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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Best graphics card for current 12 core mac tower?

the k5000 is gonna be great. has the staying power and stability of a quadro series card, but packs the punch of a true high end gpu. 3x the amount of cuda cores over a gtx 580. prelim specs say it may only need one power cord also, so you can pop two in a existing mac tower without overdrawing the system. meaning really good power efficiency. gonna be expensive, but i think totally worthwhile for all next gen tower computing.

the issue with using gaming cards is the fact that there's never any official support for these cards in pro software. you can use them, but if there is any issue, the support team from the software company can't diagnose the problem. plus gaming cards go off the shelf much faster, and don't stick around like quadro cards do. I'm using a hacked 470 myself for resolve, since the q4000 isn't really cutting it anymore, but I really can't wait to get a new workhorse gpu!
 
Only real down-side to the K5000 in the current towers is that you're cutting its potential bandwidth in half right from the start since we don't have PCIe v3 slots in the current towers to make use of it. Still not sure just when nVidia/PNY is going to unleash it anyway and if it will coincide with a new Mac Pro or not.

As for performance, you can't really go off the number of CUDA cores. The Kepler architecture is a major shift from Fermi and as we see with the GTX6xx vs GTX5xx cards, the performance gains don't really relate to the scaled core quantities. GTX680 is similar in performance to the GTX580 in most respects. Faster for some operations, but overall very similar. Actually slower for double-precision CUDA and OpenGL/CL computations.

All things considered, even with the lack of PCIe v3 in the current towers, the K5000 will probably be the ideal card once it's released. I'm not so sure I'm going to run out and buy one. As I sit here looking at my approximately 2.5 year old 2010 Mac Pro, currently with an EVGA GTX570 2.5GB installed, it runs just fine. I doubt I'd splurge on the K5000 at this point... This system has probably reached the end of the road as far as upgrades I'm willing to pay for...
 
Tom.Wong said:
the k5000 is gonna be great. has the staying power and stability of a quadro series card, but packs the punch of a true high end gpu. 3x the amount of cuda cores over a gtx 580. prelim specs say it may only need one power cord also, so you can pop two in a existing mac tower without overdrawing the system. meaning really good power efficiency. gonna be expensive, but i think totally worthwhile for all next gen tower computing.
Click to expand...

Sounds awesome. The K5000 is a Nvidia card? Is there a release date yet?
 
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