Anyone with a 285 GTX on a MacPro 1,1?

[josephnunn]

Hello All, my first post.

I've got a XFX 285 gtx in my gaming PC I'm considering upgrading and was wondering what I can do with it. After some searching I found netkas.org and many other forum posts regarding shoehorning a 285 gtx into a mac pro 1,1 which I happen to use as my office computer. Great Idea! However I have not been able to find netkas's injector for download. Additionally it seems the injector or nvidia drivers might (?) no longer be necessary to get PC version cards to work with Mountain Lion (Lion?).

To summarize:
I've got a Mac Pro 1,1 with 10 gbs of ram and currently using a 8800gt w/32bit EFI as my video card, I've got a Nvidia 7300 sitting on a shelf.
I've got a XFX 285 GTX 1gb, PC version, in a gaming PC I would like to migrate into the Mac Pro if I get a new video card for the gaming machine.

Questions:
Do I still need netkas's injector? If so where can I download it from?
Do I still need to use another Nvidia card, like my 8800gt on slot 3?
Do I need to flash my PC card's to 64EFI to get it to work with Lion or will it 'just work' as the newer Fermi cards are purported to do so on Mountain Lion
What about upgrading to Mountain Lion? Would this help me run a PC 285 GTX without otherwise modification?

Ideally I would be able to use the 285 gtx on the Mac Pro for CUDA and OpenCL programming and experimentation.

Any ideas or stories of success are appreciated!

Joseph

 

[CaptainChunk]

In Mountain Lion (this requires a bootloader hack on a 1,1), a GTX 285 should simply just work, as the drivers are already there.

Two caveats: 1) You won't get an EFI boot screen if it's the primary GPU; 2) The card will be throttled down to 2.5 GT/s link (this actually doesn't matter much in most cases).

It is possible to flash a GTX 285, provided the card is based on a reference NVIDIA design and the ROM chip is large enough to hold an EFI ROM. However, many pre-Kepler NVIDIA PC cards use smaller ROM chips, making this impossible without soldering on a new chip.

 

[josephnunn]

@CaptainChunk

Thanks for posting the info on Mountain Lion. I suspected ML would support a PC 285 gtx card with the included drivers, however as those cards precede the latest drivers they are not listed as being supported. Nvidia tends to put out one driver that can deal with any card from my experience and it is good to hear that from you.

Unfortunately I do sometimes boot from a firewire drive that I carbon copy clone to from my installation. I might try out the Mountain Lion approach in the future but I want to give Lion a shot first.