Graphics cards

My ageing (2006) home Mac Pro 2,1 2 x 3Ghz Quad has started restarting itself for no apparent reason. Nothing in the crash logs that I can see. It seems to be when the graphics card is stressed, or the room is hot, so I'm thinking of replacing the card. What would be a good choice to suit both Premiere Pro and FCP7?

I've done a bunch of looking on the web, and have seen a couple that look like they might work well, but when I rang Apple sales they told me my computer was too old for any new cards and I had to go to the service department. I think this is bollocks. Anyone here good at this stuff?

This computer only has to handle DV, HDV, ProRes, P2, DSLR stuff and very occasional XDCam. It's also running a couple of old sony screens, but these could stand upgrading too if this was an issue.

I'm thinking of putting in a ATI Radeon HD 5770. Any caveats?

One thing for sure, since you mention the room gets hot, get a small fan and put it directly in front of the Mac to move more air through the machine. Might put a second fan behind the machine pointed across the back to help dissapate the heat.

Sounds like when the graphics card is cranking, it overheats the machine causing the restart.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

With an ATI card you won't get the benefits of CUDA processing in Premiere Pro. This can speed up decoding, encoding and compositing operations.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Jude,

I just went through this process. I have a Mac Pro 1,1 so my choices are even more limited. There is a solution, actually solutions out there.

You want to get yourself a used NVIDIA card that not only has the CUDA processing power but one that will speak to Premiere Pro. There are only a few officially supported cards but someone has come up with a solution that allows you to "add" cards to a text file buried in the Premiere Pro app that will allow you to use a few other NVIDIA cards.

For your specific machine you will have to do some spadework. I settled for a Quadro GeForce 4800 GT. There are a couple of other solutions out there but this had the best cost/benefit ratio for my machine.

The best place to look, according to my research, is on eBay. The seller that has the most information on the matter and the best selection is "macvidcards".

Here are a few helpful resources:

[netkas.org]

[myworld.ebay.com]

There is this solution but it takes up 2 PCI slots...

[www.ebay.com]

[www.nvidia.com]

It appears that all the elegant NVIDIA video card solutions for your machine have been sold off recently, however, this seller does get new inventory up frequently.

EDIT: Just found a very important forum thread on hacking CUDA based cards to work with Premiere Pro. I would suggest downloading the thread and making a PDF out of it. Essential information contained within...

[www.insanelymac.com]

BTW I have been using a 5770 in my Mac for the past while and am now moving to the Geforce 8800 GT for Premiere compatibility. One big downside for me is going from 3 screen down to 2 moving from the ATI 5770 to the 8000 GT

-Andrew

Oh excellent help guys, thanks. I'll look into the NVIDIAs.

Andrew - are you happy with the performance of the 4800? I'm fine to run two screens.

How is the performance on the current MacBook Pros? I'm thinking if getting it, but also may wait for CS6.



www.strypesinpost.com

Oh actually, the 8800 looks like the go. And so cheap! I'll pdf that guide and see how I go.

Of course, living in the second most isolated city in the world, it'll be six weeks before I get the card, but still. A solution on the way is excellent.

I can edit 1080p H.264 natively on my 2011 MacBook Pro 15" and I don't even have a RAID connected up. Performance is great but I'm losing out on the extra power of CUDA because the new MBPs only have ATI cards.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

The 8800GT card is pretty old. Surely there's a newer card. Why not the GTXs?



www.strypesinpost.com

Jon, does playback of H.264 fire up multiple processors? Is it playing back full resolution?

Also, has anyone gotten multiple streams (3 streams or more) of DSLR H.264 at full resolution? What kind of hardware are you guys using?



www.strypesinpost.com

I'm on a 2006 machine - I think the GT is the best I can get to that works reliably. And by that I mean 'using a hack in the terminal'.

Hi Jude my mention of the 4400 was a typo. I got a 4800 which was a no-go. Ordered the 8800 GT which I have now put through it's paces and it does work as advertised using the CUDA engine with the terminal/text file hack. I have done some torture tests stacking up layers of video using opacity, fades and colour correction in Premiere Pro and it is impressive the way it handles much of what you would throw at it in the real world. Once I was confident I had Premiere sorted with this card, I launched Resolve. Unfortunately, the card on it's own won't work. You have to divide the processing and the GUI drawing on separate cards. There is a report in a thread on another forum of someone a year or so back who got an 8800 and I think 4000 to work in concert in a Mac Pro. Not sure which model though.

It seems the GT120 and the GTX 285 are considered the optimal pairing in a Mac Pro for Resolve and it should work in Premiere Pro but NOT in our machines. They are too old. There is a pairing of the GT120 and the GTX 260 that will masquerade as a GTX285 but I don't know if it will work in the Mac Pro we have. You may wish to inquire with the macvidcards vendor to see if he has or will test this pairing in a Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 machines. It is inexpensive and may be worth a chance.

I'm going to hang onto my ATI 5770 as it works with Resolve and I am going to inquire with a couple of the Adobe employees that have been jonesin editing forums of late to see if there is a plan to get ATI cards to interact with their Mercury Engine.

-Andrew

Thanks Andrew. I ordered an 8800 GT, although it will be weeks before I get it, so it's good to know it runs PP. I'm not so bothered about Resolve because we have a 2011 machine to run that on. I did only get the 512 though, and someone mentioned afterwards I should have got the 1GB model, so I'm a bit nervous if it will work as advertised. Or, not advertised, I suppose.

ANYway. I got the original problem sorted. It was the hard drive. Put in a new one, fresh install of everything, 18 hours later, all better.

Jude, did you finally get your 8800? I pulled one out of my MacPro 3,1 back when I was getting ready to move to FCPX but I decided to stay with FCP7 for a while longer. I was about to jump to PP but chickened out and decided to wait for PP 6 to see what that would bring. One thing that kept me from jumping ship to PP was not knowing if my old 8800 would work well or not.

FCP 7.0.3, PPro CS5.5, MPro Octo 2.8, 16 gigs RAM, Matrox MXO2, Sony EX1

Yep - I put in an 8800GT with 512MB of VRAM. Someone told me I should have gone for 1GB of VRAM but I had already ordered. It works fine with PP 5.5 so far.