New Computer. How much RAM is enough? Video card options?

[mrguitarguy]

So the company I purchase the Mac Pro from is giving me a “free upgrade” from my standard 5870 graphics card to an Nvidia Quadro 4000. I suspect this s a flashed card.

Does anyone have any experience with this card? The benchmarks I could find online look slower than the 5870, but they are pretty old and I don’t know if changes in drivers and operating systems could have changed that over time. I’m not knowledgeable about graphics cards in the slightest and I want to make sure that having a non original Apple graphics card won’t result in kernel panics or Pro Tools compatibility issues.

I’d greatly appreciate any information that you could share. Many thanks to everyone for for all the help on this thread!

[martthie_08]

So the company I purchase the Mac Pro from is giving me a “free upgrade” from my standard 5870 graphics card to an Nvidia Quadro 4000. I suspect this s a flashed card.

I wouldn't assume the Quadro 4000 is flashed. As far as I am concerned the PC version has less ROM than the Mac edition. This means that in order to flash the Quadro for a Mac ROM, there would have been more memory physically soldered onto the card.

It seems that the (PC version) 4000 will work with the current NVidia drivers in MacOS, but you will probably not get a boot screen?! Anyways, would you let us know how ProTools runs with the 4000?

[mrguitarguy]

Well the card is actually failing. I'm getting all kinds of screen artifacts. Now they are sending me a 5870 as a replacement.

[martthie_08]

thanks for the info!
I've got a Quadro 4000 somewhere that I haven't got around to testing yet. They can be found dirt cheap used..