Mac Pro 3.1 (early 2008) New Graphics Card, What are the options?

ATI Radeon HD5870 or HD5770 or NVIDIA Quadro 4000 or NVIDIA Quadro K5000.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC743ZM/A/ati-radeon-hd-5870-graphics-upgrade- kit-for-mac-pro-(mid-2010-or-early-2009)?fnode=53

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC743ZM/A/ati-radeon-hd-5870-graphics-upgrade- kit-for-mac-pro-(mid-2010-or-early-2009)?fnode=53

http://store.apple.com/us/product/H3314LL/A/nvidia-quadro-4000-for-mac?fnode=53& p=1

http://store.apple.com/us/product/HA959LL/A/nvidia-quadro-k5000-gpu-for-mac?fnod e=53&p=1

-- kaz-k

A lot depends on what version of OS X.

The GTX 680 from EVGA or the AMD 7950 are new and a lot less than any Quadro.

Barefeats.com just posted 5870 vs those two.

Wahtever you plug in MUST have Apple EFI firmware, or it will not show a picture AT ALL under Mac OS X.

It is not true that it must have EFI. Many PC "only" graphics cards work fine in OS X, and they are usually less expensive than the mac version. There's also more choices (gtx 660ti works for example).

With a PC video card you will not get BOOTUP screens without EFI, but once you are booted, you are golden. Mountain Lion contains drivers for all KINDS of cards that aren't available in 'mac' versions. I'm using a eVGA GTX 670 4GB Superclock in my 2008 mac pro, and it works great.

No boot screen just means you won't get the grey apple and spinning circle while boot happens, it just starts right at the desktop. I boot from a PCI SSD so it's only a few seconds. I kept my old card around in case I ever need the boot screens (like to select boot disk) but I usually use other options for choosing starup disk. I also boot Windows 8 with boot camp and it also works perfectly.

check out the forums and blog at netkas.org for far more info. Mountain Lion made a lot of new things possible, though.

ScottieB-

You are right in the case of some of the new NVIDIA cards under 10.8.3.

But for casual Users who are not prepared to Flash cards, the rule of using only Apple-firmware cards will keep securely them out of trouble, with no surprises whatsovever.

Do I get two DVI ports? in the past, not always.

10.8.3 is a "game changer"

Do I have or want to keep a card on hand for when I do need to say use Recovery Mode to do troubleshooting or repairs? Or if you have to download and install 10.8?

I have never liked having to find and release the card clasp or lock and swap out a card unless absolutely necessary.

IF the Mac Pro would just have 1 x 8-pin in addition to the two 6-pin aux power cables would make it a lot easier. You had to make sure you bought a card with 2 x 6-pin connectors. One person seems to be frying cards, trying to use 6-pin to 8-pin adapters, or you have cables from a 2nd PSU that are messy but provide 450W (2x8 and 2x6).

I am not clear if any and all 660ti are going to work or worth it though. And how close a card has to be to reference design.

Even support for a 4GB card. Or directing CS6 to use the card.

Lack of early boot that is provided by EFI may or may not seem like small potatoes.

Sure it can be done. It isn't always necessary to or even desireable to flash a PC card, not nVidia card, and those people - I send them to MacRumors or to "look around".

I suspect some are better off with a PC and Windows. You can build a i7 3770 that makes a nice graphic workstation or for gaming today.

No flashing necesary either. The flashing would ADD efi, but you don't need efi. That said I did need to do some simple patches to have adobe cs6 see the card.

Of coure a new machine is a better option, and right now Windows is a better choice for a 'workstation' (and games of course) - but if we're talking about upgrading a 5-year old machine, a little hackery is expected I'd think. And it's FUN! I guess I tend to think of mac pro owners as more than casual users. Regardless, even on my mac pro and everything working in os x, I find myself using windows more these days.

I just installed a GTX 650Ti Boost in my Mac Pro 3,1, and it works great in Mountain Lion. However, I'm kinda stuck now because I want to upgrade my main bootup disk to Mountain Lion (now that I can get off Snow Leopard), but the installer disc is 10.8, not 10.8.3, so I can't use it!

Can I put my old ATI Radeon HD 2600 back into PCI slot 3 of my Mac Pro, connect the DVI cables to that, and boot normally into the installation? Will it know to use that GPU and not the GTX I have in slot 1?

Yes you can. Just attach the monitors to the older card and os x will use that one. But you want to be careful of power draw.

I'm not familiar with that radeon card - if it uses any auxiliary power you may not be able to run both at the same time. But it's ok. You can swap out the old card, install os x and then put the new card back in. I keep my old 8800gt around for that very reason - any time I need the EFI boot screens I change out the cards. It is fine - OS X will recognize the new card once you swap it.

Redownload Mountain Lion. When you go to the App Store it should be current version.

depends I guess how you want to do this. I recommend keep your current hard drive and OS as is and install to a different drive. Or partition.

I did that, but I think you also have to reset the PRAM (read that somewhere) because I was getting some error message I've never seen before when I tried it. It looked like the kernel panic message but looked a little different and said that there is a problem with my computer or something like that. Unconfirmed if resetting the PRAM works because I went and replaced the new card with the old one anyway.

Anyway, I got it sorted out. Running ML 10.8.4 with a totally unmodified GPU that isn't made for Mac. The only problem is that the Finder windows sometimes freeze when I resize them, but I don't know if that's the hardware or software.

I don't know if that's hardware or software either but I can say I've not seen that (freezing finder windows) with a gtx670 or a 680 (both 4GB). However, my old gtx285 would show some slowdown on moving finder windows between displays (I had 2 and 1 was a 30" so that could have been using up the 1GB of vRam quickly).

Found out it was software. I installed a tweak to get the colored sidebar back, and it was causing problems. It works for my friend, so it could be a weird incompatibility thing. It still freezes rarely because Mountain Lion seems to want to access an external drive when I resize a Finder window sometimes, and disk access is not its own thread, so it hangs as an external hard drive wakes from sleep. I hope they fix this in Mavericks :/