Forums | MacLife

NightCougar_37 wrote:

Well good news today. Mac Pros got updated. Looking much better now.

Instead of a low end basic board we got a very nice midrange board in the 2600XT. Then they finally upgraded the X1900XT to a 8800GT. Price went up tho. I'm not surprised. Ever since the Intel switch the Mac prices have gone up. I remember ppl back then saying that "Intel would make Macs cheaper to afford." Yeah right! This is one reason I wanted Apple to go with AMD at least in lower end Macs. They always undercut Intel and give plenty of performance for most users. Shame AMD has had such problems tho.

As for the flashing community, i'd expect to see flashed 2600s and 8800s within a month or 2 of this new release.

I am wondering if the new MacPros since they have 2 PCIe 2.0 slots would support SLI; but I suppose the motherboard needs to support it.

-mark

Yeah sadly SLI needs board support. Altho, I remember seeing something where certain Crossfire boards could work without board support on any board but they needed a special onboard chip. Bat will probably know more on that. Think it was a feature in CrossfireX and the 38x0 series could do it. Think it was Diamond who released some boards like this.

I wonder if you could simply make another PCIe card that acted as a brain for SLI, then Apple would be in business, although they would probably need a beefier power supply.

-mark

Well I try and keep up with the technology as it effects me when running Lightwave 3D.  The AFR and SFR is really a good idea actually.

-mark

JIT for this, the R680/HD3870 X2 has been spotted in the wild (CES, really). From the show floor, and test bench.

The '9800 GX2' (really two 8800s on one board) was also recently sighted.


ed sp

Last edited by Bat (2008-01-10 3:22 am)

NightCougar_37 wrote:

...Price is insane tho. $350. You can get 8800GTs for half that.

Flashing community is gonna eat this up.

Maybe you're thinking of the wrong card. AT's realtime deals still shows it hovering a bit below $300.

AnandTech Deals
PNY XLR8 GeForce 8800GT 512MB (512

Prices
- TigerDirect.com $279.99
- Amazon $249.99
- Amazon Marketplace $299.99
- TigerDirect.com $279.99
- Amazon $269.99
- Amazon Marketplace $279.99

...and that's a drop over the last few days. So, more like typical Apple pricing.

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT: The Only Card That Matters

NightCougar_37 wrote:

Could be Apple has waited on SLI/Crossfire because of there being 2 different boards needed. Apple isn't playing favorites right now as they are supporting both makers.

They tend to alternate suppliers. ATi's gotten most OEM notebook design wins for some time, and their integrated video/core logic keeps improving. Won't see it while Intel has all Apple's CPU biz, tho.

If a Hybrid board came out which would allow both SLI/Crossfire natively on a board then I wonder if Apple would embrace it finally.

As I think we covered in Gaming but not here, the HD 3870's central chip makes it indifferent to the core logic, thus works with ATi, Intel, even NV. Proper drivers still needed, and ATi won't have Quad CrossFire (two of these boards in CrossFire, or four boards) enabled in Win release drivers for another month or two.

Whether it's the future of graphics or not... that means on the consumer level, anyway. It's already part of the past on the professional side.

You collect these things, Joost. How 'bout it? You have one of these in the closet?

To outgrow this limit, the founding fathers of 3D introduced the idea of multiplying chips. Once again, this approach is largely beneficial in the GPU world, as tasks can be easily parallelized and assigned to a specific chip while still limiting the number of exchanges between the different GPUs, unlike what you might have seen with multi-CPU solutions. Thus the Infinite Reality from Silicon Graphics was conceived and meant to be largely configurable, the different parts of the graphical pipeline being implemented on independent cards: Geometry Engine, Raster Manager, Display Generator.

With pics.