Trouble updating to new videocard

Question

I am having trouble getting my new Nvidia Quadro FX 5600 video card to install. When I fired the machine up after putting the new card in it gives a alarm tune and the monitor does not wake up.
My system is a Mac Pro 2.8GHz 8-Core with 16GB of ram and a 1TB HD, it currently has a Radeon 3870 card in it, I am running OS X 10.5.5.
I bought the Quadro card from eBay.
Is there any difference between a PC video card and a Mac?
I am new to Mac's, this is my 1st system, but I am loving it so far.
Thanks for the help in advance.

Answer 1

Hi,
I was looking at using the FX 5600 to improve performance while running Windows on the mac desktop with VMWare Fusion 2 and running SolidWorks 2007.
Taken from the Fusion Communities http://communities.vmware.com/thread/70071
"SolidWorks runs rather well in VMware Fusion. I'm using XPx64 with SWx64 and the performance is really great...for a VIRTUAL MACHINE.
It is somewhat overly optimistic to think that a virtual device will ever perform as well as a real device. I would NEVER recommend that someone attempt to do any serious or meaningful CAD work on a virtual computer. This just doesn't make sense, especially when you can run a full version of Windows 64bit or 32bit natively in bootcamp. Furthermore, at this stage, Fusion cannot save to an NTFS format drive, which leaves you with accessing a FAT32 drive which is super slow.
In addition, SolidWorks REQUIRES access to a REAL video card in order to use HARDWARE OPEN GL. Unless VMware finds a way to access a REAL video card from a VIRTUAL environment, SolidWorks is a no-go for anyone other than a small parts modeler.
If your modeling needs are not too intensive, it'll work pretty darn good, I've been pleased with the performance so far. SW has not crashed once on me while using Fusion and I use it rather regularly for presentations to clients.
However, in reality this is a novelty for anyone using large assemblies, complex parts, rendering, mold flow analysis, cosmos, etc. If all you want to do is model some rubber dog dookey without having to boot into Windows...Fusion is all you need. But, unfortunately that's not going to be the case with people spending this much money on SW, you really need a real environment to do some real work.
The cool thing is that it works at all, and with the new 45nm process Intel has come up with for their chips we can look forward to more cores per chip in the future. If we could get more CPU cores in a VM, and dedicate a processor for video hardware emulation, I really think this software has a future in the CAD arena.
My 2 cents.
-MacSolidWorks"
Would the GeForce 8800 card work better then the 3870 ?
See above. And some benchmarks by Barefeats http://www.barefeats.com/harper17.html
Can you run 2 cards in a SLi mode with a Mac?
No SLI is not supported on a Mac Pro.
I seen a article on a SolidWorks site that says you can make a GeForce card think it is a Quadro card, can this really be done?
No personal experience with that, but I doubt it will be useful in Fusion (see above).
Personal I would propose to go with BootCamp for running Windows/Solidworks as it provides full access to REAL graphics cards instead of virtualizing one.
Stefan