Reviews for NVIDIA Quadro 4000 for Mac

Just got this card installed yesterday, and I love it!!! Super quick in Premiere and After Effects. Just in one day, it's amazing how much time I have saved with rendering. This card will pay it's self off in no time!

My only complaint, about the card is that there is only one display port hookup. On the PC version of this card, there are 2 display ports as well as one DVI hookup. Because of this, I could only hookup one of my 27" Cinema Displays. To work around this I left my old card in to run both of the displays.

We had high hopes for this card but Apple's (insane) use of the MDP pretty much kills it. We use it with large production monitors (Apple Cinema, LaCie, NEC) and noone but Apple has MDP so we have to buy these stupid (and expensive) kludge adaptors to make the large monitors work. (Apple - we love your products but whoever the engineer was who had this idea - they should be fired!!)

On top of that the MDI to Dual Link adaptors they sell are flaky and cause intermittent screen flickers.

Why Apple got rid of the Dual - Dual Link DVI connections on the back of their high end video cards is STUPID. There are not even 30" production monitors available with MDP connections by Apple or anyone else.

Unfortunately, we sent the card back - not worth the hassle or expense. We reverted back to our GTX 285 setup which won't be as fast, but at least its stable.

I do a lot of 3D in Maya, Mudbox, and a bunch of other apps and reviewed this card when it was released under OS X 10.6. As others have pointed out, it was buggy and kernel panicked but OS X 10.7 fixed all the crashing issues and it's a rock now. The only drawback is the lack of OpenCL, which Apple (not Nvidia) is responsible for and they pulled it before Lion's release. Otherwise, performance is great (faster than Radeon 5870 for Maya and Mudbox from my benchmarks) and only uses one slot. Not as fast as the Radeon for games (in Parallels or Boot Camp) though. If you need CUDA or want a low-power card for 3D, it's easy to recommend now.

Works great with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. Fast, quiet and reliable. Huge improvement over ATI 4870. Performs unacceptably in After Effects: diagonal shapes severely aliased, opaque effects inserted in Premier Pro timelines appear white instead. If you work in Premiere Pro, but not in AE, you're good to go. For me, this restriction is far too limiting to be at all practical. Major bummer. I've reinstalled the ATI and am waiting, with little sense of optimism, for a fix from NVIDIA.

Do not buy this video card for the Mac. We bought 8 new 12-core MacPro in February and "upgraded" all the video cards to the Quadro 4000 on the advice of our Mac sales rep. What a mistake. Constant screen tearing with After Effects RAM previews and several problems after doing software updates. Seems every time someone updates their system software it breaks video driver support for the card. Up to date video drivers from NVIDIA have yet to solve screen tearing problems. I have an early 2008 8-core MacPro at home with an ATI Radeon HD 5870 which works flawlessly with After Effects and Cinema 4D.

Spent my last money on a new mac pro I need for work, bought this card from the apple store and now I cant even use it since it makes my mac kernel panic about 40 times a day. Sometimes I cant even boot up the system since the card freezes before its loaded up. I don't know if it is Apple or Nvidia or both, but I cant recommend this card(mac version) to anyone. You will just end up taking out the card from the machine and use whatever card you got before.

Apple please don't sell things not working on your page.

I did some, not as much as i should have, research before I bought this card. I know it's very specific to what it's going to work with and what it's not.

I do editing in After Effects,.. 3D in Cinema 4D... bought this card in hopes it would improve workflow with CS5. If you buy the right plugins, ones that support the 4000, you see some gain, but thats it. As for CS4, Forget about it.
I know it doesn't speed up renders in C4D, but I assumed with all that video memory the screen redraw and over all viewer in C4D would improve... nope. As a matter of fact Cinebench clocked it slower than my old 4870.

The card seems to rev pretty high, very loud and gets really hot.
This wouldn't bother me if i was seeing speed gain, but nope. I ended up buying the 5870 and all seems well, but still not what I need.

It now sits in a box waiting for the day Apple decides to address this issue.

Oh, also,....if by chance you read this Steve ... PLEASE...PLEASE.... KILL THE DOCK.

i work in 3D visual effects, post production, and graphics.

this video card works fantastic under Windows 7. the Windows drivers for the Quadro are finely tuned and allow particular applications to take full advantage of the video card.

under OS X, the card is NOT worth the premium cost. my ATI 5870 performs better in applications that the Quadro 4000 is suppose to work better with. for the life of me, i can't understand why Nvidia/Apple can't get these drivers right under OS X. its the same story, Quadro release after Quadro release. Nvidia and Apple just don't seem to care. my current 2010 12-core Mac Pro might be my very last Apple desktop. i just can't justify the Apple tax anymore if Apple isn't going to provide basic stuff professionals need. it just seems like Apple is drifting farther and farther away from the professional market.....so disappointing.

another extremely annoying thing is that i can't have my ATI 5870 and Quadro 4000 running at the same time. the Mac Pro only has two 6-pin power cables!!!! what's with that!! are you kidding me??!!

and why is apple charging $400 more than every other vendor for this graphics card? what a joke....please, do yourself a favor and do your research before you buy.

I currently have two Nvidia Quadro 4000 mac cards and there causing my Mac Pro 2009 machine to kernel Panic and freeze or shutdown my machine.

I dropped it off at the Apple store for them to diagnose the problem for 9 days and they went ahead and confirmed that it was the card which was causing the problem.

NVIDIA PLEASE UPDATE YOUR DRIVERS FOR THIS CARD FOR MAC.

Lets wait and see what Nvidia or PNY will do about the big problem. I'm wanting to keep these babies, so make some moves people and fix the issues for the Professionals.

The 4000 is absolutely wonderful!
1st the spec.s of my Mac Pro:

SnowLeopard OS X 10.6.6, 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro, 16GB RAM, with a 'RocketRAID eSATA(Dual eSATA port[i.e.: 2 eSATA Ports that run @ 3Gb/s]+ has 64-bit driver)'. Connected to an External: "STARTECH 4x3.5 S354UFER U/FW/eSATA Enclosure" with FOUR 'SATA3 1.0TB W.D 7200 64M WD1002FAEX BLACK' inside set @ RAID 0(or striped RAID(Same thing))

When I run: BlackMagic-SpeedTest I GET UNDER 10 BIT HDTV YUV 4:2:2 FRAME RATES:
HDTV 1080fps 'DISK READ=40, DISK WRITE=25" & UNDER 8 BIT HDTV YUV 4:2:2 FRAME RATES: HDTV 1080fps "DISK READ=54, DISK WRITE=34"

works extremely fast with PS & AE CS5(I've got both), but because FCS3 has not been updated to take advance of the 4000's architecture, yet anyway, software like FCP, Motion work well enough, but still lack that extra jump in speed…

FINAL IMPORTANT NOTE: You must not only DL the latest drivers from NVIDIA, but you must install them before you remove your old card & install the 4000!
I found repairing 'permissions' after this was done to greatly improve performance!

All & all, for the $$ I give the 4000 a 9/10. Though I've yet to benchmark the 4800.