Best Video Card For Mac 3,1

'Available', 'supported', and 'will work' are three very different things. The officially compatible video cards for the original (1,1) Mac Pro are: • NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT • ATI Radeon X1900 XT • NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 (and family) • NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT These are the only cards that are supported in an original Mac Pro. Unfortunately, most are not particularly available any more. Apple no longer sells any of these cards, except the Quadro FX family (which is super-expensive and not consumer-oriented). I believe most, if not all, of the above officially supported cards are all Apple-specific variants. There are various non-Apple versions of the above, which may or may not work in a Mac Pro, depending on firmware compatibility (sometimes it is possible to program a Mac-compatible version of the firmware into a non-Apple card's non-volatile flash, thus enabling the use of a non-Apple version in the Mac Pro).

But the bottom line is that it is not really possible to purchase these cards anymore (except for the super-expensive Quadro FX and maybe a small quantity of the others that can be found used on Amazon or eBay). That said, there is at least one other card that is currently (as of Summer 2011) available that will work in an original Mac Pro.

Nov 29, 2014  Barefeats did some benchmarks on it a couple of years ago and realized that once you get to a card like the 680 the 3,1 mac pros are bottlenecked at the CPU. Click to expand. Not sure that they are bottlenecked at the CPU when the whole point of CUDA & OpenCL is that computation can be offloaded to the graphics card. AMD RADEON R9 280X 3GB for APPLE MAC PRO 2008 to 2012 3,1 4,1 5,1. COMeap Dual Mini 6 Pin to 8 Pin PCI Express Video Card Power Adapter Cable for Mac Pro Tower/Power Mac G5 15-inch(38cm) by COMeap. $12.99 $ 12 99 Prime. FREE Shipping on eligible orders. 4.5 out of 5 stars 27. Outlook keeps asking for password on mac.

Although it is not listed as being officially compatible (and therefore not officially supported), there are numerous accounts in the Apple online store from customers who have reported that the works just fine out-of-the-box in their original Mac Pros. I too purchased one from a local Apple Store and installed it in my original Mac Pro (running OS X 10.6.7), so I can state for a fact that this card does work just fine, and it doesn't require any hacking (no drivers to install, no firmware to be flashed) -- it just works right out of the box. It also performs quite a bit better than the older officially compatible cards. It also works just fine in Windows under Boot Camp (after downloading and installing the Boot Camp drivers from the ATI/AMD website). The only caveat (and it is a very minor one) is that the installation instructions that accompany the card deviate somewhat from what is actually required in the original Mac Pro, due to minor variations between the internals of the older Mac Pros and the newer ones.