final Cut Trial for the next 28 days. Not so surprisingly, the Apple card actually gets a higher GeekBench score versus the flashed card.

I also got an SSD and made sure to enable TRIM and its working beautifully. Next thing I'm going to look for is an 8-core processor tray. I'm going back to place I bought it from this Tuesday, so I hope that maybe they have one.

I also have bragging rights since I'm the first one in my family to ever own a Mac Pro!
 
The 5770 is an okay card and will work fine, but over time you are going to find it has limitations...You might want to check out our resident MP GPU experts thread here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1703274/

I see he's currently in TO, but he knows his stuff and helped us a lot with upgrading our 5.1 Hex a while back.

Unfortunately, I didn't have enough cash to buy a top end graphics card so the 5770 will have to do for now. The card does fine with Final Cut and will do great for video streaming. Maybe in a few years I'll upgrade again but for now the 5770 will work.

Other then the PCIe fan issue I had which I resolved, the machine has been working quite well!
 
How does a card arrive half dead? It either works like it is supposed to or it doesn't. There really isn't an in-between.

It worked, in the case that it displayed video but it started distorting. Eventually, the card wouldn't stop glitching and was causing the system to freeze. It ended up causing 2 Kernel Panics.
 
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