Picture 1 of 7; Picture 2 of 7; Picture 3 of 7; Picture 4 of 7; Picture 5 of 7; Picture 6 of 7. Apple Mac Pro ATI Radeon HD 7870 2GB PCI-E Video Card 680 7950.
![]()
The only difference between a PC and a Mac video card is the ROM. Us Mac users from was back used to flash PC cards so we could use the more latest GPUs for cheap.hint hint.Unfortunately that doesn't work so well if the size of the code you need to flash doesn't fit in the flashROM, which happens. In that case you have to do physical work on the card to install larger flashROM chips, which isn't for the faint of heart. Also, that's not necessarily the only difference-my X800 Mac edition has different ports on the back than any of the PC versions. That would only matter depending on what kind of displays you have, of course.-Eric. Yeah, a 4850x2 is quite nice, but when youve got a Mac Pro which is pretty much the bleeding edge in terms of tech and cost, you expect to be able to kit it out with the very best GPU.
In that case it would be the 4870, 4870x2, or a NV GTX280.That Apple havent managed to put enough leverage and support in place in order to get a more middle of the road (though still very competent) 4850 for the MP, let alone a 4870, 4870x2, GTX280 or whatever just goes to show.The blame here lies in three places. ATI and NVidia, but mainly Apple. Theyre the driving force behind the drivers and integration of a GPU into the OS and are consistently failing to deliver.Things are admittedly better on the laptop side of things, where Apple are amongst the first to adopt the latest generation of GPU. But they are seriously lagging with desktops.I mean come on, its been 5 months since the 4870 came out, why is there still nothing to show for it? Is the next Mac Pro update gonna be in January? If Apple were to support crossfire there could a a stellar gaming computer with the new Core i7 stuff, and then the goodies from ATI (assuming the 4850 and 70 are released then, the 4850 being the stock card).
What would be an ultra ghey move from apple would be if the new card was the 9800 GT, I'm somewhat surprised they haven't started calling the 8800 we have now the 9800 just to stay 'on the bleeding edge' of GPU'sJanuary Expectations:- Core i7- 4670 or 9600 GT as stock card (would much prefer the 9600), option for either the GTX 260 or the 4870 depending on which company Apple goes with for the high end card- DDR3 RAM- gazillion $$ price-Snake. Unfortunately that doesn't work so well if the size of the code you need to flash doesn't fit in the flashROM, which happens.That's still quite the crock. The drivers should be written to run the code already on the cards. Much of it's ATI's own interpreted language, in the ones made in the last few years, with a bit of X86 that can even be run in a VM on PPC Macs. Someone's even gotten it working in open-source Linux and X drivers, for a few cards. ATI and Apple know what cards they support, so they could even ship the ROMs with the drivers, if writing better drivers isn't in the cards.Quote.
![]()
Is the next Mac Pro update gonna be in January? If Apple were to support crossfire there could a a stellar gaming computer with the new Core i7 stuff, and then the goodies from ATI (assuming the 4850 and 70 are released then, the 4850 being the stock card). What would be an ultra ghey move from apple would be if the new card was the 9800 GT, I'm somewhat surprised they haven't started calling the 8800 we have now the 9800 just to stay 'on the bleeding edge' of GPU'sJanuary Expectations:- Core i7- 4670 or 9600 GT as stock card (would much prefer the 9600), option for either the GTX 260 or the 4870 depending on which company Apple goes with for the high end card- DDR3 RAM- gazillion $$ price-SnakeWell since these are Mac Pro's it won't be Core i7, but the dual processor Xeon equivalent.I actually hope Apple chooses ATI GPUs. Out of nVidia's offerings, only the GTX260 and GXT280 support 64-bit double precision floats for GPGPU operation for OpenCL. NVidia's 8xxx and 9xxx series only support 32-bit floats which is what is needed for graphics, but higher precision is useful for general computation work which Apple is pushing for. That's why I wasn't overly enthused with the choice of 9400M and 9600M GT for the notebook refresh since it's just perpetuating a lower feature set and will have to continue to be supported in the future holding everything back.
In comparison, ATI has supported 64-bit floats as part of their DX10.1 GPUs, so both the HD3xxx and HD4xxx series. Which is why I hope Apple goes with the HD4670 or the HD4830 as the low-end GPU option. And to through nVidia a bone, let them have the GTX260 in the high-end if the 55nm shrink is available, otherwise go with the HD4870 or HD4850 X2.
Originally Posted by MacJunky They see it but then people would just buy that instead of the Mac Pro. Apple had workstation GFX card for the last Mac Pro but I guess they axed it or something, probably due to not many people buying it. They covered that in the Anand article. Apparently Apple rights the Nvidia drivers and there wasn’t a clear benefit in OS X to having an expensive work station card that was based off a consumer gaming card. The only benefit was more memory in OS X. I’m glad that the 4870 is supported now anyhow.
