Sapphire 7950 (Mac version) or 7970 (standard) for FCPX???

I need a new graphics card for use SPECIFICALLY with FCPX. Recently at Cebit, Sapphire previewed their Radeon 7950 Mac Edition graphics card. I've been waiting for 10.8.3 (or the rumored 10.9) so I can upgrade my existing 5870 to the Radeon 7970. Now, with the introduction of this new player to the potential roster, I'm a tad confused.

Can anyone please explain to me why I would use a slower card because it is a "Mac Edition", over the faster 7970 when both of them need 10.8.3 to operate??? I've read that there is a special Mac BIOS included with this card, but will that give it greater functionality or compatibility with OSX / FCPX? Doesn't 10.8.3 address any compatibility issues with it's inclusion of radeon 7XXX drivers???

I can't wait to see greater performance in FCPX with a new graphics card... but which will be BEST & why?
Thank you in advance for any assistance you may provide!!!

Here is the 7950 article for reference: www.macrumors.com/2013/03/05/sapphire-pr...cs-card-for-mac-pro/

Will FCP X rum any faster on a 7970 than a 7950? I'd wait to see some benchmarks with the app first. Just because it is faster on paper, doesn't mean it will be that much faster with a specific app.

When I upgraded to the 5870, I was disappointed that I didn't get more performance increase than I did.

Do you have any published specs on the 7970 running on a Mac Pro?

www.barefeats.com/wst10g14.html

That link is to a Bare Feats article (which you may have referred me to in another post) that shows some testing results..

I'm just unclear whether the 7850's Mac Bios and nifty color will do any better/worse than the 7970???

Calgon, take me away!!!

this is probably too little too late, but FYI i'm using the XFX 7970 black edition in my mac 2008 mac pro. there is of course no EFI boot mode, but otherwise it works exquisitely with lion 10.8.3 and above, with full acceleration in motion 5 (it renders 6x faster than my old 5890) which presumably would translate over to FCX as well (though i don't use that asa much). works great with resolve too.

this card will not work with any mac os before 10.8.3 so i had to kiss my snow leopard boot drive goodbye. works fine in bootcamp too once the drivers are up and running (I recommend keeping your old video card handy until you've got it all set up) also uses about 100 watts less power than the 5890

as for what not having bios/EFI boot really means: basically anything that you can see on screen on a mac during startup before your desktop comes up would no longer be visible. the apple logo, target disk mode logo, but more importantly, you can't see option selecting a startup disk, or the command-s command line screen for running file system check, etc. if you have another card you can swap out when the need arrises then you're fine. if you don't have multiple startup disks, then not much to worry about. I do, but have managed to avoid having to put my old card in for anything by using startup disk in the system preferences. once had to zap p-ram to force it to startup on the default disk, but no sweat.

Thanks for yiur reply,
What about the power consumption of the 7970. I've read that the 6 & 8 pin power cables may be too much for the Mac PCI slots if there is an additional card. I also have an AJA KONA 3G card installed and am concerned about running over the allotted 300w allocated to the PCI slots.
Please advise...

The Kona only uses PCIe bus power, if i'm not mistaken, which is 25W. The radeon, despite having one 8pin and one 6pin power input uses less power than legacy cards such as the 58XX. when i had both my 5890 and 7970 in at once, my total power consumption was about 100W higher than when I only had the 58XX in, and even under heavy load the total system consumption would max out at about 660W (take out 150W for monitors, and that's just over 500W the Mac Pro is actually drawing, well under the 1000W the power supply is rated for).

You should be fine, even with everything, but I'd recommend only having one graphics card in most of the time, for heat as much as anything else, and because there's not that much benefit most of the time:

The only way you can get a *slight* performance gain in the mac with multiple graphics cards is to have your lesser card driving GUI freeing up the other for processing, though depending on the App, this may require the card you want to do your processing to drive the menu-bar monitor, so even that only helps if you have a large multi-monitor setup.