It was a like for like comparison from someone else who tested the GTX 970, it just struck me as not a vast increase but I am aware there are a lot of other factors to consider.
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.
New Nvidia GTX 970 and 980 - cMP?
- Thread starter PostProdMan
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
It was a like for like comparison from someone else who tested the GTX 970, it just struck me as not a vast increase but I am aware there are a lot of other factors to consider.
Probably because the GT 120 is not supported by windows nvidia drivers anymore. It would conflict with the GTX 970 and you'd have all kinds of driver weirdness happen.
When Windows boots up with the GT120 it loads a generic video driver with no hardware acceleration. Therefore it disables a secondary card.
I'm at my wit's end here. I recently grabbed an MSI GTX 970 (http://us.msi.com/product/vga/GTX-970-GAMING-4G.html#hero-overview). Upgraded from a flashed Sapphire Vapor-X 5870. Works fine under OS X and Windows 7 once they've booted (no EFI screen obviously).
Problem is, once I've booted into Windows 7... I'm stuck there. Boot Camp control panel only shows "Time Machine" of all things, which is actually on a separate drive from my OS X boot SSD. If I remove the Time Machine drive, the Boot Camp control panel errors out with "An error occurred while trying to access the startup disk settings."
Here's where things start to get weird. Holding down option during boot and trying to do a blind boot pick won't boot ANYTHING. Just a black screen, even if Windows is "blind" picked (it would be the default anyways). If I restart without holding option, Windows 7 boots normally. The ONLY way I have been able to boot back to OS X is by plugging in another GPU with mac EFI and option-selecting it during boot. I would just leave the card in there always, but no extra card I have lets the 970 function in Windows.
I have tried everything I could think of, including a clean install of OSX. SMC/pram/etc done dozens of times. I can't figure out why I'm locked out of selecting my OS X for boot. Does this sound familiar to anybody?
Problem is, once I've booted into Windows 7... I'm stuck there. Boot Camp control panel only shows "Time Machine" of all things, which is actually on a separate drive from my OS X boot SSD. If I remove the Time Machine drive, the Boot Camp control panel errors out with "An error occurred while trying to access the startup disk settings."
Here's where things start to get weird. Holding down option during boot and trying to do a blind boot pick won't boot ANYTHING. Just a black screen, even if Windows is "blind" picked (it would be the default anyways). If I restart without holding option, Windows 7 boots normally. The ONLY way I have been able to boot back to OS X is by plugging in another GPU with mac EFI and option-selecting it during boot. I would just leave the card in there always, but no extra card I have lets the 970 function in Windows.
I have tried everything I could think of, including a clean install of OSX. SMC/pram/etc done dozens of times. I can't figure out why I'm locked out of selecting my OS X for boot. Does this sound familiar to anybody?
Remove the 970.
Boot into OSX with the old card.
Clone your OSX drive to a USB attached external hard drive.
Shut down, reinstall the 970, and boot back into Windows.
If the external hard drive comes up in Bootcamp control panel and you can restart and boot from it, then I'd venture that there is a conflict between the AHCI drivers, HFS drivers (if installed) and the 970 drivers.
When that happened back in the old days we used to manually assign each device driver its own IRQ space from the Device Manager. I don't know what people do now and fortunately I have no conflicts.
Edit: with 970 installed, check to see if any devices are reporting an error in the Device Manager. If so, shut down and then move devices to different SATA and PCIE slots. Then boot and check again.
Last edited:
Thanks for the insight. I'll get around to cloning my SSD onto an external a bit later today. No errors of any kind that I can see in Device Manager. The OS X SSD is also perfectly accessible in Win7 Boot Camp (that would be the doing of the Boot Camp HFS drivers, right? Sorry, this is not my territory, and its been a while since I last dove into all this stuff.)
I tried mixing around my drives around previously, although not in all possible configurations. Suppose I can give that a go for kicks. But IIRC, AHCI only works in slots 1 & 2 in Windows on the cMP even with Intel AHCI drivers.
Mac Pro 4,1. I have 3 HDDs (Slots 1, 3, 4). 2 SSDs (Samsung 840 EVO with OS X 10.10 in empty optical bay, Samsung 840 with win7 in Slot 2).
That's a lot of drives. When USB 3.1 cards are out you should move them to an external box and just keep the essentials in the Mac.
If you keep seeing your problem, try a very basic standard config. OSX drive in slot 1, Bootcamp in slot 2. No other drives installed. Then see if the problem still exists.
I guess I forgot to mention that I've previously tried it with ONLY the OSX drive in slot 1, and all I get is a black screen. Which made me think it was a 970/efi related problem.
What I did:
1. GT 120 in PCIe slot 1.
2. Boot to OSX
3. Switch to NVIDIA Web driver
4. Shut down
5. Replace GT 120 with GTX 970 in PCIe slot 1 (also tried slot 2)
6. Boot to OS X successful (no efi boot screen)
7. Choose Win7 Boot Camp as startup disk & restart
8. Boot successfully to Win7
9. Right click Boot Camp tray icon and choose to restart in OS X, then restart.
10. Computer boots to Win7
11. Restart computer again
12. Hold option after chime for 15-30 seconds, then press enter (or left/right arrow, then enter... makes no difference)
13. Screen stays black forever
At this point, the only way for me to get back to OSX is to plug in any of my old mac EFI cards and option-boot to OSX. It doesn't matter whether the 970 is still connected. In step 9, sometimes the win7 & OSX icons will show up under the Boot Camp control panel if they are in different drive bays (which I just tried various combinations of), but it does not change the outcome. No matter what is selected, it will always boot to Windows by default, and I will get stuck on a black screen no matter what if I option-boot.
