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REVIEW: 7950 Mac Edition vs Apple 5870 vs MSI 7970 (Pics)

Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition

could you please make a bios dump from Radeon 7950?
 
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I decided that i'm going to wait it out until Apple comes out with there 2013 Mac Pro and see what GPU options there going with, I think Apple may go Nvidia this time around what do you guys think?
 
skyline r34 said:
I decided that i'm going to wait it out until Apple comes out with there 2013 Mac Pro and see what GPU options there going with, I think Apple may go Nvidia this time around what do you guys think?
Click to expand...

i am to deciding to to wait i think thell go nvidia as well
 
How does that 7950 stack up with a 670? I have a 670 currently and really like it. I want to put my 5770 back in and drive my second monitor with it but worried about how the amd and nvidia cards with act together, either in windows and osx.
 
My EVGA GTX570 2560Mb
 

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kgapp said:
If the new sapphire 7950 doesn't work properly in boot camp this is going to be a seriously disappointing product. Certainly this can't be working as intended. Can it? Did you install the windows driver disc that comes packed with the card?

Mine is arriving tomorrow and I sure hope this isn't the case. is it possible that you received a faulty card?
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I am happy to report that my Sapphire 7950 Mac Edition arrived and installation was a complete success. It works fantastic in OS X 10.8.3 and also works perfectly in a Win 7 bootcamp partition.

The 7950 replaced a 5770 and I had none of the issues the OP had installing the supplied Win 7 Radeon drivers. First boot into Windows and the OS automatically downloaded and installed generic drivers. Popped the AMD disc in and ran through their installation. Rebooted and everything was good to go. Didn't even have to take my GT120 out of slot 4 during the process. The 7950 FLIES in bootcamp. No comparison to my 5770. Not by a long shot.

I can safely report that the Sapphire 7950 appears to be the real deal. Current generation GPU, EFI support for boot display, completely safe power draw specs for the MacPro hardware. Other than the price there seems to be no downside that I can tell.

I still can't view any DRM'd movies in iTunes as I still receive the dreaded HDCP error. I believe this is related to my 30" ACD being hooked up via the DVI port. I have a feeling this problem will probably never go away until I find a worthwhile set of displays to replace my aging 30" ACD and two 20" ACD's flanking in portrait mode. If anyone has any success playing DRM'd movies when outputting to ACD's please enlighten me as to what I am doing wrong.
 
Bam

Sapphire 7950 Mac Edition
 

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kgapp said:
I am happy to report that my Sapphire 7950 Mac Edition arrived and installation was a complete success. It works fantastic in OS X 10.8.3 and also works perfectly in a Win 7 bootcamp partition.
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How about the noise level of the card?
Thanks.
 
Chumnick said:
How about the noise level of the card?
Thanks.
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Noise level at idle is whisper quiet. When pushing the system the fans ramp up slightly and I would say the noise is slightly greater than that of a 5770 (but quieter than a 5870). In my environment and with the computer on the floor I do not find it distracting in the least. The Mac Pro has great ventilation and my system continues to run cool as always.

The best part for me is that I discovered I can drive all three displays from one card and the UI and OS animations are now more fluid than ever. Thinking about using the free slot to put in a Sonnet Tempo Pro with some new SSD's and watch this thing fly even faster.
 
My results from my Bigabyte GTX570, 1.25 GB with MacVidCards EFI in a Mac Pro 3,1.

Lou
 

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I believe Link speed is PCI 1.1 16x under Mac OSX (i get an error when checking in System Information/PCI Cards option).

Surely PCI 1.1 under Bootcamp.

Regarding video connections i have only one monitor attached to DVI output...
 
ugru said:
I believe Link speed is PCI 1.1 16x under Mac OSX (i get an error when checking in System Information/PCI Cards option).

Surely PCI 1.1 under Bootcamp.

Regarding video connections i have only one monitor attached to DVI output...
Click to expand...

That sucks means it will/would need to be flashed with the EFI added in to get that information then.
 


Name: ATI Radeon HD 7950 Compute Engine
Vendor:AMD
Type: GPU
Device Version: OpenCL 1.1
Driver Version: 1.0
Compute Units: 32
Work Group Size: 1024
Clock: 900 MHz
Global Memory: 1536 MB
Local Memory: 32 KB
Cache Size: 0 KB
Cache Line Size: 0 Bytes
Available: Yes
Double-Precision: No
Extensions:
cl_APPLE_SetMemObjectDestructor
cl_APPLE_ContextLoggingFunctions
cl_APPLE_clut
cl_APPLE_query_kernel_names
cl_APPLE_gl_sharing
cl_khr_gl_event
cl_khr_global_int32_base_atomics
cl_khr_global_int32_extended_atomics
cl_khr_local_int32_base_atomics
cl_khr_local_int32_extended_atomics
cl_khr_byte_addressable_store

Apparently PCI 1.1....

Anyone knows why only 1.5 GB of VRAM is used?
 
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