Video Card Upgrades for Mac Pro

From Mac Guides

1 VGA Solutions for Mac Pro
- 1.1 Upgrade Options
  - 1.1.1 Apple Upgrade Options
- 1.2 Upgrading the Graphics Card
2 See Also
3 Links

VGA Solutions for Mac Pro

The Mac Pro has four PCI-Express slots to install expansion cards into. The best option is to set the double wide slot to x16 lanes using the Expansion Slot Utility and use it for your primary video card.

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Upgrade Options

There are many options for upgrading the VGA in Mac Pros. Two VGA manufacturers currently offer VGA solutions for the Mac Pro. They are NVIDIA which offers its consumer GeForce series and the professional Quadro series of Graphics Cards and ATI which offers the Radeon series. The following VGA solutions are available as an upgrade option for Mac Pros running Mac OS X 10.4 and above.

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Apple Upgrade Options

ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 vRAM (two dual-link DVI ports)

Note: Apple does not officially support HD2600 XT with older Mac Pro (Mid 2006). To run the card on versions older than the Mid 2007 revision, the Mac Pro must be cloned or imaged from an Aluminum iMac (Mid 2007) to obtain the Radeon HD 2600 drivers for Tiger.

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of GDDR3 (two dual-link DVI ports)

Note: Only the "Graphics Upgrade Kit for 1st Generation Mac Pro" will work with the Mid 2006 Mac Pro.

Nvidia Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of 384-bit GDDDR3 (two stereo dual-link DVI)
AMD ATI Radeon HD3870 with 512MB of 256-bit GDDR4 (two dual-link DVI ports)

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Upgrading the Graphics Card

The following step-by-step method may be adopted to upgrade/install a new graphics card in all Mac Pros running Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Obtain the VGA card driver from the CD in the upgrade package, the manufacturer website or other sources.
Install the obtained driver.
Restart. Almost all problems while upgrading occur because users skip this step
Shut down the Mac Pro after the reboot.
Replace the graphics card.
Start Mac Pro.

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