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MP 1,1-5,1 MVC EFI BIOS for AMD 580?
- Thread starter bookemdano
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oh thats a shame
is there a specific reason as to why you cant retain that BIOS part number at least so the OS X drivers load the custom framebuffer personality?
or use the Pulses original VBIOS as the starting point for the Custom firmware?
or is it a case that the framebuffer personality is incompatible with the Custom firmware/boot screen setup you have developed?
(ie if you were to enable it, would OS X boot part way up then fall over once it kicks in?)
I can confirm the bootscreens also working to 4K monitor via DP 1.4.
Mail-in flash for RX480 and RX580 now available from MVC, $150 for the 580 and ten bucks less for the 480. From MVC's blog:
"Hey, so wanted to let everyone know that we are officially taking flash orders via mail. We are going to start off just doing 4 cards we have already worked with. This will include the original Reference 480, the Sapphire Pulse, the MSI 580 8GB and a Gigabyte AORUS 580 8GB.
Once we establish a working baseline and try some other cards out we will be expanding to more models."
Hopefully the UK & EU agents will be up and running shortly.
"Hey, so wanted to let everyone know that we are officially taking flash orders via mail. We are going to start off just doing 4 cards we have already worked with. This will include the original Reference 480, the Sapphire Pulse, the MSI 580 8GB and a Gigabyte AORUS 580 8GB.
Once we establish a working baseline and try some other cards out we will be expanding to more models."
Hopefully the UK & EU agents will be up and running shortly.
I bought my MSI Armor RX 580 here in Japan for ¥21,000 = US$197.
If i post it to MVC for flashing - on return it will have cost me a totoal of US$347 + shipping.
That is just too much no matter how much I would like having EFI bootscreens with this card.
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In any case I still have an EFI flashed & under-volted Sapphire HD 7970 3gb. & an EVGa PowerLink if I absolutely need EFI booting.
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Off topic a little . . .
One problem I noted in using my RX 580 with Win 7 was that it was now impossible to boot OUT OF Win 7 back into Mac OS without doing a PRAM reset - an EFI'd GPU would be handy in that situation.
I haven't tried Brigadier yet which sees Mac OS volumes - but seeing that I rarely use my Win 7 install ( on it's own spinner HDD - no Bootcamp ) and the fact that Mojave 10.14.6 ( full clean install with the "6.05gb. " FULL installer - then CCC cloned to an HFS+ formatted Samsung 970 EVO is pleasing me no end .. it came to me that Mojave 10.14.6 satisfies and even excels my needs so much so that I rarely even need to EFI boot lately.
I feel that Mojave is the best ever final MacOS released to date.
Apple appears to have put as much work into it's development as they did with their refining of Snow Leopard 10.6.8.
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Hopefully, sometime in the near future Netkas or Fiorian will surprise us with a Christmas present.
From a rank newbie to a confident GPU flasher. . I learned so much from them.
Of course other cMP owners have their own needs.
If i post it to MVC for flashing - on return it will have cost me a totoal of US$347 + shipping.
That is just too much no matter how much I would like having EFI bootscreens with this card.
==============================================
In any case I still have an EFI flashed & under-volted Sapphire HD 7970 3gb. & an EVGa PowerLink if I absolutely need EFI booting.
===============================================
Off topic a little . . .
One problem I noted in using my RX 580 with Win 7 was that it was now impossible to boot OUT OF Win 7 back into Mac OS without doing a PRAM reset - an EFI'd GPU would be handy in that situation.
I haven't tried Brigadier yet which sees Mac OS volumes - but seeing that I rarely use my Win 7 install ( on it's own spinner HDD - no Bootcamp ) and the fact that Mojave 10.14.6 ( full clean install with the "6.05gb. " FULL installer - then CCC cloned to an HFS+ formatted Samsung 970 EVO is pleasing me no end .. it came to me that Mojave 10.14.6 satisfies and even excels my needs so much so that I rarely even need to EFI boot lately.
I feel that Mojave is the best ever final MacOS released to date.
Apple appears to have put as much work into it's development as they did with their refining of Snow Leopard 10.6.8.
================================================
Hopefully, sometime in the near future Netkas or Fiorian will surprise us with a Christmas present.
From a rank newbie to a confident GPU flasher. . I learned so much from them.
Of course other cMP owners have their own needs.
I finally got enough cables to do this test. Yes, it can drive 5 displays at once! All at 60hz.
3840x2160 @ 60hz - DisplayPort
1920x1200 @ 60hz - DisplayPort
1920x1080 @ 60hz - DVI
1920x1080 @ 60hz - HDMI
Does the card need to be physically modified in any way ?
I have ordered one, I am just curious
I have ordered one, I am just curious
Yes, a new EPROM needs to be soldered onto the board in place of the existing part. Hence the expense and the lack of a do-it-yourself option.
I have the macvidcards model here now, it seems to work very well. I have an LG 4k monitor and can switch from bootcamp to macos with the bootscreen, performance seems identical to the normal sapphire card i was using, no additional fan noise....
but everytime when i slept the computer the monitor did not get a signal on waking (but this has happened once before with the stock card) so i switched from displayport to hdmi and the sleep/wake thingy is all good again...
but everytime when i slept the computer the monitor did not get a signal on waking (but this has happened once before with the stock card) so i switched from displayport to hdmi and the sleep/wake thingy is all good again...
