As with all reviews on this site, I have no relationship whatsoever with the following vendor, except that I found their service to be valuable to me as a filmmaker and thought I’d share this with you.

I recently upgraded my mac pro, and being an Adobe junkie, my goal was to take advantage of CUDA & GPU acceleration on my Mac. As a business owner and freelancer, I am always looking for smart ways to spend my money. It is easy to get caught up in the technology craze, trying to keep up with the Jones’. So I am careful to not just invest in the latest buzz worthy product. However, that does not mean there are not any purchases out there that offer a great ROI (return on investment).

By ROI, I mean:

• Will it help my business make more money?
• Or save it time?
• Or help it gain exposure?
• Or open new doors?

These are the questions I ask before making a purchase. If none of them are a yes, I will pass. Otherwise, I would rationalize a reason to buy everything under the sun.

EVGA GeForce FTX 680 Mac Edition

This product was well worth my investment. A bit pricey at first glance, the EVGA GeForce GTX 680 MAC is a new video card with 2GB of 256-bit GDDR5 SDRAM. I replaced my ATI Radeon HD 5770 Graphics card with 1 GB of GDDR5 SDRAM by simply swapping them out using the PCI Express slot. A basic installation that anyone can do (especially if I did).

The results were incredible. Render times were faster, but the big difference to me was the playback. I am able to playback Premiere Pro and AE CS6 files real time with multiple layers, including with heavy plugins on such as Magic Bullet’s Looks and Neat Video, and blend modes.

My Mac Pro version is a mid 2010 2 x 2.4 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 24 Gb 1066 MHz DDR3 RAM. I have also upgraded the disk drives to SSDs. This has made my workflow 10x faster. I can now see most stuff in realtime, or close to it. That gives me the ability to work faster, and make better decisions.

Fom EVGA’s website:

This card delivers truly game-changing performance that taps into the powerful new GeForce architecture to redefine smooth, seamless, lifelike gaming. It offers brand new, never before seen features that will redefine the way you think about performance graphics cards.

If you are thinking of upgrading your video card on the Mac Pro, I certainly recommend this one. I do not know enough about measuring clock speed to offer the exact effect this upgrade has had, but I can certainly attest it was obviously significant to me when using Adobe CS6.

KEY FEATURES

• NVIDIA GPU Boost
• Support for four concurrent displays; two dual-link DVI connectors, HDMI and Displayport 1.1**
• NVIDIA® CUDA® Technology
• PCI Express® 2.0 Support
• OpenGL 3.2 Support
• OpenGLTM Support

REQUIREMENTS

• Mac Pro (Early 2008) or later.
• [Models: MacPro 3, 1 or later] with PCI Express® 2.0 slot.
• Mac OS X v10.8.3 or later.
• Microsoft® Windows 8 / 7 / Vista / XP (Apple Boot Camp)

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