Graphics Champ: NVIDIA's Quadra K5000 for Mac

Definition Magazine by Adam Garstone

While waiting to see what the new Mac Pro would offer the creative artist looking for a graphics speed bump, ADAM GARSTONE persuaded a new NVIDIA Quadro K5000 in to his old Mac Pro and sat back while applications that were only previously gliding began to pin back their ears and fly.

I’ve been a fan of NVIDIA’s Quadro 4000 for Mac since it was released – amongst other things we use a rack of them to accelerate DaVinci Resolve – so I was pretty excited at the release of the latest Kepler architecture card, the Quadro K5000 for Mac.

The headline benefits of the new Kepler based card are 1536 CUDA cores and 4GB of GDDR5 memory with a bandwidth of 173GB/s. If that means nothing to you (nope – me neither) then we can talk about the four monitor outputs – two dual link DVI and two DisplayPort 1.2 with the latter able to drive a 4096x2160 display at 50Hz, with 10 bit colour depth. There is also stereo 3D support, and all this at a reduced power consumption, which means quieter fans.

The Quadro 4000 manages to pack a lot of performance into a single width card. The K5000, however, is double width (not least for all those video output ports). This means, for instance, that it’s really only practical to fit a single card into your Mac Pro – so you’ll need an external PCIe expansion chassis if you want to add further cards for Resolve. Also, some PCIe broadcast I/O cards, like Blackmagic’s Decklinks, have a passive connector bracket to provide things like HDMI I/O. The Quadro 4000 left a convenient empty slot for this bracket, which is eaten up with the larger card. Small points, but worth considering before you upgrade an existing machine. read more...

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	NVIDIA Quadro K5000 for Mac $1,999.00			NVIDIA Quadro 4000 by PNY for Mac Professional Graphics Board $799.00