The G5 and Pro Video Cards!?!?

pwharff

pwharff

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Stevie mentioned that the G5's come with nVidia and ATI cards, but I'm not sure if many of you caught this, he also mentioned:

"or you can install any of ATI or nVidia's Pro cards".

Does this now mean that we can purchase 3rd party vendor nVidia cards or any of ATI's?

Also, a little bit off the subject, WHERE'S my second frickin optical drive bay? We just got them in the new PowerMac G4's and now their gone in the G5! They could have made it a little taller!

Your comments on the 2 topics is appreciated and what the future holds.
 
While it's nice to have options, what do you need a 2nd drive bay for when every g5 has a superdrive??
 
It's obviously not all that common, but some people certainly have a need:

Copying disk-to-disk is obviously faster if you don't have to rip one pass, then burn the next (instead, rip and burn at the same time)

Avoid excessive disk swapping - some people have need for data on multiple disks, or need to be able to read from a data disk to run an app (perhaps because of copy protection) while also need to burn CDs.

There's plenty of other reasons...

Mostly, I'd say that it's the serious power users that have a need for multiple optical drives, but aren't they the ones that will be buying a G5?

Rip
 
I wondered the same thing, thought I bought an external 16x CDR drive [which is still faster at burning CDRs than the super drive, right?] which also reads CDs at 42x.

It only cost 150 bucks... but here is the kicker: I can rip a cd to a disk image on the 42x drive and then burn that image at 16x using the same drive, faster than I can copy directly from the G4's internal disk drive. This is mostly because the internal drive is pretty slow...but still, its a decent thing to point out.
 
I would bet they did quite a bit of market research on this and found that few people were using that extra optical drive bay. With Firewire 400 and 800 as well as USB 2.0 built in they give you plenty of options for an external drive. I think more people wish there was more internal drive space but I bet the third party external drive suppliers love it.
I've seen some threads from video producers that are not happy about the 2 internal hard drive limit but I would bet that the built in Firewire will be fast enough for their needs.
 
I'm pretty sure that you can rip a CD to a disk image on the hard drive, then burn the new CD from that. And if you have mucho $$$$, the ripped image will reside somewhere in 8GB of RAM where you can then burn to CD in a few minutes.

I haven't personally tried this yet, but I've been told that Mac OS X and Disk Utility can copy audio CDs this way. Great for making a copy to leave in the car; if it melts from the summer heat, just burn another.
 
If you mean, install PC versions of ATI & nVidia cards, then that would be cool, but unlikely unless Apple wrote drivers for them.
 
Originally posted by Captain Code
If you mean, install PC versions of ATI & nVidia cards, then that would be cool, but unlikely unless Apple wrote drivers for them.
Click to expand...
It's a little more complicated than that. Drivers are not the issue, rather it's the video BIOS. There's a reason for having a "Mac edition" of nvidia or ati video cards because they have to solder a different BIOS chip onto the card in order for it to boot on Mac hardware. ATI manufactures most of their products themselves with some third parties making them as well, nVidia does not however, they just sell chips to third parties to make final products sold on the market.

But it's always been this way, if you have a powermac with an AGP slot, you can buy retail video cards with the Mac compatible video BIOS and install it.
 
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