GTX580 ... which one?

[dmvdberg]

I've been puzzeled about this for about a week now ...
Two weeks ago I succesfully build a Hackingtosh with i7 2600K, 16Gb Ram, Gigabyte board and a EVGA GTX570HD SC.

Sadly that gfx isn't that available anymore :'(
A good friend asked me to build a hackingtosh for his film editing work (shoots on a RED ).
The GTX580 is known to work nicely on OSX Lion with a hackingtosh build.

But which one should I use?
currently these are the models I can still buy:
- EVGA GTX 570 Classified (last GTX570 that is still available here)
- Club3D GTX 580 1536MB GDDR5 (reference model)
- MSI N580GTX Twin Frozr II/OC
- MSI N580GTX Twin Frozr III 15D5 Power Edition

And above budget:
- Asus ENGTX580/2DI/1536MD5
- Gainward GeForce GTX 580 3072MB "Phantom"

The multibeast Lion only has a few steps to get GTX5** model running propper but i've heard that a OC model might preset itself with some issues?

Personally / budget wise the MSI GTX580 Power Edition or the EVGA GTX570 Classified would be my best bet ... but i've only build one hackingtosh with an Nvidia so far since at my first hackingtosh I only assisted and that runs a Sapphire AMD HD6850.

 

[ggeorge]

I've been puzzeled about this for about a week now ...
Two weeks ago I succesfully build a Hackingtosh with i7 2600K, 16Gb Ram, Gigabyte board and a EVGA GTX570HD SC.

Sadly that gfx isn't that available anymore :'(
A good friend asked me to build a hackingtosh for his film editing work (shoots on a RED ).
The GTX580 is known to work nicely on OSX Lion with a hackingtosh build.

But which one should I use?
currently these are the models I can still buy:
- EVGA GTX 570 Classified (last GTX570 that is still available here)
- Club3D GTX 580 1536MB GDDR5 (reference model)
- MSI N580GTX Twin Frozr II/OC
- MSI N580GTX Twin Frozr III 15D5 Power Edition

And above budget:
- Asus ENGTX580/2DI/1536MD5
- Gainward GeForce GTX 580 3072MB "Phantom"

The multibeast Lion only has a few steps to get GTX5** model running propper but i've heard that a OC model might preset itself with some issues?

Personally / budget wise the MSI GTX580 Power Edition or the EVGA GTX570 Classified would be my best bet ... but i've only build one hackingtosh with an Nvidia so far since at my first hackingtosh I only assisted and that runs a Sapphire AMD HD6850.

Overclocking is not generally an "Issue" in terms of compatibility in and of it's self. Though none of the windows software for overclocking works under OSX, so if you are trying to manually overclock it (as opposed to a factory overclock) you would need to be able to do that in the firmware on the card. Under windows with the overclocking software you can do a "soft" overclock where there is a utility that runs which sets the overclock, which makes it easier to experiment with overclocking and reduces issues if you push the card too hard. Since it "resets" when the machine is rebooted.

It is not generally worthwhile paying for extra ram on a graphics card like with the 3gb Gainward. The MSI is probably your best bet overall. The twin frozr III is a good graphics card cooler.

I would check the support forums for what ever software he is planning on using to edit the RED footage though. I am guessing he wants to tap the graphics card for GPU acceleration and what cards are best for that can vary wildly depending on the software and even the specific operations.

A 580 is the best overall for a lot of them though, especially if they use nVidia's CUDA (which obviously requires an nVidia card).

Unfortunately the AMD 7XXX cards are not compatible (they are much better at some OpenCL tasks) and probably won't be any time soon, if ever.

 

[dmvdberg]

SO its a safe bet that the MSI GTX580 TwinFrozr3 (also the cheapest gtx580 i can get) will install just with with the lion unibeast etc?
and yes, he's gonna use it for hardware support (adobe) and openCL (finalcut timeline).

I might just go with the GTX570 Classified though, bit cheaper and the performance isn't that much lower than a GTX580 ... I guess :/
Stability is most important in the end ^^