Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition; how is it?

Is the 7950 still the way to go?

There have been a number of new 7950 cards on the market. There are a few Sapphire 7950 models, and a gigabyte which a lot of people seem to like. Any suggestions on which one to go with? I'd hate to pay the premium for the Mac sapphire when i can just flash it myself.

Sapphire Radeon Vapor-X HD 7950 vs Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD 7950 ?

Or is there something newer than the 7950?
 
If you want newer, you could look at the nVidia 780 cards.

AMD should be due to announce their own newer 8xxx cards soon if you read some of the review blogs.
 
DPUser said:
Based on the earlier posts reporting no flicker under Mavericks and Windows, I suspect this post may be inaccurate. If some one wants to experiment, any 4,1 can be turned into a 5,1 with the Netkas EFI flash...

As for the occasional flicker, I experienced this with an ATI5770 on my 4,1>5,1 flashed MP. I drive three monitors: two DP and one VGA. I discovered that if I power on the monitors prior to booting my Mac, the flicker does not occur.
Click to expand...

Inaccurate? How so? I'm talking about out of the box experience. Flashing your UEFI to pretend your machine is a 5, 1 doesn't count.

Not everyone wants to risk messing up their expensive machine to do that. That's why I don't mind paying a premium for cards such as 7950.
 
guys, do you have any info about this card availability?
it seems discontinued?
every shop as soon as goes out of stock is not restocking these cards...mmm
 
cledet said:
Inaccurate? How so? I'm talking about out of the box experience. Flashing your UEFI to pretend your machine is a 5, 1 doesn't count.

Not everyone wants to risk messing up their expensive machine to do that. That's why I don't mind paying a premium for cards such as 7950.
Click to expand...

Yeah I bought one because I just wanted to plug it in and be done with it. And I'm a Software Engineer with 20 years experience, so it's not lack of ability! I've done so much firmware flashing and mucking around, I've got better work to do. If the installation takes more than five minutes it's not worth my time.
 
h9826790 said:
OWC still selling this card.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'm not currently looking to buy one, especially since it seems they manufactured with hw (flickering) / sw (bios), errors.

I'm in EU, and it's nowhere in stock.

In US / EU it's disappeared from Amazon store too!!!

Isn't it strange for a new card???

I'm trying to understand what's going on...
 
dia3olik said:
Thanks, I'm not currently looking to buy one, especially since it seems they manufactured with hw (flickering) / sw (bios), errors.

I'm in EU, and it's nowhere in stock.

In US / EU it's disappeared from Amazon store too!!!

Isn't it strange for a new card???

I'm trying to understand what's going on...
Click to expand...

I am in Asia, nowhere can find this card as well, but still quite easy to get it via internet.

This card may be relatively new, but not really very new. The new Mac pro can't use this card, so if the manufacture stop producing anything for the old machine which actually make sense to me. For this reason, I bought this card a month ago, just try to avoid running out of upgrade option later on (I love my oMP and want to use it for at least few more years, the original 4870 clearly can't do that, and I prefer to use native graphic card)

As a home user, the performance is well acceptable. The flickering only occur occasionally when using browser (most of the time during scrolling), never have any problem when playing movie or game. So it seems like a software / driver issue. Hopefully the driver in 10.9.3 will fix the problem (I did try the 10.9.3 beta in my spare boot disk, it works quite well, more "smooth" scrolling / animation in safari, and no flicking so far, but I didn't do any extensive test, so can't confirm it yet. Besides, the Cinebench report a little bit higher benchmark as well.)
 
Last edited:
I'm using a Sapphire HD7950 Mac Edition in my 1,1. I do not have any flickering issues, but I have not tried to run an OS other than Mavericks with it installed. It is smoother than the 5770 that it replaced. For a lot of the things I do with the machine, it's made the machine better, but it's also showed me that my bottleneck now isn't the GPU, it's the rest of the machine.
 
HuntingPudel said:
I'm using a Sapphire HD7950 Mac Edition in my 1,1. I do not have any flickering issues, but I have not tried to run an OS other than Mavericks with it installed. It is smoother than the 5770 that it replaced. For a lot of the things I do with the machine, it's made the machine better, but it's also showed me that my bottleneck now isn't the GPU, it's the rest of the machine.
Click to expand...

Yep, we will always hit a bottleneck after the previous one removed... it's the nature of the beast... obtaining a 'balanced' system is very difficult to achieve.
 
Sapphire 7950 Mac Edition

Hi there,

I bought this card when off Dabs UK. There is a well known switch to use one of two ROMs.

Sadly, out of the factory, both sides of the switch for my GPU had the Windows friendly ROM (no boot screen)

With the help of a forum member here, I re-flashed my GPU with factory firmware and now it works beautifully. Full boot screen. Very quiet compared to 4870 and very nice uplift in performance.

All on a Mac Pro 1,1 2006 model ;)
 
I'm installing OWC's Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 - Mac Edition tomorrow. I've checked the switch is set for Mac and it was already set correctly. So hope this will work correctly and there being no need for re-flashing.
 
bxs said:
I'm installing OWC's Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 - Mac Edition tomorrow. I've checked the switch is set for Mac and it was already set correctly. So hope this will work correctly and there being no need for re-flashing.
Click to expand...

Congrats on getting your new card. I hope it works as well for you as mine is working for me.
 
No issues found at all

dia3olik said:
bxs, any news?
Click to expand...

It installed without any fuss whatsoever. :) I'm using it to drive an Apple 27" ACD using its MDP connector, an Apple 30" ACD via DVI-to-MDP and a 46" Sony Bravia TV via HDMI.

The HDMI connection to the TV has resolved a long standing audio stuttering issue I've had using a Blackmagic PCIe card.

I've not noticed any noise issue with using this graphics card.

I could not be happier.
 
bxs said:
It installed without any fuss whatsoever. :) I'm using it to drive an Apple 27" ACD using its MDP connector, an Apple 30" ACD via DVI-to-MDP and a 46" Sony Bravia TV via HDMI.

The HDMI connection to the TV has resolved a long standing audio stuttering issue I've had using a Blackmagic PCIe card.

I've not noticed any noise issue with using this graphics card.

I could not be happier.
Click to expand...

You're getting audio over HDMI? Awesome. I haven't tried that yet.
 
Flickering removed by updating to Mavericks?

Could someone please verify that the flickering issue with the Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition and Mountain Lion can be removed by updating to Mavericks?

I have an originally 4,1 Mac Pro with the firmware upgraded to 5,1 and the GPU in question. With Bootcamp/Windows 7 it works as it should but in Mountain Lion I get those flicks every now and then. And boy it's annoying.

I've been waiting for a good reason to update to Mavericks. Could this be one?
 
Last edited:
In my own experience, the answer is NO. It improve a lot (especially with 10.9.5 beta at this moment), may be less than one flickering per day, but still not yet totally eliminated.

My permanent solution is hex edit the BIOS and force the card memory to run at 1250MHz in 2D environment.
 
Thanks again for the reply.

I updated to Mavericks two days ago and haven't seen one flick after that. So even if it didn't fix the whole thing, it sure improved A LOT. :)
 
My flashed 7950 is doing fine with no flickering on a 3,1 running 10.9.4.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back