MP 1,1-5,1 Macvidcards... they have been very responsive for me

[PROFESS0R]

All,

Recently, I have engaged in the process of updating my 2010 5,1 that I purchased new in 2010. This Mac Pro has been serving up my webpages and email 24-7 for all this time, and it has been flawless. The only failure I have had is that my PSU finally gave out and I replaced it. I have upgraded to 128Gb of ram, 2 six core 3.46GHz 5960 processors, upgraded wifi and bluetooth cards, added two SSDs on PCIe, USB C, Fibre Channel, and to the point of this post, an RX 580 Pulse graphics card.

I sent macvidcards an email, expecting, based on some feedback in macrumors, that they would either respond slowly, or not at all. I received a quick response from MacVidCards Kid (LOL) whose real name I do not know, and we have traded emails back and forth to get my GPU flashed. I sent my GPU to them yesterday, and I will be excited to report back when it is sent back to me. So far, I have been impressed with their responses.

By the way, the reason I decided to spend the extra money to get my card flashed is because I somehow screwed up the permissions on my High Sierra install, and ended up with some very odd errors so I decided to do a reinstall via CMD-R. As most if not all of you know, you need to install a Mac specific GPU in order to see the boot sequence in order to do a OS reinstall. I decided I would rather be out $150 than deal with having to reinstall the original GPU every time I needed to see the boot sequence.

I expect the card back next week. Stand by for more.

Joe

 

[Snow Tiger]

All,

Recently, I have engaged in the process of updating my 2010 5,1 that I purchased new in 2010. This Mac Pro has been serving up my webpages and email 24-7 for all this time, and it has been flawless. The only failure I have had is that my PSU finally gave out and I replaced it. I have upgraded to 128Gb of ram, 2 six core 3.46GHz 5960 processors, upgraded wifi and bluetooth cards, added two SSDs on PCIe, USB C, Fibre Channel, and to the point of this post, an RX 580 Pulse graphics card.

I sent macvidcards an email, expecting, based on some feedback in macrumors, that they would either respond slowly, or not at all. I received a quick response from MacVidCards Kid (LOL) whose real name I do not know, and we have traded emails back and forth to get my GPU flashed. I sent my GPU to them yesterday, and I will be excited to report back when it is sent back to me. So far, I have been impressed with their responses.

By the way, the reason I decided to spend the extra money to get my card flashed is because I somehow screwed up the permissions on my High Sierra install, and ended up with some very odd errors so I decided to do a reinstall via CMD-R. As most if not all of you know, you need to install a Mac specific GPU in order to see the boot sequence in order to do a OS reinstall. I decided I would rather be out $150 than deal with having to reinstall the original GPU every time I needed to see the boot sequence.

I expect the card back next week. Stand by for more.

Joe

If you have such great communication with the "kid" - and I do know his real name - please ask him to return the GTX 750 Ti he never returned to me after I sent it to him for flashing . Losing other people's property is not worthy of a commendation . It also delayed a Build I was working on .

 

[skizzo]

All,

Recently, I have engaged in the process of updating my 2010 5,1 that I purchased new in 2010. This Mac Pro has been serving up my webpages and email 24-7 for all this time, and it has been flawless. The only failure I have had is that my PSU finally gave out and I replaced it. I have upgraded to 128Gb of ram, 2 six core 3.46GHz 5960 processors, upgraded wifi and bluetooth cards, added two SSDs on PCIe, USB C, Fibre Channel, and to the point of this post, an RX 580 Pulse graphics card.

I sent macvidcards an email, expecting, based on some feedback in macrumors, that they would either respond slowly, or not at all. I received a quick response from MacVidCards Kid (LOL) whose real name I do not know, and we have traded emails back and forth to get my GPU flashed. I sent my GPU to them yesterday, and I will be excited to report back when it is sent back to me. So far, I have been impressed with their responses.

By the way, the reason I decided to spend the extra money to get my card flashed is because I somehow screwed up the permissions on my High Sierra install, and ended up with some very odd errors so I decided to do a reinstall via CMD-R. As most if not all of you know, you need to install a Mac specific GPU in order to see the boot sequence in order to do a OS reinstall. I decided I would rather be out $150 than deal with having to reinstall the original GPU every time I needed to see the boot sequence.

I expect the card back next week. Stand by for more.

Joe

hate to burst your bubble, but you most certainly do not need to get that Sapphire RX 580 Pulse GPU flashed by MVC in order to get to the recovery partition or do any macOS installs. it did that already OOTB

 

[PROFESS0R]

When I boot with CMD-R, I did not get the normal option window. I wonder if I did not wait long enough? Regardless, I would rather have access to the boot screen than not.

I am hoping that I have better luck than several of you who have posted. I will definitely post my results here.