I've been at this the past few days and my eyes are about to explode, I think.
Last edited:
Man I wish I could think but I'm on Win 8.1 which has newer updated AHCI, EFI and NVME support. Maybe that's why I don't get that problem with GTX 980? Could it be a Win 7 issue?
What I do experience is that the Bootcamp menu item 'Restart in OSX' always boots my system back up hard drive in the SATA bays instead of my actual working install in the PCIE slot. It defaults to the SATA bays. I have to manually choose to boot the SSD volume every time, but this doesn't apply to your problem.
This might not do anything for you, but what about trying BootChamp as a workaround? From OS X, click and restart in Windows just once as it doesn't actually change your Startup Disk. Leave your OS X drive as startup. All cold boots & restarts should lead back to OS X that way.
Well, whaddya know... I think BootChamp will do the trick. I'm not really sure why, and at this point I kind of don't care. Thanks for the suggestion, TruckdriverSean. (and the info, EdDuPlessis) Now to hurry up and wait for some genius to engineer a mac EFI rom for the MSI GTX 970 so I can get that tasty tasty Apple boot logo!
Yeah. For whatever reason, BootChamp bypasses whatever conflict that was causing an option-boot to freeze at a black screen with the 970 as the main card. At least, I imagine it will as long as I don't touch my Startup Disk options. I'm not sure what method BootChamp uses to tell it to boot into Boot Camp 1x. Probably some script/plist injection. Maybe I'll investigate later for some answers, but I think I'd rather spend some time catching up on work and playing some Dragon Age Inquisition with some shiny new graphics.
I have to boot into OSX every time in order to use BootChamp to get into Win7, but that is a helluva lot better than the alternative of swapping out PCIe cards, reinstalling drivers, and resetting the PRAM to get audio back every time I want to change OSes.
Last edited:
Yea, technically correct. The problem is... resetting the PRAM also forces your mac to the default graphics drivers in OSX. So with the GTX970, which as of right now REQUIRES the "beta" Nvidia Web drivers to display anything in OSX... resetting the PRAM will get you a lovely black screen in OSX until you swap in an Apple default driver-supported GPU and switch back to the Web drivers. You could probably do some manual kext tweaks to get the Nvidia Web drivers to be chosen by default... but that seems like a bad long term idea for a number of reasons. But now I'm rambling.
Yes also on the TRIM thing. So BootChamp > PRAM resets right now for me.
Sometimes, I think of my Mac Pro as the barely-held-together Frankenstein of computer builds. I'm sure most of you can relate.
Both trimthing and nvidia driver can be enabled via boot.plist,and then you become pram-reset proof
So basically, we likely won't see any native 9xx drivers from Apple until there's a new Mac with the 900 series onboard?
It seems strange to me given that Maxwell's power/heat efficient design seems exactly what Apple would want... notwithstanding OpenCL vs CUDA and any sweet bulk volume deals AMD might be offering.
It seems strange to me given that Maxwell's power/heat efficient design seems exactly what Apple would want... notwithstanding OpenCL vs CUDA and any sweet bulk volume deals AMD might be offering.
Granted I know this is going to be 90% irrelevant but it may help somebody - I have a Hackintosh that I built with a Gigabyte GTX 970 G1. As expected nothing worked before I installed nVidia's web driver, but once I did everything works fine! It boots using the web driver instead of the built in OS X driver.
Like I said it's irrelevant since it's not Apple hardware, but I will say that the web driver is working flawlessly for me...
Like I said it's irrelevant since it's not Apple hardware, but I will say that the web driver is working flawlessly for me...
You and Tesseract gave me the info I needed. I removed my GT120 and manage booting into Windows using BootChamp. Now I have all three monitors working both under Yosemite and Windows!! Thanks, guys.
Mike in Mass
Netkas,
This is something I'd very much like to do. Can you point me to instructions as to how to edit boot.plist to do these two things?
Would a nvidia GTX 970 work in Yosemite without any issues? This card:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/201200484575?_trksid=p2060778.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT
Is it a simple matter of just having the latest web drives and OSX updates installed before putting the card in and running with it? I currently have a GTX 570 and I planned to upgrade to a 970.
I dont do much gaming in OSX, its basically just for windows. So if gaming performance in OSX isnt at its fullest I dont really mind. All I care about is being able to use 2 DVI displays.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/201200484575?_trksid=p2060778.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT
Is it a simple matter of just having the latest web drives and OSX updates installed before putting the card in and running with it? I currently have a GTX 570 and I planned to upgrade to a 970.
I dont do much gaming in OSX, its basically just for windows. So if gaming performance in OSX isnt at its fullest I dont really mind. All I care about is being able to use 2 DVI displays.
If it is dual 6 pin it will work. If it is 6 pin + 8 pin you will have two methods.
- run it on an external PSU
- use a dual PCIE booster to 8 pin cable and a dual SATA to 6 pin cable.
If a card is dual 8 pin then it has to run off external power