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8800GT now avail for 2006-2007 MacPro's


OSXtasy
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Woo! Now to rip the BIOS off it and give Mac Pro owners the opportunity to have an industry standard graphics card without paying rip-off Apple prices :huh:

It's really not that much more than some standard 8800GTs. Yes, you can get one cheaper at NewEgg (whose prices ranged from $179 to $259 when I checked), but that's almost always the case no matter who you're comparing to. I just did a search on Best Buy's site, and they charge the same price that Apple does for a 512MB 8800 GT - http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?sk...d=1197679249442

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I have to admit, I was about to pull the trigger on a standard 8600GTS, and just deal wiith being able to use it while booted into windows, but at the price this 8800GT is at, it really makes no sense to go hacking a bios or only being able to use the 8600GTS in windows. As far as I'm concerned, the problem is solved, and quite nicely at that.

 

FINALLY my MacPro is Complete......FOR NOW.... :)

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Right you are. Apple's price is exactly in line with what other retailers are charging B)

 

http://www.directron.com/pvt88pydf4.html

 

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=GA-88T51V1&c=fr

There was no need to link those, as I already said in my earlier post that NewEgg had them for as low as $179, but different brands are different prices, even at these online-only stores, which almost always sell things for less than you can find in a brick and mortar store. Not to mention the stores you linked to also have $279 8800GTs from other brands...or $283.25 or $280.16. Just because one brand isn't the absolute cheapest you can get, it doesn't mean it's overpriced.

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What the hell are you talking about? All 8800GTs, along with all high-end ATI graphics cards are made in a single factory, by a single manufacturer and then shipped to OEMs to put their stickers on them. It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference who's badge is on them unless you care about the software bundle. Anybody who buys anything but the cheapest one believing it makes a difference (I've not even seen different coolers on 8800GTs yet!) is a fool and perhaps they'd like to buy a plot of land on the moon right now.

 

Apple's price is a rip off. That's a $100 difference, and will doubtless be an even greater price differential in the UK, where Apple likes to overcharge us to death. I'd much rather buy and flash a normal one any day.

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The GPU itself is made by NVIDIA, but the whole card is not. That's like saying all P35 motherboards are made at the same factory. NVIDIA has a chipset specification that the other companies must adhere to, but the cards themselves are build by the third party companies, using different components and RAM, except for the actual GPU. It's no different than Intel and motherboard manufacturers. You can put the same Intel CPU in a $49 motherboard, or a $200 one.

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You've never looked at two 8800GTs next to each-other, have you?

 

They're made by a single OEM for NVidia to be sticker-branded by the 'manufacturers' - this isn't the case with all graphics cards, and may not even be the case with all 8800GTs, but it certainly is of all those I've seen. There have been other specific models of cards where this has been the case, like the 2900 XTs... This is not speculation, it's fact. I know in the past many cars have been built on a reference PCB, with a reference cooler, but by different manufacturers (although even these must have been contract manufactured for most companies who don't have production facilities), but it appears they now don't even bother with this practice. The cards are the same, PCB material and colour dies, identical silkscreening, memory and auxillary chips like the power regs change bath-by-batch, depending on what's available/cheap on for a given batch and tell us nothing about who manufactured the card.

 

Most cards like this will have two stickers on with different serial numbers. My Zotac 8800GTS 512 does, and the number on the 'generic white sticker' was in the same format and had the same part number and first several digits of the SN the same as an XFX I was reviewing around the time of launch. Another sticker has been added to the card with a Zotac logo and their serial number in a different format. I've seen some 'generic' cards which didn't have any manufacturer branding applied at all and even came with generic NVidia decals applied to the cooler.

 

Anyway, this is all a moot point. The fact remains that it makes precious little what brand of card you buy. Even the 'factory overclocked' cards are just cherry picked and flashed with a BIOS with faster clocks where they don't have a different cooler. Apple's price is a rip off compared to many other internet retailers and I don't see why people should have to pay the 'Apple tax' just to get another graphics card which is already outdated to stick in their £1500 workstations.

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Anyway if you look at the 8800GT from Apple, it's clearly the same old standard 8800GT we can buy in the shop. They are all the same, ASUS, Leadtek, etc, if you put the cards next to each other you'll see they are the same exactly.

 

So, +1 Azurael !

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Anyway if you look at the 8800GT from Apple, it's clearly the same old standard 8800GT we can buy in the shop. They are all the same, ASUS, Leadtek, etc, if you put the cards next to each other you'll see they are the same exactly.

 

So, +1 Azurael !

Probably the only real difference is the Apple card is 100% EFI, hence the remarks about getting the firmware off it, and flashing a normal 8800GT with Apple-compatible firmware.

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Just a quick question guys. I'm more of an audio guy than a video/3d person. The card everybody has linked to has been $179+. I was looking to get an 8800GT but the one I'm looking at is on sale at newegg for $89. I've tried to compare what some people have linked to and from what I can tell the only difference is in the connectivity. Is this correct? Or is the card I'm looking at crippled in some way in comparison? I don't need any other connectivity other than the DVI or VGA btw I was just interested in the performance aspect in terms of gaming.

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I didn't say it wasn't. I actually was saying it's the same card just with a different firmware, just like you.

 

Flashing a PC card (even a no name one) with the Apple firmware would make NO DIFFERENCE in terms of stability between these 2 cards.

 

But it seems some people there tend to think Apple cards are "better". You have a warranty on PC cards too btw :P

 

@yoda, you are wrong, this card you linked is a 8600GT which is less powerful than a 8800GT (yeah A LOT less)

 

 

Probably the only real difference is the Apple card is 100% EFI, hence the remarks about getting the firmware off it, and flashing a normal 8800GT with Apple-compatible firmware.
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I didn't say it wasn't. I actually was saying it's the same card just with a different firmware, just like you.

 

Flashing a PC card (even a no name one) with the Apple firmware would make NO DIFFERENCE in terms of stability between these 2 cards.

 

But it seems some people there tend to think Apple cards are "better". You have a warranty on PC cards too btw :P

I never said it was better. I only said that it's not fair to call Apple's 8800GT (and only Apple's 8800GT) "over priced" when there are plenty of other non-Apple 8800GTs going for $279 and sometimes even more.

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I never said it was better. I only said that it's not fair to call Apple's 8800GT (and only Apple's 8800GT) "over priced" when there are plenty of other non-Apple 8800GTs going for $279 and sometimes even more.

 

I agree with sarahbau.

If everything is the same than we wouldn't need charts to compare the cards with the same spec we see in store.

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I walked around some PC stores in Akihabara this weekend pricing PC 880GT cards with 512 MB of DDR3 vs the Apple card for 34,000 yen. In nearly every shop, they were 29,000 yen, making it hardly worth the effort of fooling around with a BIOS flash and risking the instability and wasted time.

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I never said it was better. I only said that it's not fair to call Apple's 8800GT (and only Apple's 8800GT) "over priced" when there are plenty of other non-Apple 8800GTs going for $279 and sometimes even more.

 

Any price but the cheapest for the same item is 'overpriced' IMHO.

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