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Video card for 8-core Mac Pro

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MarkBrodhuber says

Hey guys a buddy of mine just got a great deal on a used 8-core Mac Pro. He’s looking to dump a good chunk of change into a video card upgrade and ram. He asked me for some help but I don’t really know where to point him..

The main use of the computer is to edit Red One footage, he won’t be working with 4K of course, but he still needs something beefy. I was thinking about the Quadro cards, as he’s looking to dump over $1K. But then again, would it be smarter for him to get a top of the line Radeon or GTX , and spend the rest on ram?

Any opinions?

10 months ago

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felt_tips says

Quadro sounds good. A good gfx card’s getting more important by the day. Seems everything’s going GPU lately. Thinking of upgrading myself.

-f.

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MarkBrodhuber says

The Quadro is apparently the defacto workstation video card at the moment from what I understand. I know a few post houses in NYC that have them in each machine. It makes sense for heavy compositing, or 3D stuff. But he’s looking to color grade, edit, and output Red footage. I’m almost thinking he’d be better off with a GTX 590 , which is almost $900 less, and then cram as much ram in there as it will hold. Was hoping someone here would have some experience with the 590, or the comparable Radeon card… Or maybe even the Quadro. I’m just afraid to be the guy to suggest he buys a $1,400 graphics card and have it not be what he was looking for . Thanks for the input Felt.

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felt_tips says

I definitely can’t offer a personal direct comparison. Sorry.

-f.

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AlexZlatev says

Avid or FCP ? Because Avid makes configuration which will work best with and probably he can get the videocard that is going to be with their workstation

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addict_fx says

He doesn’t need a high end video card for footage editing and color grading.

The processor speed and the number of cores are the things that matters in his case.

It would be a waste of money to buy a quadro for such work.

10 months ago

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felt_tips says

I think where expensive video cards really come into their own is high-end 3D. You should see some of the stuff that the GPU can do these days….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT-7bnPPVgg&feature=player_embedded

Check out the nearly real-time hair-dynamics around 2 mins.

But for editing…. fast RAIDed disks, plenty of RAM . There’s not much calculating to do, but throughput, throughput, throughput.

-f.

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Farley_Design says

I have this and it really works great…

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-5000/hd-5870-eyefinity-6-edition/Pages/overview.aspx#1

If he’s on a budget, this beast will do the job, not as fast as the Quadro of course, but it works very very well.

There are driver issues because ATI and nVidia are doing their best to promote their pro series so they killed OpenGL support in the last driver batch. Now I have to use original drivers which came on the disc in order to have OpenGL in PS and AE. Expect trouble if you try to use a gaming accelerator for pro work, but the save in $$$ could be worth it.

Hope this helps a bit