Joe

hate to burst your bubble, but you most certainly do not need to get that Sapphire RX 580 Pulse GPU flashed by MVC in order to get to the recovery partition or do any macOS installs. it did that already OOTB

 

[flowrider]

^^^^My Comment from another thread:

I'm now on my third MVC flashed card. The other two were Nvidia cards that got superseded by newer cards and of course the Apple Nvidia Feud. Downside - None that I know of. Everything's an upside View attachment 892544

My current GPU is a Gigabyte Aorus RX580 that I purchased myself and forwarded to him for flashing. He has a flashing service in addition to selling cards from his inventory.

Over the years I've never had an issue with MVC. Dave has always been responsive to me.

Lou

 

[skizzo]

When I boot with CMD-R, I did not get the normal option window. I wonder if I did not wait long enough? Regardless, I would rather have access to the boot screen than not.

I am hoping that I have better luck than several of you who have posted. I will definitely post my results here.

Joe

You likely didn't wait long enough. I would estimate it takes ~3mins, or the least, it is noticeably longer than a standard boot up. That's on an SSD too, guessing it would be longer with a HDD

Or any chance you had multiple monitors hooked up? I usually don't get the recovery to display if I have a 4K TV and a 2nd monitor hooked up at the same time....so these occurrences may look like you're stuck with a black screen but the recovery screen is there, it's just not displaying on the monitor. When that happened to me I usually unplug the TV and then the 2nd monitor shows the recovery screen instantly

Glad you WANT the extra features because if you just wanted an EFI flash thinking it was needed to do any installs that is false. It is prolly the most popular GPU recommended by Apple for the cMP's. So it would be pretty silly for them to suggest that card if it actually prevents you from doing any macOS installs or recovery etc

 

[h9826790]

...so I decided to do a reinstall via CMD-R. As most if not all of you know, you need to install a Mac specific GPU in order to see the boot sequence in order to do a OS reinstall.

This is wrong.

1) Any GPU that natively supported by the OS can access recovery partition. Flashed or not won't make any difference.

2) The macOS USB installer can also boot with any supported (but non flashed) GPU.

3) We can now use OpenCore to see the boot screen, no need to flash the graphic card. I just uploaded a video to show that my non flashed Radeon VII can boot verbose mode. Since there is no Mac EFI ROM for Radeon VII yet. And boot screen is required to see the text during verbose boot. Therefore, I think this is good enough to demonstrate that it is not necessary to flash our GPU for getting boot screen.

 

[kohlson]

There may be lots of reasons to have boot screens. But re/installing an OS is not one of them. I installed a stock Sapphire Radeo Pulse RX 580 8GB over a year ago. Since then, I have installed and reinstalled several major and minor versions of Mac OSX, and disabled/enabled SIP (which requires booting into Recovery - Cmd+R) many times. As noted above it does take a long time before the boot screen progress thermometer shows up - a few minutes or more. Have something to read readily available!

 

[1boomer]

I recently had my second experience with MVC, and found the experience to similar to my first one. Last time, I bought a somewhat overpriced pre-flashed Radeon card. The service was good. I have subsequently heard of different types of experiences from others. This time I sent him a nVidia GeForce GTX 680 to be flashed for Mac. I found the service to be quick and thorough. I received the completed GPU back from him within a week. It works as it should.

I had received comments that I could have easily done the GPU flashing by myself. That is true, I probably could have, but I don't have a PC desktop and don't know anyone that has one either.

I would consider availing myself of his service again, should the need arise. YMMV

 

[h9826790]

I recently had my second experience with MVC, and found the experience to similar to my first one. Last time, I bought a somewhat overpriced pre-flashed Radeon card. The service was good. I have subsequently heard of different types of experiences from others. This time I sent him a nVidia GeForce GTX 680 to be flashed for Mac. I found the service to be quick and thorough. I received the completed GPU back from him within a week. It works as it should.

I had received comments that I could have easily done the GPU flashing by myself. That is true, I probably could have, but I don't have a PC desktop and don't know anyone that has one either.

I would consider availing myself of his service again, should the need arise. YMMV

GTX680 is a completely different story.

Plenty of members here can flash that within 5min (including install the card into the cMP).

The process does NOT require a PC, not even require Windows. Just need to boot DOS and flash the ROM that dumped from the EVGA Mac Edition card.

For MVC, that will be super easy to do. And I won’t doubt that they prefer to finish your order first.

For RX580, that’s a completely different story. Evidences so far point to that they will physically open the card, desolder the original SPI chip, and solder another one which flashed with the Mac EFI ROM via hardware method. Way more complicated than the GTX680.

 

[mattspace]

3) We can now use OpenCore to see the boot screen, no need to flash the graphic card. I just uploaded a video to show that my non flashed Radeon VII can boot verbose mode. Since there is no Mac EFI ROM for Radeon VII yet. And boot screen is required to see the text during verbose boot. Therefore, I think this is good enough to demonstrate that it is not necessary to flash our GPU for getting boot screen.

*sigh* I really miss seeing verbose mode. Really looking forward to the way OpenCore is progressing - here's hoping it gets to be a non-risk turnkey thing.

