New Video Card for Mac Pro 1.1, 2.66, 30" LCD...

[Macshroomer]

Hi there,

I am currently running a 2.66 Mac Pro 1,1 with 16gb of ram, 300gb raptor, three 2TB drives with a XT1900 video card. I just upgraded my monitor from a 23" to a 30" and even though it is running great, I am wondering if a video card upgrade might pep things up a bit. My main need for speed at the moment is rendering thumbnails in iView Media Pro and eventually some video work next year. The latter is not such a big deal because it will be time to upgrade the whole enchilada at that point. I mostly use Photoshop CS5, Lightroom, the faster I can get raw files converted and thumbs rendered in my catalogs, the better, might be switching to Aperture as I am doing away with DVD backups and going all drives for archiving.

I am running OSX 10.6.6 by the way..

I was looking at an ATI 4870 but maybe I am just fine with my 1900 since the machine is a bit dated now..

Ideas?

 

[interslicer]

Hi there,

I am currently running a 2.66 Mac Pro 1,1 with 16gb of ram, 300gb raptor, three 2TB drives with a XT1900 video card. I just upgraded my monitor from a 23" to a 30" and even though it is running great, I am wondering if a video card upgrade might pep things up a bit. My main need for speed at the moment is rendering thumbnails in iView Media Pro and eventually some video work next year. The latter is not such a big deal because it will be time to upgrade the whole enchilada at that point. I mostly use Photoshop CS5, Lightroom, the faster I can get raw files converted and thumbs rendered in my catalogs, the better, might be switching to Aperture as I am doing away with DVD backups and going all drives for archiving.

I am running OSX 10.6.6 by the way..

I was looking at an ATI 4870 but maybe I am just fine with my 1900 since the machine is a bit dated now..

Ideas?

i upgraded from an x1900 to a 5770 and its miles better.. but for me its mostly measured in games, so whether or not you'd notice a difference, im not sure.

 

[yfile]

Old Mac Pro's can't use power of new graphic cards. It's a bit frustrating. I made upgrade from 1900xt to hd4890 and noticed very little improvement. So don't waste your money. Get SSD drive, for example.

 

[SoupaFly]

Problem with video card/logic board? Mac Pro 1,1 2.66

Hello,

I also have a 1st Gen Mac Pro 1,1 2.66Ghz Dual Xeon,8GB ram, 4x 1TB nVIDIA 7300GT. I'm having a problem with my system I came home one day to use my mac and no chime or video after powered on the small power LED light is on and LED lights on the logic board are also on. I figured my video card went bad so I removed the X1900XT video card from my other Mac Pro same model A1186 but after installed and powered back up same situation as before only now the fan on my video card is running at an extreamly high rpm can somebody help. Is my Logic board bad??

 

[goMac]

Get a Radeon 5770.

Old Mac Pro's can't use power of new graphic cards. It's a bit frustrating. I made upgrade from 1900xt to hd4890 and noticed very little improvement. So don't waste your money. Get SSD drive, for example.

Yeah, this isn't the entire story... You can certainly see a boost over the 1900xt, but the boosts start to wear off past the 5770.

If you don't use GPU based apps, you won't see a boost, but Aperture would certainly be boosted by a better card. I certainly noticed on my Mac Pro (2008) when I got a 5870.

(Also the x1900 is a ridiculously badly designed card.)

 

[interslicer]

the difference between my x1900 and my 5770 was night and day. on things like high end games you can definitely see the difference, and its not even close.

plus i was never able to install bootcamp prior to getting rid of the x1900 and now im posting this from windows...

(and i feel like i need a shower, but at least i get to choose >_>)

 

[Macshroomer]

I have a 5770-HD and C300 SSD for a boot drive on order, that ought to speed things up a bit until I decide to upgrade...

 

[shaved-ape]

same boat

Have a similar set up want to step up video card from the 7300, ( gag hate this low powered thing). loe the system just want more choices and a better card. most bang for the buck?

i am running both bootcamp and OSX SL. i have one 23 mac monitor and want to run it to my 46" tv as a second monitor for video playback.