Hello, I have the chance to purchase multiple 5870s and am thinking about flashing them so that they can be used in earlier Mac Pros. Based on what I've read though, it seems that the card will work "out of the box" with no flashing required. Does anyone have experience with the card and if so, minus the boot screen not showing, are there any issues you've encountered? Any feedback is much appreciated.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
ATI 5870 in Mac Pro. Flash Required?
- Thread starter StockDC2
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The 5870 flash was worked out largely by Netkas, I did some testing.
Details at his site.
There are many problems with flashed 5870 cards, most notably the only place to see the hoped-for boot screen is on a VGA display connected via DVI to VGA adapter.
Putting them in PCIE 2.0 requires moving a tiny resistor. (discovered by yours truly)
For most people, the DP port is non-functional. They aren't a super card to flash, if by chance you are running an old VGA display, they're great.
Read up on details, there never was a "Golden Version" that worked better than what I have described. Sadly, the copy & paste flasher crowd never did any work to improve them.
Details at his site.
There are many problems with flashed 5870 cards, most notably the only place to see the hoped-for boot screen is on a VGA display connected via DVI to VGA adapter.
Putting them in PCIE 2.0 requires moving a tiny resistor. (discovered by yours truly)
For most people, the DP port is non-functional. They aren't a super card to flash, if by chance you are running an old VGA display, they're great.
Read up on details, there never was a "Golden Version" that worked better than what I have described. Sadly, the copy & paste flasher crowd never did any work to improve them.
Hey, thanks so much for the reply. I did some research but haven't had any luck finding what other problems there are other than the boot screen issue. Can you please elaborate?
I did find the article about moving the resistor. Sounds pretty scary and what's worse is that I don't even have a Mac Pro on hand to test the cards on.
A lot of the information that I read is outdated and I think that I even read somewhere that if you're running Lion, no flash is required.
I did find the article about moving the resistor. Sounds pretty scary and what's worse is that I don't even have a Mac Pro on hand to test the cards on.
A lot of the information that I read is outdated and I think that I even read somewhere that if you're running Lion, no flash is required.
Last edited:
There was a time I had to do a quick edit on a brochure layout in one of my client's office. They let me use their Mac Pro that had a flashed 5870 GPU. The back of the GPU had 2 vertically positioned DVI ports, a HDMI and a Display Port. From there I knew it was a PC card. It was hooked via VGA to a Viewsonic monitor. I noticed the monitor was connected to the lower DVI port. The art director who was using that Mac Pro commented only the lower DVI port provides boot screen. The display port does not work. They were using Snow Leopard that time. I could not remember the art director's comments on HDMI as I was rushing to finish the revision and was paying more attention on finishing up the edits.