Thursday, April 30th 2009
GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition Coming This June
NVIDIA is pushing forth a special variant of its high-end GeForce GTX 285 graphics accelerator. This one is specific for use in Apple Mac systems that support PCI-Express addon-cards. Its hardware specifications remain the same: 240 stream processors and 1 GB of 512-bit GDDR3 memory. Available in June, the accelerator will benefit the upcoming Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" that makes use of GPGPU. NVIDIA partner EVGA seems to be ready with one. Pictured below, the card resembles the reference design accelerator commonly available for PCs.
Source:
Engadget
19 Comments on GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition Coming This June
should'a been white
Does a mac not have PCI-E slots? im confused. One would assume the drivers would be all that is needed?
FTW they even have Mac edition SSDs:)
One of the few things that still have to be specially made for Macs is the video card, and basically the only difference is the BIOS on the video card, which has to be specially written to interface with the Mac motherboard's BIOS properly.
Usually this means that the only hardware difference between a Mac card and a PC card is that the Mac card has a larger BIOS ROM chip on it to hold the special BIOS. This is also why most of the time, a standard PC card can not simply be flashed to the Mac edition, though this isn't always true.
But, unfortunately, Mac video cards are alway quite expensive for some reason. It's still $280 for a Mac 8800GT and $350 for a Mac 4870.
No added benefit except its more plug and play for Mac users which saves them 10 minutes of time and costs them twice as much. They bleed Mac users dry. :ohwell:
Despite that, it was still way cheaper to buy a flashed card than a real one, so the tradeoff was worth it for many.