Wow... thank you, everybody, for responding. Lots of helpful information so far.
The EVGA Geforce 680 Mac Edition so far sounds like a good choice. Have folks here any experience with this card? How noisy is it compared to the Radeon 5870? I perhaps should have mentioned this in my original post, but I do appreciate quiet operation when under load.
What about the Quadro 4000 and the K5000?
I guess the best way to find out is to buy them and try them, then decide on one and return the others. It's a procedure I'm a little uncomfortable with (buy to try), but there is so little hard evidence out there that it seems the only way. Is this common practice, would you say, in the Mac GPU scene?
I'm definitely leaning more towards nVidia than AMD, primarily for MentalRay CUDA optimisation reasons.
A quick question before I head off out for the day.
What concerns you about boot screens, or lack thereof?
I ask because if you can get past that issue, there's almost the entire NVidia range that will just plug in and switch on with no faffing or flashing.
ps My best guess as a cost effective card would be a GTX 660 - if you can afford better, so be it, but the 660 would be a good place to start, and there is a version marketed to/at Macs, for the usual Mac price premium, which should have boot screens - Though there is a PC version with 3gig of RAM if you can live without the boot screens.
I guess I like to keep my Mac as functional as I can. I suppose not having a boot screen won't detract from any vital functionality, will it? I mean drives for booting can still be selected from the System Preferences-->Startup Disk section.
without having to:
add an additional PSU.
flash firmware or mess around with it in Windows to make it OSX friendly.
lose my boot screen.
Then get a Geforce 680 Mac Edition or a Radeon 7950 Mac Edition, they are fully compitable with your mac, so you want lose boot screen or something like that.
Thank you tayh. The GeForce 680 Mac Edition sounds like the best bang for buck, so far I think. Though I wonder if there are 680 cards available with a little bit more RAM than the EVGA's 2GB. Would you happen to know of any?
Macvideocards on eBay sells fully compatible cards better than 680 and 7950!
Thanks, I had a look at his eBay store and there's a lot to choose from. Which models would you say are better than the 680? And how are they better? Faster? More Ram? Quieter?
One question: how much do you use Maya? I ask because if it's not your main application, the 680 or 7950 Mac Editions would probably fit your needs well. So would MacVidCards flashed cards, but I'm not sure if you feel comfortable with that.
If Maya is where you make money, though, you might consider an NVIDIA Quadro card, like a K5000 for Mac. Only for Maya would thIs start to make sense, because the drivers have been optimized for much better viewport performance in this app (not MODO).
Hi riggles, I use Maya on a daily basis... I'd say anywhere from 2-6 hours or more a day, depending on the tasks at hand. So it's a major part of my toolkit. Modo only gets an occasional visit every now and then. I've been more than a little disappointed with Luxology's offerings of late.
I did have a look at the K5000 and it looks like a serious contender. I could stretch my budget if I knew it would be a considerably better fit for me and my work than a GeForce class card.
I am and Environments Artist/Digital Matte Painter. Which means my 3D scene files can get huge. Lots of polygons (10-100s of millions of 'em, GB's worth of textures, etc.) So Viewport 2.0 performance and modelling interactivity is hugely important to me.
I have a Quadro 4000 in the HP Z800 Linux workstation provided to me by my employer and I'm quite pleased with it's performance in Maya. So if the K5000 can improve upon that, I'd certainly consider it. Then again, I read time and again that the GeForce cards are just as fast, if not faster than their Quadro equivalents for this type of work. It's a bit of a dilemma.
I can't imagine caring less about boot screens for my work. My machine boots in about 8 seconds so I would never see it anyway. That requirement really limits your possibilities.
Yes, I can see your point. I suppose it's not a huge drama to lose it.
A reference PC gtx 680 takes literally seconds to flash in bootcamp, anyone can do it. I paid £210 in total for a used unregistered warranty evga model on eBay with two new PCIe cables, under half the cost of a proper evga mac 680 card.
Sticking a spare hard drive in sled 2 and installing windows 7 will take under an hour, you won't even have to have a windows licence key as you are only using it solely to flash the mac EFI bios then flatten the drive back to hfs+ afterwards. You will only need the 64 bit ISO burnt to a DVD.
I had an 8800GT before which made far more noise and blurs on photoshop were a hell of a lot slower. It's a great card and bought the right way the best bang per buck!
Hi Gav Mack. Well, I do have an authentic Windows 7 Professional disc + license key lying around somewhere. But I really don't relish the thought of this process at all. First of all, the license key as far as I can remember is registered to my old 1,1 Mac Pro, that I no longer have. The process of getting in contact with the MS folks to try and unlock and switch over the license key sounds fraught with frustration and rising blood pressure.
Are you saying that if I installed my copy of W7 on a bootcamp drive I will be able to run the bios Flash software without having to activate Windows? How does that work? Apologies for my ignorance on this. It's been a few years since I've had to install Windows and the memories (those I haven't been able to rid from my brain) are hardly pleasant ones.
