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EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Easy to install, works great

Written by KK from Novi

Jun 10, 2009

The card arrived today, and other than the premium price, it works great. Powered up the ACD30 without problems, and was an easy swap to the Radeon 4870, including the power cables. There seems to be some performance issues with the drivers, but this will be worked out with time. If you are looking for an upgrade to the GT120/130 cards, especially for CUDA/OpenGL or gaming, this is the current card to get. Just remember it has two dual link DVI-D connectors, no mini displayport connector.

125 of 146 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

WOW!

Written by CB from SEATTLE

Jun 11, 2009

I have a new Mac Pro, a 30" Cinema HD Display and now an amazingly improved image on the screen. I had the ATI Radeon 4870 HD but what a difference 500 more MBs make! Again I say WOW!

139 of 231 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Excellent card; Snow Leopard supported

Written by RZ from Roslyn Heights

Aug 29, 2009

Just got this card for my upgrade to Snow Leopard. Installation was a breeze. Performance is outstanding; I moved from the 4870 to this.

I'd get this card over the 4870 in a heartbeat; supports OpenGL and CUDA. Snow Leopard includes drivers for this card, so no need to reinstall the old card if you are upgrading.

40 of 48 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Great card, performance issues due to power states in ROM

Written by DO from South Pasadena

Jun 15, 2009

The card is great, no doubt. However, as noted in several forums now (google it, including evga's own board) the card has serious performance issues due to the speed-state (there are 3) management in it's ROM which will give wildly varying performance benchmarks as well as perceived performance.
Until evga fixes the rom (this is with the latest 2f16 driver) I cannot really recommend this card. Compared to the ATI 4870 HD it replaces I get same, much better or significantly worse performance from a variety of sources - from World of Warcraft to the Finder (Quartz) to benchmarks. I applaud evga and nvidia for releasing the card - I just hope they will address the issues (and they are easily addressed remotely, i.e. per update) soon. Until then, I am going to keep my 4870 very handy :(

45 of 58 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

great card

Written by TL from Chandler

Jul 29, 2009

This is a great card! There are a couple of "gotchas":

1) install the driver before installing the card - this is important
2) when installing the card, install the power cables to the motherboard, then insert the card and then connect the cables to the card.
3) two APPLE DVI to VGA adapters will not fit on the two ports. You can use 1 APPLE adapter and the adapter that comes with the card, and it's still a very tight fit. (or use two proper DVI cables)

After those issues are resolved, all I can say is Wow! great card! Works great, games look great, iPhoto and Aperture look awesome!

Pricey but worth it.

31 of 33 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

EVGA Geforce GTX 285 - 2009.07

Written by KB from Bradenton

Jul 23, 2009

2x2.28 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 6GB Ram

PROS - Super Quiet i mean its hard to tell my tower is on, amd I know that the fan is throttled down but my 8800GT used to heat my office up this card seems to run quieter and cooler. Great performance in Maya and After Effects, not a huge noticeable jump in FCP but haven't had any dropped frames.

CONS - My 8800GT crashed so i ordered this as a replacement card, but because Mac Hardware is so friendly and easy to work with, I got my GTX 285 and couldn't install it! YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO INSTALL THE DRIVERS FIRST! or the card will not work at all. No sort of default driver is present in OSX for this card.

OTHER THOUGHTS - This card out preforms the ATI 4870 in some applications but falls short in others, I hope that when snow leopard comes out it will be able to release this things power. It is definitely weaker for running on OSX as all graphics cards seem to be. I chose this over the ATI 4870 in hopes that upgrades to drivers and OSX would bring greater performance. Time will tell... OSX does throtal down the fan to 40% so it is cool and quiet but at what sacrifice???

I am hoping that when updates come out this thing will be the true screamer i know it can be!

27 of 27 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Great hardware with miserable drivers

Written by DM from Houston

Aug 13, 2009

Stay far, far away from this card. The hardware is top-notch but EVGA appear to be having terrible difficulty producing OS X drivers that are stable or can make good use of the card. Constant crashing, incompatible with many popular games like Sims3, and much worse performance than the hardware should theoretically provide.

42 of 62 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Unexpectedly HORRIBLE performance in OS X Snow Leopard

Written by CB from clay

Sep 13, 2009

This is great PC hardware. This is the same hardware with an EFI ROM. This performs exceptional in Windows. This performs Awful in OS X. Its either OS X, or the drivers provided in Snow Leopard. Either way, STAY AWAY FROm THIS CARD UNTIL THAT IS RESOLVED. TRUST ME.

35 of 49 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Fan is a bit on the loud side.

Written by BN from Dayton

Jun 17, 2009

I just received my 09 Mac Pro with the 2.66 Quad and this card a day after. I used the GT120 for the first day and was happy with how quiet the system was even after putting in extra drives and memory. After I put this card in, the computer became much louder. The CPU I is running 5-10C hotter since this card is heating up the entire aluminum frame around the CPU compartment and raising its ambient temperature by a few celsius. The drone sound is gone from my GT120, but was replaced with a much faster fan of the GTX285. You can noticeably hear a difference even with my Mac Pro sitting inside of a cabinet that vents out the back. It just sounds like some serious air pushing out the back of the computer. I have played many games including WoW and a few windows games like Crysis and it performs flawless and I have yet to hear the fan wind up any louder. I just wish I could adjust the fan speed down in OS X as it is very annoying to have a silent room and quiet computer be ruined by a fast spinning fan on the GPU.

