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Latest Mac Pros supporting PC Graphic cards?
Posted February 1st, 2008 07:21:10 AM (GMT) by Alexandros Roussos
If a recent user report is to be believed, Apple could have made the latest Mac Pros compatible with graphic cards destined to PCs.
A member of the French tech-savy MacBidouille forum claims he has tried to install a Saphire ATI Radeon 2600 card inside his new Mac Pro as second video card. Surprisingly, it appears that the card is recognized by the system without any problem.
Though the card wasn't tested alone yet, if the user's claimings are true, there is strong possibility that Apple has made changes in its latest Macs so as to support any graphic card.
Recently, previous generation Mac Pro users complained regarding the fact the NVidia 8800GT graphic card destined to the latest Mac Pros can't work on previous generation ones and, by the way, giving very little choice for a GPU upgrade to these users. This incompatibility is maybe due to the fact that the recently released NVidia 8800GT is actually standard card which could also be used on a PC.
Currently, if you want to upgrade your Mac's GPU, you either need to buy a Mac compatible card which is rare and expensive or get a PC-compatible card and flash the firmware which may actually cause your card to never work again.
This would be very good news for Mac users if confirmed, as it would provide them more choice for GPU upgrades for less money.
Meanwhile, if any of you has a Mac Pro of the latest generation and can make some tests, your feedback is welcome here. Notice this could void your waranty.
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Just for fun I tried a PC
Just for fun I tried a PC version of the GeForce 8800 GTX OC (BFG) on our Mac Pro 3.2GHz. It was the only GPU installed and does NOT work. ATI/AMD cards may be different but the PC version the GeForce 8800 series will have to be flashed with the ROM code from an Apple OEM GeForce 8800 GT before they will work.
I wonder if the above
I wonder if the above mentioned HD2600 has an EFI firmware. perhaps ATI is shipping cards with EFI firmware alongside the old BIOS firmware to broaden their market to Mac users.
You'd expect them to be marked as Mac compatible if so, though.
Should be an interesting next few months.