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GPU issues with 2006 Mac Pro

P

philm001

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 29, 2018
109
7
Hello all,

I am having an issue with a 2006 mac pro related to the video card. The 2006 mac pro has been flashed to 2,1 and I am running El Capitan on the machine v10.11.6.

(Please note that this is unrelated to my other most recent post)

I have 2 GPUs that I interested in using. One is the XFX HD 5830 and the other is the NVidia GT 120.

The GT 120 is mainly for having the boot screen and the HD5830 is the work horse.

Now, for the HD 5830, there is no screen being displayed. I am not sure what the issue could be? Any thoughts on this? I have a feeling that the reason is simply that it is a XFX card and I don't think there is enough power to utilize the card. But I would appreciate it if someone could confirm this.

For the GT120, I am actually confused. I pulled this from a 2009 Mac Pro model and the card was able to work as intended. I saw the boot screen and everything. On the 2006 Mac, no boot screen but I can get to the desktop. What would the reason for this be? I thought that the GT 120 was a supported gpu for apple?

I did come across some articles that were about 8 years old. The articles did bring up some concerns for compatibility with the GT120 cards in the 2006 mac models. Does that apply even today? Or is there a method out there that will allow for compatibility on the GT 120s?

(As a side note, I do have a few 8800's laying around, I will be trying with these soon)
 
philm001 said:
Hello all,

I am having an issue with a 2006 mac pro related to the video card. The 2006 mac pro has been flashed to 2,1 and I am running El Capitan on the machine v10.11.6.

(Please note that this is unrelated to my other most recent post)

I have 2 GPUs that I interested in using. One is the XFX HD 5830 and the other is the NVidia GT 120.

The GT 120 is mainly for having the boot screen and the HD5830 is the work horse.

Now, for the HD 5830, there is no screen being displayed. I am not sure what the issue could be? Any thoughts on this? I have a feeling that the reason is simply that it is a XFX card and I don't think there is enough power to utilize the card. But I would appreciate it if someone could confirm this.

For the GT120, I am actually confused. I pulled this from a 2009 Mac Pro model and the card was able to work as intended. I saw the boot screen and everything. On the 2006 Mac, no boot screen but I can get to the desktop. What would the reason for this be? I thought that the GT 120 was a supported gpu for apple?

I did come across some articles that were about 8 years old. The articles did bring up some concerns for compatibility with the GT120 cards in the 2006 mac models. Does that apply even today? Or is there a method out there that will allow for compatibility on the GT 120s?

(As a side note, I do have a few 8800's laying around, I will be trying with these soon)
Click to expand...
Mac Pro 2006 and 2007 have EFI32 firmware, GT120 is a EFI64 GPU, it works once macOS loads drivers, but will not get BootScreens on a EFI32 Mac Pro.

Apple had a model of 8800GT with EFI32, maybe you can try to flash the EFI32 firmware to your cards. You will have to search if the model you have is compatible with Apple's EFI32 firmware.
 
tsialex said:
Mac Pro 2006 and 2007 have EFI32 firmware, GT120 is a EFI64 GPU, it works once macOS loads drivers, but will not get BootScreens on a EFI32 Mac Pro.

Apple had a model of 8800GT with EFI32, maybe you can try to flash the EFI32 firmware to your cards. You will have to search if the model you have is compatible with Apple's EFI32 firmware.
Click to expand...

Oh, I did not know that. Thank you for clarifying that for me.

Is there some sort of list out there so that I know which cards have a bootable efi32 firmware?
 
philm001 said:
Oh, I did not know that. Thank you for clarifying that for me.

Is there some sort of list out there so that I know which cards have a bootable efi32 firmware?
Click to expand...
Open MacTracker, check for all supported cards for 2006 and 2007 Mac Pro, add 8800GT EFI32 to it. Now you have all Apple OEM cards.
 
Perfect, thank you. So what the HD 5830 issue? What would cause it to not even work in the system? Do I need to get drivers for the card?
 
tsialex said:
HD 5830 it's a PC GPU…
Click to expand...

Yes, my understanding is that the ATI cards had the best compatibility for Macs (generally speaking). From what I can tell, "most" nvidia cards are able to work with Macs through the web driver. So I am wondering, what is different about this card that prevents it from being used? Are not all nvidia cards PC cards?
 
philm001 said:
Yes, my understanding is that the ATI cards had the best compatibility for Macs (generally speaking). From what I can tell, "most" nvidia cards are able to work with Macs through the web driver. So I am wondering, what is different about this card that prevents it from being used? Are not all nvidia cards PC cards?
Click to expand...
First, PC Cards can only work if the card has driver support on macOS.

If the card ID is not present in the Apple AMD, Apple native NVIDIA or NVIDIA Web Drivers, it's not going to work.
 
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So here is an update. I just discovered that the GPU I am using in my 2006 mac pro is a 9800 GT.

I have OSX El Capitan installed on the machine. According to the About Mac page, I have installed 10.11.6. I download the nvidia drivers for this version and I get an error stating that the drivers are not compatible with this version of the computer (https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/120846/en-us)

I downloaded the older version of the drivers (for 10.11.5) and it says that those drivers are not compatible with 10.11.6.

What is going on here?

Also, I noticed that the card is unable to drive my 32 in monitor. Why would this be the case? The monitor max resolution is full HD. Could this be a driver related issue?
 
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