FS: nVidia Quadro 6000 and Quadro 4000-Mac

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Have the following two video cards for sale:

PNY nVidia Quadro 6000 w/6GB DDR5 - $2000

PNY nVidia Quadro 4000 Mac Edition - SOLD ( I stil have one in the Mac Pro I'm trying to sell, may be willing to part it out, not sure yet)


Both cards are in perfect, like-new condition and have seen relatively light use. Pictures on request. Prices are firm, but I will ship anywhere in the continental USA for free.

Everywhere else, buyer pays for shipping. International buyers -- I will ship via FedEx IP or USPS Express International only. If paying by PayPal, they now have additional international fees the buyer will have to cover.


PM or email to info at rojomojo dot net

[Adnan Siddiqui]

PM sent.

[Jon Jones]

Jeff I would buy your Quadro 6000 in a heartbeat if I could use it in my new MAC PRO... Sorry bud. Also I have my sights on some Master Primes and other accoutrements.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jeff I would buy your Quadro 6000 in a heartbeat if I could use it in my new MAC PRO... Sorry bud. Also I have my sights on some Master Primes and other accoutrements.

Well... You can use it in a Mac Pro... Kinda. The current nVidia drivers do support it under OSX 10.7.3, but nVidia will have to release a new driver set since their drivers are breaking under the new 10.7.4 today. The real catch is that it's not a Mac-specific card, which means there is no proper Mac EFI support. Once in the OS with the proper drivers, the GUI and everything works great. But you can't use any of the EFI functions if this is your primary display card, such as option-booting to choose which drive to start-up from or installing a fresh copy of OSX. So yeah, it works but it doesn't. :-/

Quadro 6000 is a great card. The extra RAM is a huge help in a lot of intense 3D and CUDA apps. It really shines in OpenGL performance in part due to the extra memory and in part due to how the hardware and drivers are tuned a bit differently than its GeForce counterpart. It pushes around a few more polygons and moves them much smoother than a GTX580 Classified Ultra that has 64 more cores and runs 200MHz faster! Of course, that GTX580 is faster for gaming and performance visuals and is also faster for CUDA acceleration, at least up to the point where you run short on RAM compared to what you get with the Quadro.

Anyway, Quadro 6000 is a great card for Adobe CS6, Maya, Houdini, XSI, Mari, Lightwave, etc.. etc.. And due to the above-mentioned shortcomings it's best considered a PC-only GPU unless someone doesn't mind always fiddling with it and testing system updates and driver updates before committing.

Quadro 4000 is an all-around great card on the Mac. But when it comes to raw performance in CUDA or OpenGL, it's half the card the Quadro 6000 is.

[Johnny Friday]

Jeff, you may have been asked this a few times, but how does one enable OpenGL in a Mac using Quadra 4000 card....and in PrPro or AE? I see this mentioned on various threads....and see screen shots of it there....but i don't see openGL as an option in my machine with Quadra 4000 card; updated drivers; red rocket card....i also thought Cuda was mentioned to outperform OpenGL as well.....just curious about this and if you can get more horse power by using OpenGL....im looking for any edge after a 24 hour encode of a 52min. doc with about 3-4 effects applied to each clip/mixed codecs from R3d down to AVCHD and then add some neat video and mercalli to that.....but seemed a lot of about 26mins per minute of video....

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Johnny,

You're thinking of OpenCL. Yeah, kinda confusing. OpenCL is the Open Computational Library established by the same people who established OpenGL, which is the Graphics Library. Both are accelerated by GPUs. CUDA is nVidia's proprietary compute library that only runs on their cards. Currently it is more capable and evolved as it's been around longer. A big reason why it's more widely supported. OpenCL is gaining acceptance and may eventually one day replace CUDA since it doesn't lock anyone into one hardware vendor.

As for enabling OpenCL with the Quadro... you can't. nVidia has dabbled with OpenCL support by making it appear as an emulation layer on top of CUDA, but it's not readily available in current drivers. The two technologies are in somewhat of an industry war at the moment. nVidia just dealt a hefty blow to the OpenCL camp yesterday -- they released the CUDA library into the open source domain for direct incorporation into compilers and have already made modules available for the popular LLVM compiler. This means software developers can now flip a switch in their compiler or development environment software and start building and running CUDA compliant code within their apps written in C, C++, etc..

Back to that other Open thing... OpenGL. It's the graphics library used primarily for 3D imagery, games, CAD and 3D design software, etc.. It's been around for years and is industry supported and runs in various forms on everything from high end workstations down to smart phones and everything in between. Its only real competitor is Microsoft's DirectX, but even with that a significant number of Windows games are still written to use OpenGL for their graphics.

[Jon Jones]

Jeff, I already have a quadro 4000 that I use for my Mac. So what your saying is that i can also install the 6000 and use that card for adobe premiere for the added cuda cores and video ram?

[Johnny Friday]

Jeff, thanks for the explanation---as usual: completely informative! Thanks Sir.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jon... Well, that's a whole other deal there... The Quadro 6000 is a double-width card, so in a Mac Pro you would want it in the bottom slot. It will take up both PCIe power connectors and you'll need a 6pin to 8pin adapter for one of those connectors. If you want to also have the Quadro 4000 in there, you will need to pull more power from somewhere else -- lower optical bay or external power supply. And that opens up another line of discussion in configuring a Mac Pro, PCIe expansion, etc.. There are really only two applications on OSX that can take advantage of having multiple GPUs for processing like that. Davinci Resolve and Premiere CS6. And I really don't want to comment much in that regard on CS6 because I honestly haven't had time to do multiple GPU testing to see if it's worth-while. I'll be hitting up that testing this weekend on both the Mac and a couple new PC workstations.

Johnny... No problem. :)

[Jon Jones]

Ok Jef well that's cool. However I already have a RED ROCKET occupying that slot, so an expansion bay would most def. have to be the way. You are def. a wealth of knowledge!