My Mac Pro 1,1 Windows 7 + Current gen Graphics Dilemma

[SuparNoob]

I currently have a 2011 MBP and I use it for OS X but recently I was given (yes given) a 2006 Mac Pro as my company were upgrading their music department line of Macs.

I decided I wouldn't really bother with the mac side and just use it as a backup for my MBP and I would just give it a 1TB HDD and whenever Mountain Lion comes out, I found a method to forcibly install it.
Please tell me this method works: http://www.j4mie.co.uk/blog/2012/02/18/how-to-install-mountain-lion-on-macpro11/

I decided that I was going to use it primarily as my windows machine. I upgraded it to 16GB RAM and planning to get a cheap SSD (The new Crucial V4 SATA 2 line should do nicely)
My dilemma begins with the widows 64bit install. I have retail windows 7 64 bit and I read that I have to have a patched install disk for 64 bit on the 1,1 model.
I plan to follow this guide: http://www.gopulls.com/blog/2009.08.26/install-windows-7-x64-on-a-mac-beat-the-select-cd-rom-boot-type-error/
And then use the snow leopard disk to get 64 bit bootcamp drivers (yes I know I have to use CMD and navigate my way to the .msi)

This should work, right?

My final, and arguably most difficult to solve dilemma is the graphics card. I plan to leave the 7300GT that was in there originally for the mac side and to get EFI Bootscreen. My question here is if there is a cheap upgrade to the 7300 that works with the 1,1 and allows for bootscreen?
I plan to stick in a GTX 670 into the second slot. This is what I'm worried about. I hear that if I have both the mac graphics drivers and the 670 drivers installed in windows it should be fine. If the PSU is not enough, I can stick a small PSU into the 2nd superdrive bay.

Any suggestions or glaring mistakes here? Can I get the GTX 670 running on the windows side (not worried about it working on the mac side) and will the other old card allow me to access boot screen and boot into mac at the same time?

P.S I understand my 2x 2.66 dual xeons may be a bottleneck but a friend of mine says he may have a couple of the xeon 5355 2.66 quads lying around that I understand my 1,1 can upgrade to. Will this be a good upgrade?

 

[Mr. Zarniwoop]

You don't need the EFI boot screen if you will only run Windows.

The boot screen's usefulness is to choose which device (and OS) to boot from, including an OS X recovery partition. Otherwise, once you hit legacy mode after about 30 seconds or so your PC graphics card will be initialized by its BIOS as if it was in a PC.

The MacPro1,1 is actually a great Windows 7 x64 machine. Latest ESD (electronic software distribution) Apple Boot Camp Windows Support Software (driver) downloads right from the Apple Software Update servers:

Apple Boot Camp 4.0 build 4033 from 2011.06.29 (for most Intel-based Macs, including official support for MacPro1,1)
Apple Boot Camp 4.0 build 4131 from 2011.07.02 (officially for mid-2011 MacBookAir4,1/4,2 and Macmini5,1/5,2/5.3 but seems to work fine on older Macs like MacPro1,1 too)

It installs the Windows Support Software CD image into:

/Library/Application Support/BootCamp/WindowsSupport.dmg

If you have trouble installing it because you officially have an unsupported Mac, use a tool like Pacifist to extract the DMG file so you can burn or mount it.

After installing the Boot Camp drivers in Windows, you can install the latest graphics drivers for your PC card.

For absolute maximum performance, two things left:

Enable AHCI SATA mode and drivers under Windows: Howto install an AHCI SATA driver in Windows XP, Vista and Win7

If you use Ethernet bonding/Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) you'll also need to install the Intel Ethernet drivers from their site.

 

[SuparNoob]

Thanks for the help, however I do plan to run a mac OS X partition, albeit not very often so in that case should I keep the original graphics card in there or should I only need to put it in if I need to boot to OSX? If I don't pt an EFI boot screen enabled graphics card in there, will it just boot to windows as long as I have a windows HDD set up?

Also about legacy mode, will the mac pro automatically boot to legacy mode if an OS X compatible graphics card is in there or will I have to do some tinkering?

 

[Mr. Zarniwoop]

Macs boot from the selected boot device in NVRAM. From Mac OS X, you select it from "Startup Disk" in "System Preferences". From Windows, you select it from the Boot Camp Control Panel.

Legacy mode booting doesn't have anything directly linked to a graphics card. Legacy mode booting (aka PC BIOS emulation) for Boot Camp is automatically selected if you choose a startup disk that is a recognized MBR (or hybrid GPT/MBR) partition that is typically used to boot Windows. Otherwise, the default is EFI32 mode booting that is typically used to boot Mac OS X.

If you use a non-EFI32 Mac firmware graphics card:

• Boot Camp/Legacy Mode/Windows boot: No Mac EFI boot screen, card will be initialized by its own BIOS like in would be in a PC right before any boot loader (typically Windows) starts
• Native/EFI32 Mode/Mac OS X boot: No Mac EFI boot screen, no grey Apple "spinner" Mac OS X boot loader screen, card can be initialized at the Mac OS X desktop if it's supported by a Mac OS X driver (i.e. no display until then)

Using a card with EFI32 Mac firmware would show the EFI boot screen (normally just grey screen, but if you hold the Option key it allows selecting a boot device) and in a native/EFI32 mode/Mac OS X boot show a grey Apple logo with "spinner" as the Mac OS X boot loads.

 

[SuparNoob]

Ah I see.
So after i install SL, Lion or ML in the future (running the 7300GT inside already) and I install windows on the 2nd HDD/SSD I go to system prefs in Mac and set startup disk to the Bootcamp disk?
After this, I can just put in the GTX 670 and take out the 7300 and it should boot one to windows 7. Is this right?
And If I want to boot to mac, just put the 7300GT back in and hold option at boot and select the mac disk.

Thanks for the help, I just need to be sure that the 670 will work on the windows side now and try and install win 7 onto the 1,1 which I hear takes some work.

 

[FluxMaven]

If I want to boot to mac, just put the 7300GT back in

I would think that the PCIe slots in the Mac Pro 1,1 would prevent you from utilizing all of that 670

also I'm pretty sure the GTX 570 or Radeon HD 6870 work under windows and OSX (Just no boot screen for OSX unless you flashed it) Without much work. Then you wouldn't have to swap the cards every time you wanted to switch to Mac.

I pulled a 5770 out of my PC and stuck in a Mac Pro 1,1 and it works fine, the monitor just shows a black screen until it hits the desktop.

 

[jay.w]

I was recently in the same position. I struggled with the windows 7 install for weeks, tried every trick in the book with no success. Finally just installed the drive in a PC and did the install there, letting it reboot to the initial "welcome" screen before shutting off and putting in the Mac Pro. Worked flawlessly.

I also did an upgrade to the quad core xeons ($150 on eBay) and got a notable boost in number crunching capability. Between that and my 16BGB of RAM, HD5770, and SSDs I had a very fast and capable machine more than capable of handling whatever I threw at it.

I did end up selling it though due to the EFI32 issue. I just realized that between the issues I had with the windows install, an irritating issue with it's operation with a new ACD, and the lack of support in snow lion that it was time to jump ship while I could still get value for it.

Ended up selling it for $1k (w/o SSDs and ACD) and bought a refurb 2009 for about $2100.