No more high end graphics on Mac? Apple removed Nvidia Quadro from the Mac Pro!

By bam93 at Wed, Jun 24 2009 8:30am |

Hi,

I was just enjoying the possibility to order a new Mac Pro and to my great surprise it is no longer possible to order a high end Nvidia Quadro card! So no more stereo displays, no more blazingly fast graphics, no more CUDA on the Mac Pro??

Does anybody know why Apple did this?

Maybe the scientific users could pressure Apple to re-consider these graphics cards as an option?

Thanks in advance for any comments and suggestions. I must say I am seriously wondering whether my move to an almost exclusively Mac-equipped workgroup was a good one. Maybe I'll have to go back to Linux for high performance GPU stuff.

Thanks,
Marc

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Wed, 2009-06-24 15:54 — pmolfese

could be

Could be they're about to add new ones to the store, sometimes the option disappears right before a refresh. It's worth a call to their sales line! The specs on Apple's page say that Mac Pro can power up to 8 of the 30" cinema displays.

CUDA will work fine on the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120, of course with fewer cores. I have to say that the ATI Radeon HD 4870 doesn't look bad in terms of OpenCL performance. Sure it would be nice to have more Video RAM, but GDDR5, I remember when DDR was a big deal!

Wed, 2009-06-24 21:28 — scottyb

You Have Two nVIDIA Options

Hi Marc. Check out:

1 -- EVGA GeForce GTX 285 (http://store.apple.com/us/product/TW387ZM/A?fnode=MTY1NDA5OQ&mco=NjcxMjczOQ)

2 -- Quadro FX 4800 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_quadro_fx_4800_for_mac_us.html)

Thu, 2009-06-25 05:31 — bam93

Indeed! THanks.

I hadn't seen any notice about the Quadro FX 4800 on Apple's site, but that is indeed the solution I was looking for. Thank you Scotty.

Thu, 2009-07-02 10:48 — JustinMitchell

This get's well into rumor

This get's well into rumor territory, but this is a related story I just saw today.
http://tinyurl.com/ks9z5u