At the risk of being a bit off-topic, I want to give my input on this issue here. I have an LG 4K display (27UD88-W) and unflashed RX 580 (Sapphire Pulse). Since 10.14.4, display wake has been a major problem. I've mentioned before that the culprit seems to be DP. And while using HDMI is certainly possible, I've noticed that the image quality of HDMI is a bit inferior, particularly involving red colors:
What I have found to be most interesting is that if I pass the DP signal through my Titan Ridge Thunderbolt card (it has a DP input and output), then the wake issue is gone! This is what I've resorted to.
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The MVC EFI ROM has the same 262’144 Byte as the original Sapphire Pulse ROM. No need to solder another EPROM chip.
I have the same issue when I use an HDMI splitter between computer and monitor, which only supports HDMI 2.0. Especially everything in red is inferior.
When I connect my monitor directly to the graphics card, the issue is gone. Both my monitor and the RX 580 support HDMI 2.0b. No difference between DisplayPort 1.2/1.4 and HDMI 2.0b.
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Macstore UK (MVC's partner over here) told me it was a physical change. But then, they are yet to offer a flashing service on customer cards. ' I would expect that in the coming weeks we may be able to offer a flashing service for the Pulse card but highly doubtful for other models for the foreseeable future.' Which is, frankly, a load of horse manure. If the guy who wrote the ROM can do other models, so can they. I pointed out all the models MVC is offering have the same port config as the Pulse, and even offered to pay them to do my Aorus as a guinea pig card. They have yet to reply. Not good. I might drop the Polish guys a line, see if they're any more willing to actually take people's money…
Hi, Sorry for the ignorance, but can anybody tell what are the pros and cons of an MVC Flashed card I have a Sapphire Pulse RX580 8GB, and would like to install it on a MAcPro 5,1 running High Sierra 10.13.6 at the moment and want to be able to run Mojave and be able to have my File Vault activated and access to my pre-boot screen having only that card installed, and MVC flashed cards seems to be the only option available, I'm a Sound guy and work with sound and eventually videos but nothing too fancy or crazy so my graphics demands are not really high or anything, could anybody throw me some light and help me a little bit with this I've been doing muy research but its hard to come to conclusions, Thanks
^^^^I have run MVC flashed cards for a few years now, and know of no negatives. After boot, upon reaching the desktop, the flashed card will behave like any non-flashed card. The MVC card will behave on boot, like what used to be called "Mac Edition" GPUs supplied by Apple in the "old days" and by EVGA more recently. But, as of right now, no third party supplier of AMD cards makes a Mac Edition card, and of course Nvidia cards are no longer supported by Apple. The MVC cards provide a boot screen that allows the user to do the processes the boot screen allows.
Lou
Lou
Further reply from Macstore UK: "At this point in time we have only had conformation [sic] that the EPROM chip we stock from MVC will work stable with the Pulse card. MVC may now be offering flashing or other 580 options but as we have to buy a large number of EPROM chips upfront for the Pulse card it doesn’t make commercial sense to buy further large shipments of EPROM chips for primarily mail in service. If the situation changes and we can offer more 580 selections we will be able to offer you the service on the Aorus card.
It was decided to do physical EPROM changes instead of flashing to solve the issue of other vendors making copies of the MVC ROM."
Which is fair enough. Waiting seems like the best option, sadly…
It was decided to do physical EPROM changes instead of flashing to solve the issue of other vendors making copies of the MVC ROM."
Which is fair enough. Waiting seems like the best option, sadly…
Sell your card on eBay and buy the Sapphire RX 580 from macstoreuk.com. Better than waiting for a flashing service.
Given second hand prices have tanked on account of all the mining cards being dumped, and the price of a flashed card…I'll pass.
Even with a flashed card the 5,1 is still blacklisted from being able to use FileVault in Mojave.
Indeed, and that sucks.
It's possible to work around though, by attaching your mojave/catalina boot drive to another compatible Mac, enabling FV2 there, and then moving it back. At least one person here did exactly that (utilizing a 680 or 7950 that had bootscreens).
Hell, to install Catalina you'll likely have to do that kind of switcheroo anyway, so not that big of a deal to enable FV2 while you're at it.
I'm quite sure that someone more knowledgeable about the mechanisms behind Apple's blacklisting techniques (dosdude1 for example) could figure out an easier way to re-enable FV2 on the cMP. I'm just not that familiar with macOS under the hood to have any idea how. There just isn't much demand, sadly--and likely to be even less now that it's been officially dropped from Catalina.
Yeah, not surprising at all though since Apple never intended the 3,1 to run Mojave. The block was only for the 5,1 because Apple knew that they were specifically recommending a GPU that wouldn't allow FV2 to be used.
However, you bring up a good point because now that the 5,1 is officially dropped from Catalina, is the block from enabling FV2 also gone? I'm waiting for the official release to mess with it, so maybe someone who has been using the beta(s) can comment. Seems to me that Apple ought to remove the artificial FV2 block since they have no expectation that users are going to install it on MacPro5,1.