Many apple G5 Tower owners wish to use an Apple 30" Cinema Display, some have learned the hard way that after purchasing the display they were not immediately able to connect it to their G5 Tower without the proper video card. So before you go out and buy one or two Apple 30" Cinema Displays you might want to make sure you get the correct video card first.

Crucial first step is to know if you have an PCI-X or a PCI-Express Graphics slot G5 tower. This information is found under the system profiler. For quick reference the dual core and quad core G5 have PCI-Express and the single and dual G5 have PCI-X.

PCI-Express G5 Towers

• To run two Apple Cinema 30" displays the only card that will work is the Nvidia Quadra FX 4500(512mb)
• To run one Apple Cinema 30" display any of the stock display cards so the Nvidia GeForce 6600 LE(128mb), 6600(256mb), 7800 GT(256mb) work they all have one dual-link and one single link DVI port.
  
• Or newly released November 2006 the Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition (512mb) price not clear yet, shipping before X-mas, more updates on this exciting option soon(will surely run two 30 inch displays
  

A few things to know the 7800GT card was not available when this model G5's first hit the market. Many customers bought the NVIDIA 6600 cards with their QUADs and were told by Apple that this card would be sufficient to run Aperture. Well this is not the case, Aperture requires massive video card performance which the NVIDIA 6600 card does not deliver. As Apple does not offer the later available 7800GT card or the Quarda FX card seperate from a new G5 system the only option to upgrade these machines is to either find one of the original OEM cards on ebay or buy a modified PC card which can also be found on ebay. Even other people have sold their G5 towers to then re-order the same tower they had before with the 7800GT card as most people cannot afford the 1500+ price tag of the Quarda FX option.

PCI-X G5 Towers ( 8 ram slot machines only, 4 slot machines are PCI not PCI-X !!)

• To run two Apple Cinema 30" displays the options are Nvidia 6800 GT DDL or Nvidia 6800 Ultra DDL both are no longer available from apple and extremely difficult to find.
• To run one Apple Cinema 30" display the options are ATI Radeon X800/X850 XT Mac Edition 8x AGP only,  or ATI Radeon 9650

All cards mentioned for PCI-X machines have 256mb of video ram. Questions and comments welcome, remember this is for G5 towers only not G4's.

With the Nvidia Quadro FX 4500, the Nvidia 6800 GT & Ultra DDL cards you lose one extra PCI slot next to the graphics card due to the massive heatsink.

Mac Pro DUAL-Core Intel Xeon (First Generation) 2.0/2.66/3.0

• To run two Apple Cinema 30" displays the options are ATI Radeon X1900 XT or QUADRO FX 4500, also 2 or more NVIDIA Geforce 7300 GT should do the job
• any stock card will run a single 30" display.
  

The 7300 GT looks interesting to G5 PCI-Express owners with NVIDIA 6600 cards but I have bad news it cannot be used in any G5 tower because there is no open firmware available for the 7300 GT card. Luckily the X1900 card is now also available as a version for the PCI-Express G5 towers which lacked any serious alternatives.

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