It would be much nicer if we could simply use a PC video card in the system, as it would greatly expand the possibilities for upgrades and do so at much better prices. The problem is that the first option is a fairly low end GPU, and the remaining two are fairly expensive upgrades at $499 and $399 respectively. Apple only offers three video card options for the Mac Pro: a GeForce 7300 GT, Quadro FX 4500 and a Radeon X1900 XT.

With Windows XP now working at full speed on the Mac Pro, we run into another hurdle in making the Mac Pro the perfect XP/OS X workstation: the video card. If you've done it correctly, your SATA drives should now operate in Multi-Word DMA Mode 2 instead of PIO Mode when viewed in Device Manager. The fix is simple you need to download and extract the Intel chipset drivers for the 5000X, as well as the SATA drivers, and use a tool such as nLite to slipstream the drivers into your XP SP2 install CD. We couldn't find a reason why this was true, but after following the instructions posted here (and later mirrored here) our SATA problems went away. Thankfully, some clever OS X/XP users figured out the cause of the problem: the Intel 5000X drivers must be slipstreamed into the Windows XP SP2 install CD and loaded during Windows setup, not after, in order to avoid the problem.

Video and CPU performance was fine, but with I/O performance so low the system was a very poor performer in most applications. When we first reviewed the Mac Pro, we of course tried to install Windows XP on it.Īlthough Apple's Bootcamp beta now allows you to install Windows on a separate hard drive, you'll need to physically remove your OS X boot drive before beginning the install process otherwise you'll be greeted with the following error:Įven with Apple's updated Bootcamp 1.1 beta release, we encountered serious performance issues with SATA drives under XP the fastest transfer rate attainable, regardless of drive used, was only 3.9MB/s, which obviously made the system very slow.

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