Apple's new Power Macs with PCI Express and Blackmagic products

Hi,

Following is a message which Grant Petty asked me to post in this forum regarding Apple's new Power Mac G5's with PCI Express and products from Blackmagic Design.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design


Hi,

As you would know, Apple has announced the new Power Mac G5 machines, and as these are based on PCI Express (PCIe), I want to update you on the status of the PCI Express models of our products.

Available today is the DeckLink Extreme PCIe product which is a PCI Express version of the popular DeckLink Extreme card. This card is currently shipping in a product box that has stickers indicating it is a Windows product only. However this card is also compatible with these new Mac systems, and the current DeckLink Macintosh 5.1.1 driver already has support for this card running in the new Mac systems.

Please ignore the sticker on the box showing that DeckLink Extreme PCIe is Windows only, as it is fully Mac OS X compatible, using the latest drivers from our web site.

If you have one of these new Macs already, please download the driver and check it out. Functionality is the same as the current DeckLink cards, it's just the PCI interface that is different.

All other models of DeckLink standard definition cards should be shipping within the week. I will let you know as the other models become available.

DeckLink HD cards are only a few weeks away, and we are working hard to complete these and have them shipping before the Quad Core Mac G5 systems are available.

All prices of PCI Express (PCIe) based products are the same cost as the existing PCI and PCI-X models.

Some customers have already asked for PCIe upgrades, and unfortunately if we want to sell affordably priced products there is currently no scope for upgrades. Generally at these price points, it's rare for upgrades, and I think customers have got very good value from the DeckLink cards.

We also expect to keep selling PCI models for some time to come.

Multibridge Extreme has been delayed and has not shipped yet. The good news is we are just about complete on this product, and think it's only a week or two away at the most. We are starting to build production units today. However we want to make sure everything is well tested before shipping, so we expect another week of testing before everything is checked out.

I will let you know over the next week or two as the new PCIe versions of our products are released.


Regards,

Grant
Blackmagic Design





The DeckLink Extreme PCIe is compatible with the new range of Power Mac G5 computers with PCI Express.

Luke

How do your card work if there is a NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 that takes over a PCI-e slot plus a SATA or FC card for storage in the machine?
Is NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 video card compatible with your cards & FCP in general?

-sean

Hi Sean,

That's right and one of the nice things about the PCIe bus in the new G5's, compared with the previous PCI and PCI-X buses, is that there are no shared buses. Every slot is on its own independant bus and this means one card will not slow down another card :-)

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design