My Mac Pro is now over four years old and I have already added more hard drives and extra memory. The most important component not yet upgraded was the display adapter. More commonly known as a graphics card, this adapter controls the display on both my monitors.
The ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 Graphics Card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The original card in my machine was the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of RAM. This was showing its age and struggled to cope with intensive graphical work. So, after months of deliberating, I decided to upgrade to the ATI Radeon HD 5870 with 1024 MB of RAM.
The device cost £377.00 from the Apple Store, and I also had to buy a Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter to connect one of my monitors to the Mini DisplayPort, as there is only one standard DVI port in this card. So, a total buy of £402, but was it worth it?
After an error by the carrier, who only dropped off one of the two packages, and a call to the Apple Store to rectify the problem, the card finally arrived yesterday (Friday 8th February 2013). Having seen videos on YouTube of the card being fitted in under ten minutes, I wasn’t expecting any problems.
I removed the Mac Pro case cover and found that the sockets where the two power cables connecting the card to the motherboard fitted, were difficult to get access to because of the casing surrounding the fan. Removing two of the hard drives gave me better access.
I then spent maybe half an hour trying to push the wrong end of the cables into the motherboard sockets. It was Sandra, the wife, who discovered my mistake when I asked her to help. Within a couple of minutes, the cables were connected.
All that remained was to connect the cables to the display adapter and insert it into the PCI slot that the original card was connected to. I re-booted the Ma
c, but only one display came on. I had to swap the display connections around and eventually, and with a great sigh of relief, the machine booted up. The whole process had taken 75 minutes to complete.
Immediately on booting, I found that the monitors were much clearer and text was easier to read. Aperture, my photo management software, was also much quicker, with photo adjustments being much smoother and faster. I have yet to try iMovie, but I expect even more performance increases from that.
So was it worth it? The answer has to be a resounding ‘yes’. The display is clearer, on both monitors, and text is much easier to read. I should have spent the money months ago.
Related articles
- ATI 7000 series graphics coming to the Mac? (reviews.cnet.com)
- New Mac Pro release date, rumours and leaked images (macworld.co.uk)
