EVGA's GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition: The Best for OS X?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 17, 2009 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Gaming Under Windows
To Apple’s credit, the Radeon HD 4870 is a respectable GPU option on the Mac Pro. My only complaints there are with regards to price and memory size. Apple charges $200 for the upgrade as a BTO option while configuring your Mac Pro, but $349 if you want to buy it later. To make matters worse, the card only has 512MB of memory which is better than the 128MB cards that Apple used to ship but still too small for an OS that makes good use of video memory.
While there are a few respectable gaming titles on the Mac, most gamers will want to boot into Windows for all gaming. You could keep a second (PC) video card in your Mac Pro and just swap monitor outputs when you want to game or snag one of these EVGA GTX 285s. As a gaming card under Windows, it’ll be the fastest you can get through official channels.
I ran our standard Crysis Warhead tests on the Mac Pro to show how the GTX 285 and Radeon HD 4870 stack up:
The performance advantage ranges from 17% at 1680 x 1050 to 35% at 2560 x 1600.
I was curious to see how my 2.93GHz Mac Pro stacked up to our 3.2GHz Core i7 GPU testbed so I compared the results:
| Crysis Warhead | 1680 x 1050 | 1900 x 1200 | 2560 x 1600 |
| Apple Mac Pro 2009 - 2 x 2.93GHz Xeon X5570 | 37.8 fps | 32.9 fps | 22.2 fps |
| AnandTech GPU Testbed - 1 x Core i7 965 (3.20GHz) | 38.5 fps | 32.8 fps | 22.4 fps |
It looks like the numbers are pretty comparable, so if you’d like to see a more detailed performance comparison between the Radeon HD 4870 and the GTX 285 feel free to read through any of our recent GPU articles. The numbers should apply to the Mac Pro just fine.
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bohhad - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
Will installation instructions be standard on all hardware reviews? Being Anandtech readers, I'm sure most all of us have no clue how to even take the sides of our cases off. Or was this a 'special' feature for our equally 'special' Mac-using members?utdman53 - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
Cost of a Mac pro configured with the two Xeon @ 2.93 is $6000.00 or more. What an absolute waste of money to match a core i7. If you want a computer that bad I'll build you one and myself one with that money.In life there are but kings and pawns, Apple clearly lives off the pawns.
archer75 - Wednesday, August 19, 2009 - link
I was looking at the price of the processors and ram and newegg and believe it or not it's cheaper from apple. We are talking about workstations here and as they go the mac pro is indeed priced well.ViRGE - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
Bear in mind that you're looking at a workstation system. The price on any of those is astronomical, it's not just an Apple thing. The chipset costs a small fortune, the Xeon processors cost a small fortune, etc.Apple's is still more expensive yet, but not by whole orders of magnitude like it is when comparing it to a desktop system.
ipay - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
I'd say there are clever people and stupid people, and that Apple makes its money from the latter.thurston - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
Why is the $100 price premium ridiculous? It seems to be in line with Mac pricing in general.JimmiG - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
"The first step to install the card is actually to install the drivers. If you fail to do so, you’ll be greeted with a kernel panic once you get the card installed and fire up the machine."That made me LOL after seeing those ads about how Macs don't need drivers and how they're so easy to use. At least a PC will load up Windows even without drivers. In fact, since Vista, it will even work at fairly high resolutions and in full 32-bit color. Just another example of how Apple's advertising is based on lies, exaggerations and misconceptions.
sprockkets - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 - link
But, but, I thought Macs just work and used "The World's Most Advanced operating system"!529th - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
The 4870 is also a working GPU for a Hackintosh. Also sold in the new Mac Pros. Apparently it is supported in Leopard 10.5.7 OS Xpsonice - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
Any chance of some core image tests of some kind? CI has traditionally been nvidia's very weak spot (ATI 2600 outperforming nvidia 8800 anyone?) and it's important for some apps.