ATI Radeon 4850 graphics card on Mac Pro

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Hi,

I just bought an ATI Radeon 4850 HD Graphics card for my Mac Pro 1,1 running OS X Lion 10.7.5. I did so much research before and got very lost trying to find out which graphics cards were both compatible with my Mac and would also work for Final Cut Pro X. I thought this one ticked both boxes.

Now I'm about to try and install it - and everything I've found online seem very complicated.

Have I bought a card that is incompatible?! If so, any suggestions on another to buy instead would be really appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

Dominic
 
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mid '09 13" MBP 2.53 C2D, 8Gb RAM, 250 Gb HD, SL and Win7
I'm very interested to see how this turns out. One of the things I love about OSX is it's simplicity but I would absolutely hate having to replace any Mac hardware myself (and I built my own gaming rig). I've installed new RAM in my iMac and MBP but that is the extent of my Apple hardware experience. I will say this, the actual physical install should be a piece of cake, it's finding, downloading and installing drivers for OSX that would give me fits. Good luck and keep us updated!
 
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Thanks - I have to say, this Mac is killing me! I got it because i wanted to be able to edit films with FCP, but it's been a real pain so far. Of course, being completely technically ignorant doesn't help...
 
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Well first up any gfx card needs to be either a Mac Pro version, or a commercially flashed Windows card. Windows card will not work without flashing on early model Mac Pros. Personally found the ATI Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB of memory the best when had a Mac Pro 2.1. If you do a search on eBay you will find sellers of these flashed cards.
 
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Well first up any gfx card needs to be either a Mac Pro version, or a commercially flashed Windows card. Windows card will not work without flashing on early model Mac Pros. Personally found the ATI Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB of memory the best when had a Mac Pro 2.1. If you do a search on eBay you will find sellers of these flashed cards.

Yes they will all the way through 5 series nvidia and 6 series ATI no flash is no problem, it comes at the price of no boot screen.
 
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Thanks for the replies, especially for those links Germany_Chris, it's exactly what I needed. I'll look through and find one that the Final Cut Pro website tells me will work with FCP X. I'll also shove this card in to see what happens I guess, although it looks like no good with come of that, and post what happens.

Ok, time for a very stupid question... you have a PC GT430 as well as the 4870 in yours, Germany_Chris - so, should I keep the nVidia GeForce 7300 GT 256 MB in mine and add an extra card (this one isn't good enough for FCP X)? I was going to take it out and replace it... somehow thinking I could only have one.
 
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Thanks for the replies, especially for those links Germany_Chris, it's exactly what I needed. I'll look through and find one that the Final Cut Pro website tells me will work with FCP X. I'll also shove this card in to see what happens I guess, although it looks like no good with come of that, and post what happens.

Ok, time for a very stupid question... you have a PC GT430 as well as the 4870 in yours, Germany_Chris - so, should I keep the nVidia GeForce 7300 GT 256 MB in mine and add an extra card (this one isn't good enough for FCP X)? I was going to take it out and replace it... somehow thinking I could only have one.

You should keep it for diagnostics..

You can have two they both just run at 8x instead of 16x...

I upgraded today.

Graphics card.png
 
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Ah, that looks really good but is totally out of my price range! Which is a shame because I thought I could just copy you and then I'd know what I bought would work.

So, if I were to search for yours for example, and searched Nvidia Geforce Gtx 560 Ti - would I find cards that are compatible and others that aren't? Do I always need to specify that it's for a mac?
 
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Just look for 560ti this one is an MSI..

If you looking in the 100ish range there is the 550ti 2GB which beats the 4870 by a bit and only uses one power lead.

The GT430 is bus powered so it doesn't need any lead but isn't particularly powerful…

pick your poison and your price range just make sure you have 10.7.5 installed.
 
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Oh by the way, just in case anyone wanted to know the outcome - trying to put the 4850 in had very boring results. My monitor simply didn't want to show me anything. To be honest, and I don't know if this is down to my complete ineptness with computers, but the card didn't seem to fit very well. It looked sort of wonky. I was pretty relieved when I got my old card back in and my computer actually started up ok again.
 

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