 

[1boomer]

I thank you so much for your apres coup comment. Obviously, I did not access to your apparent wealth of knowledge on this specific topic when I was recently trying to get my ol' cheese grater up to speed so I could upgrade to macOS 10.14.6. I will endeavor to do more thorough scrounging around these fora next time around.

What is it that folks often often say about hindsight????

 

[flygbuss]

Both of my 5,1 cMP with dual CPU boards take several minutes to show the startup disk selection window or recovery mode, even with the stock 5770 installed. Don't know why it takes that long (there's a post out here somewhere when I tried to investigate it) but it always shows up eventually.
My other Macs (5,1 single CPU included) are much faster with that.
I can also second that as soon as I connect an additional 4k screen (3x 1080p + 1x 4k @ Radeon HD7950) I don't see the boot screen (apple sign + progress bar) at all.

 

[choreo]

Just mailed my new Sapphire Pulse RX 580 to MVC yesterday to get flashed - will report back with results.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

This is wrong.

1) Any GPU that natively supported by the OS can access recovery partition. Flashed or not won't make any difference.

2) The macOS USB installer can also boot with any supported (but non flashed) GPU.

3) We can now use OpenCore to see the boot screen, no need to flash the graphic card. I just uploaded a video to show that my non flashed Radeon VII can boot verbose mode. Since there is no Mac EFI ROM for Radeon VII yet. And boot screen is required to see the text during verbose boot. Therefore, I think this is good enough to demonstrate that it is not necessary to flash our GPU for getting boot screen.

What OS is this with and what boot rom? That's amazingly great news for 5,1 owners!

 

[h9826790]

Both of my 5,1 cMP with dual CPU boards take several minutes to show the startup disk selection window or recovery mode, even with the stock 5770 installed. Don't know why it takes that long (there's a post out here somewhere when I tried to investigate it) but it always shows up eventually.
My other Macs (5,1 single CPU included) are much faster with that.
I can also second that as soon as I connect an additional 4k screen (3x 1080p + 1x 4k @ Radeon HD7950) I don't see the boot screen (apple sign + progress bar) at all.

The native Apple boot manger is very slow. Use rEFInd etc will be much faster.
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What OS is this with and what boot rom? That's amazingly great news for 5,1 owners!

That’s with Mojave and 144.0.0.0.0, but should work for any MacOS BootROM practically.

It’s the function from OpenCore. Which allow us to bypass the BootROM’s EFI UGA part, and use the graphic card’s UEFI GOP directly.

Therefore, it should be OS and BootROM version independent.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

The native Apple boot manger is very slow. Use rEFInd etc will be much faster.
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That’s with Mojave and 144.0.0.0.0, but should work for any MacOS BootROM practically.

It’s the function from OpenCore. Which allow us to bypass the BootROM’s EFI UGA part, and use the graphic card’s UEFI GOP directly.

Therefore, it should be OS and BootROM version independent.

Oh, I see you need the open core boot loader thingy. Yea, that's too intricate for me at this point, but it looks promising. Glad it's giving 5,1 owners new leases on life!

 

[PROFESS0R]

Just received an email from macvidcards and they indicate my card shipped out less than a week after I sent it in. Should be here this week.

 

[PROFESS0R]

Received my video card back today, along with the $50 change from the $200 cash I sent them (they offer a cash discount). I will install the card tomorrow and report back. I am looking forward to having my boot screen show up again, and although I do not use verbose mode very often, I like having access to single user mode when I encounter issues. Thus far, macvidcards has been trustworthy and responsive. Assuming that the card works tomorrow as I expect it to, I could be happier.

Joe

 

[throAU]

Just received an email from macvidcards and they indicate my card shipped out less than a week after I sent it in. Should be here this week.

Sounds like he's just unboxed it, billed $150 and shipped it back, if judging by this thread, the modern UEFI cards are ok for boot screens (Y).

 

[flowrider]

^^^^Not on a 5,1 Mac Pro. When I had my 5,1, I was running MVCs flashed RX580 in Mojave. Without the flash there's is no boot screen. However, on the 7,1 Mac Pro with UEFI, the boot screen should appear without a flashed card. I just bought a 5700XT, so I'll see.

Read posts #7 and #10 above. Your conclusion is not correct.

Lou

 

[PROFESS0R]

Installed the card and it works perfectly. It is nice having the boot screen back. I tried single user mode and verbose mode and everything displays properly. Irrespective of the issues others have had with macvidcards, my experience has been nothing but positive.

Joe

 

[choreo]

Just received an email notice from MVC that my flashed card has shipped - that was a 24 hour turnaround!

 

[choreo]

UPDATE: Installed my MVC Flashed Card earlier tonight and it fired up all (3) connected monitors with boot screen and shows up in System Report... so far, so good!

 

[flyproductions]

but you most certainly do not need to get that Sapphire RX 580 Pulse GPU flashed by MVC in order to get to the recovery partition or do any macOS installs. it did that already OOTB

Yes, that's exactly what i experienced with my AREZ RX 570: No bootscreen, but recovery mode, keeping command-r pressed, without any problems.