What video card should buy?

[Bob James]

Hi guys,

I'm not %100 sure but i don't think you can place a normal commodity PC GPU card in a MAC.

Radiance

There is, indeed, a "Mac-peculiar" card

[havensole]

Yet one more reason why I hate Mac.

[radiance]

Nvidia does offer MAC versions of various GPU's though.
i'm not sure if 3rd party manufacturers make them, like XFX, BFG, gainward, asus etc...

does anyone (read mac user) have any informations about this?, could be handy for our faq...

Radiance

[pixelrush]

not a mac user but..

EVGA seem to be the maker of GTX285 for mac 1/gb version only.

PNY make a Quadro FX4800 for mac with 1.5gb

[ROUBAL]

Roubal, Why don't you wait a little bit. Fermi cards are about to be released…

@Pixym : If I'm not wrong, Fermi cards will have 512 cores, but a narrow memory bus with 384 bits only (slower ?), and a memory of 1.5GB (not bad, but 2GB would be better). On the opposite, some Tesla cards have 4GB, but I'm still stuck wit a 32bits OS.

[Sam]

Fermi is only the architecture code name

There's gonna GTX4XX with up to 3GB
And Tesla's with up to 6GB

[ROUBAL]

There are still very few informations available about GTX 470 and 480, but for what I've read so far, they will have a memory bus of 384 bits instead of 512, and a memory size of 1.5GB.

3GB would be great for use with Windows XP pro 32 bits.

I'd like to replace my current graphic card and add a second one, so 2 x GTX 480 = 2 x 512 cores would be great, but with a 384 bits memory bus, I am not sure that this solution will be much faster than 2 x 285 GTX (2 x 240 cores). And the price of the GTX 480 is still unknown...

[Garcia]

Hi all,

well, I'd like me too upgrade my video card and I'd use Octane in a right mode. At the moment I have a Quadro FX 4500 512MB and I'm at the window for to see these new cards at the horizon (GTX 480...etc.) but as I have read on the web the price of these is not clear for now...and I think its price is not for all...

I'd buy a GTX 280 or a GTX 295 (even if at today I can't use all the cores inside it) and I hope when this new generation of card will come out, the "old" cards will have a discount ...after that in two o three months I can add a "new" (used) GTX 295 (I have two Quadro used both and bought on the web and they go like the wind! )

For now thanks to Radiance and all the staff for this incredible program...when I have seen it some days ago for the first time I haven't words!

Have a great day

Alberto
Italy

[ROUBAL]

From the few informations found on the web, it appears also that the GTX 470 and 480 will have a higher power consumption (between 225 and 300 watts), so changing the current graphic card and adding a second one would probably mean changing also the power supply... and in some case a bigger power supply would'nt fit in the tower...

[candide]

The memory bus width alone doesn't tell you the whole story. The new cards will (presumably? haven't read the specs) also have faster memory, so the total memory bandwidth will be higher. Fetching 384 buckets 5 times per seconds still gives you more water than fetching 512 buckets 3 times per second