What's so great about the d700 when the 290x is supposed to be faster at a fraction of the cost? Seems like the w9000 (D700) is $3000 and the faster 290x is 599. At least that's what I get from the aandtech review of the macpro.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
What's special about the D700 compared to the 290x?
- Thread starter richard371
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Considering you can buy a base quad MP and upgrade it to dual D700's for a grand total of $3999 Apple isn't charging anywhere near $3k for them. This goes back to the whole debate about Pro vs. Consumer GPU. The silicon is mostly the same but the drivers are different, which doesn't make much difference on OSX which might be why Apple is selling GPU's which are branded as FirePro's for much cheaper than normal.
The FirePro branding is better for the Mac Pro from Apple's perspective, and I guess those who can benefit from good view port performance under Windows.
The D700 is more like a slower R9 280X. By using their own model numbers they can also steer away from direct comparisons when it comes to most buyers. Of course they couldn't put two 280X, let alone two 290X in the Mac Pro with that design and not have them be a lot slower. Most pro cards do run slower of course.
So $1,000 for two slower versions of $450 cards, but with twice the GRR5 VRAM (Remember they have 6GB). Better than some of their previous offerings.
With the emerging power of CUDA/OpenCL the old comparison between what was considered a workstation card vs a gaming card is becoming more and more obsolete. Now days the right card for the job could be between its cuda/opencl performance rather than a QoS from workstation cards. This was really brought to light when the Titan came out as Nvidia removed one of the goal posts by producing a hybrid card competing with it's own range of both gaming and pro cards.
So, I personaly think it comes down to what gets the job done quickest for you based on cost/performance and the saying "workstation vs gaming" cards is not something we can quote anymore.
Just my 2p
