NVIDIA Quadro 4000 for Mac

Reviews for NVIDIA Quadro 4000 for Mac

Customer Reviews and Ratings

2.5 out of 5 stars

Based on 21 reviews

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Quadro 4000 firmware doesn't support Raytracing in Adobe AE CS6

    • Written by from Clarence Park

    I had one for 3 months, its fast but in After Effects CS6 it does not support Raytracing. Older Quadro 4000s are fine but for some reason newer Quadro cards have issues. There are blogs that state the firmware changed at some point which hampers Raytracing. I tried all the different drivers etc. to now avail.
    Look for the Sapphire HD 7950 Mac edition

    3 of 6 people found this useful

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    Great Card! Lightning Fast!!!

    • Written by from Phoenix

    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.

    9 of 10 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Great card for color correction and Boot Camp

    • Written by from Carlisle

    This card is an important addition to color correction on the Mac. Although you can run DaVinci Resolve with lesser powered cards, you'll find that with OSX Lion, the workflow is far superior. For other apps the boost may be less, but much of that has to do with Apple's support of Open GL standards (which are lacking).

    If you run Boot Camp, then this card is an unmitigated blessing! You will get much out of this running Windows 7 apps under with this card. Unity Pro, Maya, Mudbox, Softimage all run quickly and seamlessy with the NVIDIA QUADRO 4000.

    Highly recommended for those who need it.

    53 of 59 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Mini Display Port kills it.

    • Written by from CAVE CREEK

    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.

    93 of 105 people found this useful

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    good but you have to know what you're doing

    • Written by from calhoun

    for all the whiners, take the time to learn and understand first. The best advice I can give is to not update the drivers. it is far too complicated for the average user if you make the mistake of clicking on the "update required" cuda box. I have one running on lion and snow leopard. it is a great boost for keying and exporting really fast. it is also required for davinci resolve or you would be stupid to use it without it.

    73 of 89 people found this useful

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    finally the card it should be thanks to Lion

    • Written by from Montreal

    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.

    64 of 70 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Waste of time

    • Written by from Gloucester

    Hi, I just bought this card and after 3 days it is going back. When it works in premiere pro cs5 it is great but since installing the quadra I have had more crashes than in the last year. It also seems to disappear upon rebooting and I have to install the drivers again to get it working, for a limited time. I would love to keep this card if it was only stable as I can see potential, but for now it's bye bye and steer clear. I didn't spend six grand on.a mac pro (2010) 12 core to bugger about like this.

    50 of 57 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Technological Heartbreaker

    • Written by from Raleigh

    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.

    29 of 32 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Card seemingly not actually compatible with the MacPro

    • Written by from santa barbara

    For one thing, there's only one Display Port output, not a mini-display port like you would use with your Apple monitor (notice there's no photos of the back of the card on this site?) not to mention that the card doesn't seem to actually even work with the computer in the first place.
    Constant crashing from sleep when by itself, fights with the ATI card if you leave it in, and driver mismatches abound.
    In theory, this thing would be awesome as a GPU accelerator, I have a Nvidia 5000 in a PC workstation and it's amazing for 3d hardware acceleration once you get the correct driver update, but this 4000 card just simply doesn't work with the Mac Pro.
    Nvidia, please give us the usability and dual mini-display ports like the ATI 5770, and couple that with the CUDA core acceleration and you'll have an instant cult-following... But right now Nvidia, you're totally dropping the ball. When opportunity knocks, open the door!

    37 of 42 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Quadro 4000 and screen tearing in After Effects

    • Written by from Marina Del Rey

    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.

    37 of 40 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    A Great CARD!

    • Written by from New York

    I bought this card for a little over 1k with tax. It fit quite easily into my 8 core early 2009 MacPro and works so, so very fast with Premiere Pro and After effects and PS.

    If the software can access the GPU power it is simply amazing.

    Oh and it plays very well with my 3D projects too. It simply works and nVidia upgrades the drivers frequently.

    36 of 45 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Very disapointed

    • Written by from VÄRNAMO

    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.

    50 of 60 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Buy this card if you want to waste time and money...

    • Written by from Palm Harbor

    I bought this card in hopes it would help speed up my workload and all I did for 3 weeks was troubleshoot this card on my own because Apple, NVIDIA and PNY all thought it was the other companies problem and gave me the run around. Here's what you get for 1200$... Mac side: 1. screen tears constantly, 2. complete system lock ups, 3. audio drivers disappearing when coming over from bootcamp, 4. no support!

    And to top it off if you do a system reformat you need to put in your old card to do so.

    PC side works great but if I wanted a PC I would have bought a PC!

    I 've never been so disappointed in Apple for not making sure PNY had their ducks in a row with their drivers before selling this useless 1200+ dollar card on their site. This card came out 4 months ago and still they have not fixed the drivers!

    180 of 196 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Ugh... Common Apple

    • Written by from birmingham

    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.

    53 of 60 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Waste of money for After Effects

    • Written by from Columbus

    We purchased these cards for our studio because of a recommendation from Apple tec support. After installing them, we started running some tests against the Radeon 5570 that comes in the new mac pros. For $1100, we gained 21 seconds on a 9 and a half minute render. Also after updating OSX to 10.6.7, it conveniently didn't work with the card. We could no longer use a second monitor without reverting back to an older version. It also was slower while using 64bit Maya 2011. It reduced our frame rate and did not improve render times. Also we repeatedly tried to contact PNY to see if we had set the cards up incorrectly, but our calls were never returned nor were our e-mails responded to. We would not recommend this card at all for a professional motion graphics artist.

    197 of 216 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    extremely disappointed

    • Written by from Troy

    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.

    265 of 289 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    great fundamentals, but lack of OpenCL support is frustrating

    • Written by from Bremerton

    I bought this card and installed it in my 12-core Mac Pro. It worked fine driving my Apple display until an Apple Software Update about three months ago. ( broke sleep mode and display capability. ) Reinstalling the NVIDIA provided drivers fixed this.

    My main frustration with the card is that Apple's OpenCL API does not detect or support the card for OpenCL computing... which happens to be the main reason I bought it. Oops.

    I figured this would be addressed pretty quickly, but here I am three months later without any word from Apple.

    37 of 41 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Great Card but its very buggy & frezzing my Mac Pro 2009

    • Written by from Alexandria

    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.

    38 of 40 people found this useful

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  • 3.0 out of 5 stars

    Special Tool for Special Purpose

    • Written by from Portland

    There particular apps that use the power of this card. Among them are the latest versions of Premiere Pro, MatLab, After Effects (with certain plugins), Smoke, and DaVinci Resolve.

    Every other graphics intensive app I've tried runs faster with the Radeon HD 5870.

    This is not an impulse purchase. Do your research first.

    48 of 55 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Best WorkHorse Graphics Card for the $!!

    • Written by from Pointe Claire

    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.

    56 of 69 people found this useful

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