Tej Babra: Updating My MacPro to a Nvidia GTX570

Art of the Guillotine by Tej Babra

Recently Apple announced the new Macbook Pro Retina touting several new features. However what they failed to release was a long over due update to the MacPro line. Many professional editors were sadly disappointed by the “refresh” of the MacPros. This left many of our edit suites aging and unable to keep up with software demands such as the recent Adobe CS6. To make matter worse , I had my old Nividia Quadro 4000 recently fail, which left me with out a Cuda for CS6. Enter the EVGA GTX570 Nivida GeForce card.

Yes this card is a PC not designed or officially supported by Apple. (Warning I am not responsible for any damages caused if you attempt this on your on MacPro towers. ) However thanks to a great colleague form twitter Juan Salvo I did not have to spend a huge chunk of cash on another Quadro 4000. I could spend less than half that price on a PC graphics card known as the Nividia GTX570, and to my amazement, installing it is a simple plug and play. Now, will this work for your MacPro tower really depends on which verion you have. From what I understand this card will only work on MacPro 3.1 and above.

The GTX570 snaps in like it was meant to be there. All that is required is the right cable to power the graphics card. A 6pin to mini 6pin cable is needed. You will need 2 of these cables, although they can be easily found on Amazon or Ebay for cheap.

Now in terms of software you must be running OSX 10.7.4, the latest Nividia graphic drivers (the one I used was 270.00.00f06) and the latest Nividia Cuda Drivers (4.2.10). The combination of the 2 provide support with OSX. the interesting part is that both OSX and Nivida are supporting this card “ unofficially” , this may hint to a refreshed MacPro in the future, or Nividia is moving to one driver to rule them all scenario. read more...