nvidia Quadro FX 5600 vs nvidia GeForce 8800 GT

Question

nvidia Quadro FX 5600 vs nvidia GeForce 8800 GT

I'm going to be buying a new Mac Pro within the next few weeks, and I'm trying to decide between a couple of graphics cards.

The Quadro is supposedly designed for animation/rendering, but the 8800 is much less expensive, and I can use those in SLI.

The FX 5600 is about $2,700 more than a GeForce 8800GT 512mb.

So, which would you choose? What's better for Final Cut Studio 2?

Obviously, I'm trying to get as much bang for my buck as possible. So, any suggestions would be awesome.

Thanks,
MS

MacBook Pro, (4,1) 2.4GHz, Mac OS X (10.5.4), 4GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 8600m GT

Posted on Jul 19, 2008 12:07 PM

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Answer 1

Jul 19, 2008 12:44 PM in response to Michael Swengel

Howdy,

Unless you're living inside Maya or AliasStudio (doesn't run in OSX), a Quadro is a waste of money. It's unlikely you would notice the difference between the 8800 and the 5600, in terms of performance. Historically, Quadros have performed the same or worse than the equivalent consumer card from Nvidia, when it comes to games and the sort of stuff that Motion or Color does (pixel shaders). Also, given how poor the 8800 performance is on Mac vs. PC, it looks like the 8800 drivers aren't too hot, which means the 5600 would likely suffer the same issues.

ATI recently announced the Radeon 3870 for Mac & PC, which gets superior performance to the 8800 with Motion (and, most likely, Color). You can pick it up for a couple hundred bucks at Other World Computing. The 3870 isn't being sold directly by Apple, so you'd have to find a reseller.

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