Apple ATI Radeon 5770 1 GB ZML MC742ZM/A

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Jericho Hasselbush (Pacific Northwest) –

  

I finally bought this to replace a failing X1900XT that was having issues day in and day out. At first I had considered flashing a PC card just to save $80, but with dropping this card into a 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 I am glad I didn’t.

The two mini-dvi ports are fantastic, and help it connect wonderfully and painlessly to a 24″ Apple LED Show. My apparatus now runs cooler, quieter and quicker with this simple upgrade.

The only issue you may have if putting this into an older Mac Pro, is that you have to place it into the first PCI slot, if not it will run at a sub-optimal alacrity.

If you are going to get this card, you might as well get it on Amazon, and save a small, compared with getting it from Apple directly.

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I too own a 2008 Mac Pro and replaced my aging Radeon 2600 with this puppy. First thing I noticed out of the box: it is HUGE compared to ATI and NVidia’s older GPUs from a link years ago. To the tune of 2x as wide and 2.5x as long. It also requires that you plug it into one of the 6 pin power adapters on your motherboard, which isn’t hard but if you’re not used to doing stuff like that it might be a small scary at first. Because of both of these factors I was worried it was going to be much noisier than my 2600 (drawing more power, better fan) but ironically the contrary is right. This card is much quieter when booting up and makes no “extra” noise that I’ve heard (yet) during regular operations. I will be using this with the Adobe suite and some other GPU-intensive apps, will report back if I start to hear any real noise issues.

The best part about the card is its dual Mini DisplayPorts, but sorry to say because Apple doesn’t make a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable, you have to use 3rd party solutions to connect with a more expensive LCD for affect accurate work, and it seems some of those monitors (NEC and Eizo) are not compatible with some of those cables (StarTech, maybe others). A lot of folks have been experiencing problems with this, so just guess that if you have one of those monitors, you may be relegated to using your DVI connection until the watch manufacturers and/or cable companies can learn the cause of the problem and solve it.

Haven’t tested with any hard-core games but benchmarks I’ve seen indicate it’s a nice boost over the Radeon 4870, the best upgrade kit available before this one.

Update: For gamer types, I’ve been playing COD 4 regularly on high res/settings for a while now, and the card handles it easily and does not heat up / make any racket during play. This is probably the best GPU I’ve ever owned on Mac. Very pleased with buy.

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NOTE: The name / description for this item is incorrect. It is NOT a “Hard Drive”, but is in fact the “Apple ATI Radeon 5770″ graphics card upgrade for Mac Pro.

I’m currently running Windows 7 Ultimate on my Mac Pro, and this card is fully compatible. Installing this in my 2008 Mac Pro was a cinch! With this card and the existing video card in my system, I’m now able to simultaneously run two 30″ and two 24″ displays without breaking a sweat.

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