23 of 32 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Awesome; plain and simple

Written by DK from Vienna

Jul 7, 2009

I just got a 4-core early 2009 Mac Pro and put this sucker inside. Installation was a BIT more complicated than I originally thought, but it was only a minor setback. This card offers the best performance for all of your gaming needs and is capable of playing many popular titles at a solid framerate of 60 frames per second (1920x1200) such as Team Fortress 2, Spore, Fallout 3, and Left 4 Dead.

I haven't had the chance to do any real work with it yet, but if video game performance is any indicator of how good this card is, this card is excellent. The fact that it's a 1GB card (as opposed to other 512MB cards offered) stands out as well.

If you need your computer to do some heavy lifting, get this card.

16 of 22 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Good Card for anything but Maya 2009...

Written by PT from Newport

Nov 4, 2009

I bought this card the day it was released as an upgrade for my, at the time, recently purchased Mac Pro which came with an ATI 2600. However I soon discovered that under OSX 10.5 or 10.6 Maya 2009 suffers from heavy artifacting with marquee selection, along with disappearing windows and numbers.

The good news is that when booted into a boot camp partition running Windows XP x64 or Windows 7 64, the card works like a charm. The drivers developed for Windows are far superior than the OSX ones by a huge margin.

I'm hoping that with the release of Maya 2010 that these issues will be resolved, but until then I am stuck with a buggy app in my beloved OS of choice.

Side Note: Zbrush 3.12 runs just fine in both OSes and behaves as it should for the most part. Looking forward to 3.5 for the Mac.

Unfortunately I am seeing myself using Windows on my Mac more than OSX simply because the software I use is primarily used on a PC platform hence Zbrush 3.5 being already released :(

9 of 10 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Love the card, a bit pricey

Written by YD from TORONTO

Oct 2, 2009

This card performs very very well, it's very very quiet too, but good god was it expensive. I had to replace my old 8800GT because it couldn't take the heat.

10 of 14 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

One solution for the dual monitor/cable problem with this card

Written by JH from WASHINGTON

Oct 15, 2009

As some of you have found out, two Apple DVI cables don't fit this card. You can spend $20 on an extender (see EVGA's website, Apple doesn't seem to sell them) or you can also just pry off the white cover on the DVI connector. Mine just unsnapped with a little prying. It reveals the ugly undersides of the connector, but it also works fine...

6 of 8 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

So far so good!

Written by SB from Burlington

Nov 14, 2009

The GTX 285 installed with little effort into my MacPro3,1 (2008). The trickiest part was attaching the power cables to the sockets on the motherboard, my fat fingers didn't help this... Be sure you do this before inserting the card. The Snow Leopard 10.6.2 drivers are working just fine. The renders in FCP do seem accelerated and I'm having no issues with the output. (Knock wood).

3 of 4 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Bad for FCS

Written by EO from Moscow

Nov 6, 2009

Great for Nuke, Maya, Aperture, Adobe CS.
Bad fror FCS (displays the video with artifacts, like 256 colors).
Not support DVI to Video Adapter.

5 of 8 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Card let down by very bad drivers

Written by MK from LONDON

Jul 7, 2009

I was so looking forward to this GPU as I do not want to support a PC rig alongside my Mac. I thought this would make BootCamp gaming an ideal solution. It does on the Windows side but with Mac OSX it is a disaster. With the the 285 card, together with a fresh OSX 10.5.8 install, Apps started crashing suddenly, the MacPro would shutdown or restart unprompted and The Sims 3 can't even be loaded and played as there is a fundamental problem. All in all a wasted purchase as I had to uninstall it and replace my nVidia 8800GT.

35 of 69 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

nice but should be an option when you customize your macpro

Written by JR

Jul 1, 2009

i own a g5 2.0 quad and a mac pro 2.66 dual 8 core and it was easy to put in the card but i wish when you configure it it was an option. and the price is a lil high but i put my old ATI Radeon in my g5 it runs beautiful with the 24 inch led display and the mac pro runs a 30 inch cinema display even better makes my macbook pro 17 inch feel slow and makes my aluminum G4 17 inch powerbook really slugish i really wish though this was an option for a note book like if they could jst make a notebook compatible that would be nice for my 17 inch powerbook or my macbook pro 17 inch but also no display port :(

8 of 15 people found this useful

EVGA GeForce GTX 285

Great card..it doesn't have a mini-display port?

Written by RM from ARLINGTON

Dec 3, 2009

I have heard hype about this card for a while now, so I ended up dropping almost 5bills to get it.I also bought two 24" LED apple monitors to go with it.I didn't realize it didn't have a display port, so I had to out source to a company called monoprice and they had the Mini-display to DVI adapters I needed to run both monitors.I checked out Atlona and they wanted $150 for there product and the adapters from monoprice was only $10.30 each w/out shipping.My ? I keep pondering over, is how is this card mac specific, when it doesn't even come with a mini-display port and the lower end card that came with it, does. For a card that cost this much,It should of came with some kind of adapter, I feel very mislead.Or Apple should of said on their site, this card doesn't have a mini-display port, so you're not going to be able to run mini-display monitors.