apple nvidia geforce gt 120 512mb pcie video card for mac pro reviews

Apple Nvidia Geforce Gt 120 512Mb Pcie Video Card Pro Reviews Mac OS X 10

Many of these power hungry games require the latest and greatest graphics engines just to run.

Apple offers three different graphics-card options for the Mac Pro, ranging from a general-purpose card to a high-end option intended for scientists and engineers.

The Mac Pros default card (which is also available as a 150 add-on if you want more than one) is the.

Intended for the average creative and business user, the GeForce 7300 GT has 256MB of video RAM and two DVI connectors.

This 250 upgrade option improves the performance of applications that use OpenGL graphics, such as Apples Motion, Autodesks Maya, and other 3-D-modeling apps.

The Mac Pro accommodates the card with a special double-wide slot on the motherboard.

This keeps the card from blocking a neighboring PCIe slotuseful if you also need to add, say, a video-capture board or faster networking options (such as Apples Fibre Channel card, for connecting to the companys Xsan storage system).

If you go with the basic graphics card and later decide to upgrade to the Radeon X1900 XT, you can order the card as.

On paper, its performance is almost the same as the Radeon X1900 XTs.

So why would you want to pay 1,650 for it This card has a little interface that lets you hook up stereoscopic displaysessentially, high-end (and expensive) 3-D glasses.

Some scientific and technical applications rely on such displaysfor example, molecular biologists use them to visualize their models in three real dimensions.

The Quadro card features 512MB of video RAM and has two dual-link DVI ports, so you can hook up two 30-inch Cinema HD Displays to it at once.

It has a fan that cools its microprocessor, and it discharges hot air through a vent made accessible by Apples double-wide PCIe slot.

But unlike the Radeon, the Quadro 4500 FX isnt available as a separate upgrade kityou have to order it when you order your Mac Pro.

So if you add new graphics cardssay, multiple GeForce 7300 GT cards to drive additional monitorsthe Mac Pro will automatically sense them and allocate its PCIe bandwidth accordingly.

Itll even check with you to make sure its set up optimally for what youll be doing.

By the way, if youre thinking that you might like to pop one of these cards into your existing Power Mac G5, too bad: Apple says that theyre designed exclusively for the Mac Pro and wont work in older machines, even Power Mac G5s with PCIe slots.

The vast majority of applications and tasks will run just fine on the Mac Pros stock graphics card, the NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT graphics card with 256MB of dedicated graphics memory.

But if youre really looking for the best graphics performance, Apple offers two higher-end graphics cards as build-to-order options.

One, the 512MB ATI Radeon X1900 XT was not available in time for our testing for this story.

We.

Its awfully pricey, but it did indeed give the Mac Pro a major performance boost.

Apple Nvidia Geforce Gt 120 512Mb Pcie Video Card Pro Reviews Mac OS X 10

All systems were running Mac OS X 10.4.7 with 1GB of RAM.

We used Unreal Tournament 2004s Antalus Botmatch average-frames-per-second score; we ran the tests at four different resolutions at the Maximum setting with both audio and graphics enabled.Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung.

High-end games, such as Quake and Doom, rely less on a systems CPU than on its GPU (graphical procession unit).

Apple Nvidia Geforce Gt 120 512Mb Pcie Video Card For Mac Pro Reviews