Sapphire HD 7950 3GB Mac Pro/Hackintosh Edition First Look

Updated: March 18, 2013

For many folks anything in the personal computer world with the name Apple or Mac attached to it is usually a very pricey admission ticket and when buying any kind of an upgrade for their Mac Pro lineup is excessive at best. This dilemma however has forced the hand of the user who wants a Mac, but may work for the place that sells Big Macs to become a guerilla user due to lack of available funds. What constitutes a guerilla user you may ask, well it’s a person who has to build a Hackintosh just to have an affordable solution for them to work and learn on, because let’s just face it paying for a Real McCoy Mac is no way a reality. The thing is Sapphire is putting a light at the end of the tunnel I feel with this bold move into retail and affordable upgrade parts that fit into the Hackintosh build model like peanut butter and chocolate and I for one am stoked by this new release coming very soon.

The card states on the box that it is an intended upgrade path for the Mac Pro series of personal computers and that will be one way to beat Apple at their own game and avoid paying their bloated costs. Last Friday I was able to get my hands on one of these new cards in an attempt to see just how one would first off install the card and then get some performance results in to see how it fares. You see like most high-end video cards that the card requires direct power tvia its dual 6-Pin (75w) connections that give the card additional power beyond the PCIe slot’s 75w provided power to keep it running. Inside the box there are two cables that are meant to provide the power to the card, which can be installed easily. You can see that Sapphire has chose to go with a solid white color scheme with the Sapphire logo done in white and that the rear I/O offers the same connectivity as the first generation 7950’s with a single Dual-Link DVI a single HDMI, and dual Mini DP connections. For those wanting a card that will work in both the Windows and Mac environment the card has a switch on the side allowing you to change the way the card reads the EFI allowing easy integration between systems.

The Sapphire Mac Pro Edition 7950 offers 1,792 stream processors with a core clock running at 800MHz, in addition to 3GB of GGDR5 video memory at 500Mhz with a 384-Bit memory interface. Because it is a Mac-compatible product, it comes with a special BIOS and the familiar Apple white coloring, which should look good with the aluminum color scheme of the Mac Pro. This product is coinciding with the release of the new projectq motherboard, the very first motherboard to be built from the ground up to run any OS that is currently in existence and will be the perfect motherboard for the poor mans Mac Pro. As of now no actual release date has been set but the rumored price is set to be around the $450.00 range, that although higher than the Windows version is still a hell of a lot less than what Apple would want you to pay form them as they price rape the hell out of honest folks just trying to have a powerful system. As a Hackintosh user and enthusiast I can’t wait to see how well this card runs and how it can improve my daily workload by reducing the time it takes to render things, edit video and even play Steam games. Like always what is your opinion on this? Is this a cool move from Sapphire and are you looking to improve your Mac Pro or Hackintosh by way of this new card? Let us know your thoughts and opinions as your thoughts count here on Tech OF Tomorrow. Thanks for reading; we will be doing a full review on this card in our 2010 Mac Pro, which will be published next week.