I’ve got my hack running with full 3D accleration in OS X with my 4870 as of last month. You can flash a PC 4870 to work in a Mac Pro now it’ll save you a couple hundred dollars. The answer to my own question is a gigantic YES!! The Sapphire ATI HD 4870 Toxic 1GB, works great under mac os and windows, plus its quiet, fantastic change to having the 3870 in there.
I did the flashing differently from what is said above though:I first of all set my mac pro to boot up in windows, and installed the drivers, then shutdown.Plugged the card in, 2 power cables!! And restarted into windows sorted out the card installed driver and everything there.I then used GPU-Z to copy the ROM of the card, make sure that you get the full 128kb!!
Thats why i used GPU-Z. I use Winflash to flash the ROM later on.I then took the card out and booted into mac os off the stock card that came with the early 2008 macpro (HD 2600).Using the commands and script from “pipomolo42” i made a dual boot ROM.
Found a Bash shell worked best in terminal.Put 4870 back in, booted into windows and flashed the card using Winflash.Restarted and works great!!!You can get everything you need from: from:. If you make a dual boot ROM, as i said in my previous post, you will definitely be able to use it in boot camp. But the main reason is to preserve any modifications that have been made to the card ROM, overclocking, fan speeds etc.Im sure windows can use EFI on hardware as well as bios, so you should be fine if you just flash it with the mac ROM as well.Crossfire, you need to have a compatible motherboard, but i think the Mac Pro’s is so you should have no problem.
You may just have a problem with power since the card uses two PCIe power cables, but i think you can get away with only one. Each card uses 300 watts, so you obviously need 600 for crossfire. So I bought this card – ‘SAPPHIRE 100259-1GL Radeon HD 4870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5’ from Newegg.com, which people are having success with It comes with two power cables, but I’ve been reading I need to buy two “ATI x1900 for PowerMac G5 power cables” in order to use it. I ordered just one power cable, as I only noticed the x1900 part, and I already have an x1900 in my Mac Pro.
![]()
Does anyone know if I really need the two G5 power cables? Can I mix the two x1900 cables I have? Is anyone using the power cables that came with it?. @FrostbiteThanks for the info man. I’ve been debating doing this but I think I may take the plunge now.
I was trying to figure out how to flash and swap cards and whatnot and your winflash strategy seems to be the easiest way to go. One more thing though: I am thinking of getting the Vapor-X sapphire card as its only $10 more and I would spend 30 on a new, quieter cooler for the stock one anyway. Given that the Bios controls the fan speeds at least under windows, if I modify the stock PC bios to be dual boot, it should keep the fan speed parameters, correct? Anyway thanks everyone for the help and thanks netkas for your hard work in figuring this out!. Optimus,No problem.
Yeah if you make the dual boot ROM out of the pc bios and mac efi your fan speeds should be maintained. So i think if your going to edit the bios to change fan speeds, do the edit then make the dual boot and flash it back on.
My card remains cool and its quiet with the dual boot ROM.The only problems i have had is the second DVI port not working, but this hopefully should be fixed in 10.5.7. My next job is doing it to a 2GB Vapour X, but not for a couple of weeks.Shout if you have a problem. This is awsome. I flashed my 11133-04-20R Sapphire 4870 1GB with a dual boot bios made using the script linked to earlier in this thread. Does anyone have any ideas on how to alter the EFI info to make vga / s-video / second dvi work? For now I am using my old 2600xt to drive extra monitors/tvs/projectors but would rather use one card and a Triple Head 2 Go. I know that on Hackintosh there is a utility to convert plist info into hex for the pcEFI bootloader.
Could that be used backwards so that we can edit the EFI data in the cards bios?. Hi Netkas,I posted a few posts back when I had bought a cheapo Sapphire 512MB 4870. It didn’t work when flashed or ATYinit’d or BOTH (kept repeating startup chime over and over and over) so I returned it after reflashing it to stock with my PC.I just bought the Sapphire 100259 1GB 4870 mentioned in this post:&postcount=886I downloaded the ROM linked to by netkas here:&postcount=128and followed the flashing instructions that netkas posted here:Now, I have the Sapphire 100259. I have ATYinit installed, so I first tried to just boot with the stock card firmware. As I suspected, no dice. The card was not recognized in OS X, but it was in Windows XP. I booted into XP, and took a backup of the card using GPU-Z.
Then, I booted into my DOS bootdisk and ran the flashing commands (listed above) with the ROM (also listed above) netkas posted. I rebooted after doing this, and bam. I now have the SAME looping startup chime.
I leave for college in a week and a day, and I’m really worried I won’t have this card to use for more workspace (which I desperately require at college.)Please, netkas or anyone else. Can you please help me solve my problem? All I want is Dual-DVI (not even DVI - VGA) to work on my card so that I can use it with my Mac Pro in OS X.Thanks so much in advance!//u better go to macrumors forum with this Q, to proper section.
![]() Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2023
Categories |