Gadgetory

hey guys johnathan air with TLD with my review of the Sapphire HD 7950 which is a video cart upgrade for the Mac Pro now for those of you guys that follow the channel you're thinking wait a second Jonathan you do not own a Mac Pro and Timmy you are right so huge shout out to Elric over at tech of tomorrow for let me invade his studio using his Mac Pro and ultimately bringing this review to you guys so I will have his channel annotated right here as well as linked right below that like button just in case you guys are interested and checking out some more new awesome tech content now as far as what comes in the box you get both driver CDs for both Mac and Windows and that is because this is a dual BIOS card so with a flick of a switch you can change between Mac or PC which is definitely a neat feature do note though that if you're using Mac OS 10 8.3 or later you do not need those CD drivers because they're preloaded into the OS and the video card becomes plug-and-play this is for only if you're using something earlier than 10 8.3 continuing on with the accessories you get a DVI to VGA adapter mini DisplayPort to display port adapter to 6 pin Mac power cables and then obviously the users manual now taking a look at the card itself it is a 2 slot design and aesthetically to me it looks absolutely beautiful it's simple its cleans elegant I would almost call it like a snow-white color you got a single sapphire fan towards the top branding down the middle and then taking a look at the outputs on the card you have two mini display ports HDMI out and then a dual link DVI connector to close out the rear i/o now as far as the specs Scott you got an 800 megahertz core clock it is based off the 28 nanometer process which is huge because the 18:57 70 and 5870 currently offered in the Mac Pro those are based off the forward nanometer process so you're gonna get much better power efficiency out of this 7950 additionally you have 1792 stream processors a 384 bit memory interface and most importantly 3 gigs of video memory again the 5770 and the 5870 those tap out at 1 gigabyte of video memory so the extra 2 gigabytes here is really going to help out especially with so many applications taking advantage of video card acceleration and for those of you guys who aren't sure what that is essentially what it does is allows the program to take some of the load off the CPU and then put that on to the video card as far as the install goes it was pretty painless now we'll be comparing this to the 5770 so we'll first start out by taking that once we got the Mac Pro open we're going to disconnect that single 6 pin connector then from that we're going to go to unscrew and unlock that pci lock or protector whatever you want to call it and then to the left of that there's a little button you gotta pressed and slide open and then from there we can take out the old video card now before installing these 7950 do make sure the bios is switched to BIOS 1 because that is where the Mac BIOS is located and then from there before you insert the 7950 into the PCI slot you got to make sure you install the two 6-pin power connectors first because if you don't you're gonna have a hell of a time trying to get them in there afterwards from there you can go to and carefully insert the video card into the PCI slot once you got it locked and loaded you can go to connect the two 6-pin power connectors like so after that we can go ahead and screw back on that PCI a little lock connector again whatever you want to call it and then from there go ahead and close up the Mac Pro now like I mentioned I am using 10.8 dot three so I did not need the video card drivers those are already pre-installed but if you are using anything prior to 10.8 dot 3 you will need to use those CD drivers before installing and booting up the video card now finally jumping over to the performance results in opengl 2.1 performance the 7950 absolutely smoked the 5770 more than doubling the framerate performance next up is nova benshan for the graphics core again in 7950 completely outperformed the 57 70 but they score 474 compared to 282 on the 57 70 following that is lux mark 2.1 this really showcases OpenCL performance the 7950 absolutely destroys the 57 70 it's actually a pretty taxing benchmark on your computer too free download I will have that linked also right below the like button next up is ocean wave which again showcases the OpenCL performance on the 79 50 which got a maximum frames per second of 566 compared to the 146 on the 57 70 now jumping over to Final Cut Pro 10 I definitely saw a performance increase for a one-minute text render but more importantly for a one-minute programs 42 to export the time jumped from 48 seconds on a 57 72 40 seconds on these 7950 so if you multiply that over longer projects you're going to save a lot of time with this video card last up is dirt 2 which is not new to the PC world by any means but it does have a built in benchmark and you can see the 5770 scored an average of five point four frames per second this is on 2560 keep in mind not 1920 by 1080 I am writing this on 2560 by 1440 and the Sapphire 7950 scored 50 3.8 frames per second so there is a significant increase as well so that pretty much wraps it up if you guys did enjoy this video feel free to hit that like button as it does help the channel out for those of you guys looking to breathe new life into an older aging Mac Pro this is probably one of your best options alongside maybe a PCI SSD aside from that if you are interested in picking this one up I will have pricing and availability linked it down below if you have any questions on this or tech in general hit me up on Twitter that TLD today or Google+ or Facebook along with also what I use to create my videos so again thank you guys for watching and I will see you guys later you