Off the Shelf Graphics Card

[forbiddenfruit]

Just out of interest,
Is it possible to buy an off the shelf Graphics card that has been made for OS X, which comes with a driver disk and has online support,
and then install the card drivers on second boot after installing OS X?

Sorry, if there is some majorly technical reason as to why this is not possible, please excuse my ignorance of programming and kernel editing / bootloaders.

 

[DoctorWho]

No it's not possible. The off the shelf cards are designed to work only with the Mac Pros. They are incompatible with generic PCs.

If your looking for a new GPU, then I highly suggest going with a reference edition 5770 or 5870. Apple currently uses both of theses cards in the Mac Pros.

 

[Stork]

No it's not possible. The off the shelf cards are designed to work only with the Mac Pros. They are incompatible with generic PCs.

If your looking for a new GPU, then I highly suggest going with a reference edition 5770 or 5870. Apple currently uses both of theses cards in the Mac Pros.

Dr. Who? is your 5870 a reference design card? I ask because that might be a good starting point.

Is the "Batmobile" 5770 card a reference design? Like the OP, I'm still figuring this out.

BTW, the Wiki graphics card section doesn't make any distinction to a reference design card. But, he said just remembering, both tonmacx86's and MacMan's blogs discuss off-the-shelf reference AMD/ATI and NVIDA cards.