NVIDIA Quadro 4000 and ATI 4870?

[yoyo5280]

My buddy runs a film production company that's been doing pretty well, and I'm upgrading his editing suite.

The new machine I have for him is a 2012 3.06GHz Mac Pro with a NVIDIA Quadro 4000 for mac in there at the moment. He needs to drive two 30" ACDs, a 23" ACD, and a 24" Samsung display. The Quadro only drives two displays.

I have an ATI Radeon 4870 from an older Mac Pro that I'd like to put in. Now I've checked and it won't use too much power, but the Mac Pro itself lacks enough PCI auxiliary power ports (has two, I need three). So I'm getting a y splitter and hopefully that will work so he can drive all four screens at once.

My questions are: will this be dangerous/draw too much power from the logic board, and will running these two GPUs cause instability with OS X,Premiere, and the Final Cut suite.

Cheers!

 

[h9826790]

Purely considering their spec, 142W+150W= 292W, it's just within the limit (75W x2 from the PCIe slot + 75W x2 from the 6pin cables = 300W).

However, I am quite sure that the power won't be evenly distributed. Therefore, you have to load up the machine and check the actual power consumption (e.g. by hardware monitor).

 

[MacVidCards]

You might want to consider selling those two cards and going with a 7950/70 or gtx680/780 that can run 4 displays natively and offer faster GPU performance.

Check the apps you use at Barefeats.com. You might have to sit back a few years, those cards are 3 or more years old and would do very poorly against today's cards