GF8800 replacement, nvidia & ati coexistence?
Hey guys,
I had 2 Geforce 8800s in my 2008 MP, one of them just let out the magic smoke (other one, and the rest of my hardware, still work fine, just ran everything through a series of benchmarks to stress it and make sure). I have 3 monitors normally driven by this machine, so I'm going to need a new card, and the 8800s are getting a bit long in the tooth anyway.
I'm thinking about dropping a radeon 5770 in the box (yes, I realize it's officially unsupported in an '08, but there's no firmware reason why it won't work, so I'm not particularly worried) and keeping the working 8800 for CUDA work. Has anyone around here recently dropped an ati and nvidia card in the same MP? Last I checked apple's drivers made such a config take a major performance hit, but last I checked was 10.4, and L and SL have made some major changes.... Graphics driver architecture isn't my forte, and my googling shows me data's pretty scarce right now, anyone tried it recently?
I had 2 Geforce 8800s in my 2008 MP, one of them just let out the magic smoke (other one, and the rest of my hardware, still work fine, just ran everything through a series of benchmarks to stress it and make sure). I have 3 monitors normally driven by this machine, so I'm going to need a new card, and the 8800s are getting a bit long in the tooth anyway.
I'm thinking about dropping a radeon 5770 in the box (yes, I realize it's officially unsupported in an '08, but there's no firmware reason why it won't work, so I'm not particularly worried) and keeping the working 8800 for CUDA work. Has anyone around here recently dropped an ati and nvidia card in the same MP? Last I checked apple's drivers made such a config take a major performance hit, but last I checked was 10.4, and L and SL have made some major changes.... Graphics driver architecture isn't my forte, and my googling shows me data's pretty scarce right now, anyone tried it recently?
Comments
I'm inclined to believe such a thing won't work. Best case I can envision is that the computer will address whichever card is in the first PCIe slot. It might be a bit more expensive, but I'd recommend getting a pair of 5770s.
Well, I know it will *operate*, there's enough posts on the web of "I tossed one in for 5 seconds and stuff displayed", I'm more more concerned with performance. Win7, for example, will allow both drivers to load and provides a framework for that to operate fine. I know OSX didn't do that in 10.4 (though both drivers would *load*, it would just cause lots of conflicts and thus performance issues), but I haven't looked into it much since and I can't find much data on any changes in the graphics driver model in 5 or 6 (which is not encouraging for me). The most I seem to be able to find is "it's not a supported configuration" :-/ .
I may end up replacing the 2 cards with a 5870 (which would be cheaper than 2x5770, will work better for GPGPU work, and still drive 3 displays) - don't really want to spend that much right now though.