The Mac Pro overview, part 3: video card options
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Aug 23, 2006 at 2:29pm
On Monday we started started our multi-part review/look at the Mac Pro, which was announced on Aug. 7. Yesterday we looked at the hard drives and memory upgrades; today we’ll look at the Mac Pro’s video card options.
The Mac Pro’s standard display card is a GeForce 7300 GT. This is an entry-level card, designed by nVidia for “undemanding users of older games and basic multimedia,” as noted at Ars Technica. The GeForce 7300 GT has two DVI ports, one of which is “dual-link” and capable of driving a 30-inch Cinema Display, while the other can’t. Unfortunately, there’s nothing on the back to tell you which is which, so you’ll have to figure that out for yourself. Well, okay, I’ll tell you. If you’re facing the back of the Mac Pro, the video card port on the right is the one for connecting the really big diplays to.
Apple offers two build-to-order upgrade options: the ATI Radeon X1900XT (shown), and the nVidia Quadro FX 4500. Hard core gamers will want the former, while those working with 3D visualization tools and modeling will want the latter. I’ve found the standard issue card to work just fine for all my needs, but then I certainly quality as a casual gamer. Here are some reviews and comments I’ve collected for all three video card options for the Mac Pro:
Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT
Hexus.net: It’s best suited “to 1280×1024, or 1024×768, with modern games, depending on IQ settings and the game itself of course.
Trusted Reviews: An “absolutely amazing value for money and is still my choice card.” The reviewer rates it 7/10 overall, 7/10 in performance, 8/10 in features and 7/10 in value.
ATI Radeon X1900 XT
NeoSeeker: “The X1900XT combines high end power with a high end price tag. 48 pixel shaders, high clock speeds, and a very hungry 150W power draw come together in a package that ATI expects will retake the performance crown.”
VR Zone: “From a technical standpoint the X1900 card is very impressive and features some innovative performance enhancements. As we can see from the actual test results the new R580 performs well, with 3DMark and Doom 3 showing the biggest gains and with CoD2 showing an impressive performance lead over the 7800 GTX 512MB. What the X1900 XT lost in Fill Rate, was made up with Pixel and Vertex Shader Performance. ATI’s OpenGL performance has been getting better and better this past half year, both with driver updates and now the new R580 core yielding huge gains on what is traditionally NVIDIA’s main claim to fame. Overall, the X1900 results place it firmly in a strong performance position.”
nVidia Quadro FX 4500
PNY Technologies: “Featuring the industry’s broadest family of PCI Express products designed from the ground up with the needs of professional CAD, DCC, and Scientific Visualization applications and users in mind, NVIDIA Quadro FX ushers in a new era of unprecedented performance, programmability, precision, and quality.”
CG Society: “The Quadro FX series are generally aimed at scientific visualization, CAD/CAM, and digital content creation and undergo ISV certifications. Quadro FXs are themselves based off the consumer-oriented GeForce product line and have a number of additional features such as two-sided lighting, hardware clip and overlay planes not found in the GeForce products. The high-end product, such as the Quadro 4500, generally perform very well in CAD and DCC type applications and is reflected in synthetic and real SPEC benchmarks.”
The ATI Radeon X1900 XT is a $450 build-to-order option, while the Quadro FX 4500 is a $1,650 BTO feature. You can order a Radeon X1900 XT Graphics Upgrade Kit for your Mac Pro if you don’t take advantage of the BTO option, but it will cost you $499 and take 3-5 weeks to ship. Also note that Apple says that selecting the ATI Radeon X1900 XT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 may delay the shipment of your Mac Pro. and as noted at Ars Technica, “for reasons Apple hasn’t explained, you can’t mix-and-match ATI and nVidia cards in the Mac Pro.”
Tomorrow we’ll look at the Mac Pro’s speed benchmarks and overall performance.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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