HD For Indies

The good geeks over at Accelerate Your Mac have posted a detailed report with photos on the NVidia 6800 Ultra graphics card. Why care? This is the card that can drive the 30" Cinema Display. But in order to do so, it blocks the first PCI-X slot. This review (FINALLY!) has good pictures that shows how much the PCI slot gets blocked. This is important because if you want to edit HD with one of these cards, you're going to have to have at least two cards installed - an HD card and a drive interface card (SCSI, SATA, or fiber channel). If you're using SATA, very few cards presently on the market have external ports - they are usually internal ports and you have to run cables to the outside of the box usually via an empty PCI slot cover. It would be a very tight squeeze to route cables around this NVidia card, since it intrudes into the space that would be used by a PCI card in slot 2. So for the time being, I don't recommend the 6800 Ultra for Mac HD editors working with SATA cards. This may change in over the weeks and months ahead as new hardware alternatives become available.

-mike