If i bought 3rd party 8800GTX graphics cards for a mac pro would they work

Eric Cartman

right im contemplating a mac pro, my video editing requires a bit more power than my macbook pro and my gaming fps's could do with a tweak.

if i bought a pair of these : http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=347733 would they work in the mac pro ?

Dr_Teeth

I don't think so, Nvidia have still not bothered to do Mac drivers themselves, and Apple's cards seem to have specific firmware on them. You'd have to settle for one of these, if you didn't get it installed when you bought the Mac:

http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/irl.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=7E4F2D7D&nplm=MB137

babypink

my understanding is no.

Something about the cards needing specific firmware installed to make them play nice with the MacPro EFI motherboard and OSX.

The 8800GT is available as a BTO option, just not the GTX

ZENER

What about ATI X1900 cards ? ATI sell these for Mac G5's.

There's info around on flashing nVidia cards to make them work on Macs but the results vary depending on who makes the actual card you by. If it goes wrong there's no going back either although I did read somewhere that if you have 2 PCIe graphics slots it's possible to recover but it was still hit and miss.

Also did Apple make a G5 with 2 PCIe 16 channel slots ? I thought there was only 1 ? Probably wrong on this of course, my G5 has AGP only.

ZEN

eddyc

Try NVinject http://nvinject.free.fr/

Its a complete hack, but it works for some people.

ZENER

AFAIK nvinject is only associated with Hackintosh. It's a method of supporting standard PC video cards in Intel hardware below the EFI32 system and get the OS to see the cards. This does not work the other way around from my reading of the forums on nvinject.free.fr as this thread suggests.

It's still necessary to flash the new card to get it to work in a real Mac.

ZEN

eddyc

Ironic