EVGA's GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition: The Best for OS X?

Power Consumption

Comparing power consumption under OS X echoes what we've seen under Windows, the GeForce GTX 285 uses less power than the Radeon HD 4870 at idle but more under load:

Both of these cards will consume much more power under load than the GT120, but you also get much more performance out of them. The extra ~30W at idle isn't terrible.

Final Words

To me, the biggest advantage of EVGA’s GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition is its large 1GB frame buffer. Something you can’t currently get from any other video card Apple offers. Kudos to EVGA for not only putting out a complete product but also delivering the best video card offered on Apple’s website.

What I would like to see is this become a regular occurrence; whenever there’s a new PC GPU release I’d like to see EVGA or one of the other vendors provide quick turnaround on releasing a Mac edition. So long as there’s driver support, there’s no reason that it can’t happen.

The other thing I’d like to see is EVGA work to break down the ridiculous pricing on these things. A $100 price premium for two cables, different packaging and an EFI compliant ROM is ridiculous. Unfortunately that seems to be what the Apple user has to live with. EVGA’s pricing isn’t as bad as it could be (remember the $399 X1900 XT?) and from talking with EVGA, apparently they are also working to drive prices down. However if you take into account the fact that two PCIe power cables will cost you $60 and EVGA bundles them for free, the price premium ends up a more manageable $40.

Personally, I’d try your hands at converting a PC video card first but if you don’t want to deal with the hassle - EVGA’s GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition is pretty much the best option you’ve got.