Status of MacVidCards?

[Auggie]

On the Apple Discussion boards a customer who purchased a flashed GTX 980 4GB card had problems right out of the box but after a couple email exchanges with MVC, they stopped responding to him.

I sent an email to MVC through their website contact page last week inquiring as a prospective customer turnaround times for GTX 980 flashing services and what brands to avoid or which do they recommend but have not yet received a response.

Their website shows ALL pre-flashed nVideo cards as Out of Stock.

So are they still in business?

There have been threads that always recommended purchasing from them versus other parties that are claimed to have reversed engineered his firmware mods and are now offering flashed nVidia cards themselves. But if they are no longer responding to both existing customers who are having issues with cards they sold them as well as not responding to prospective customers' questions on his services, why should we continue to support this company?

 

[MH01]

Interesting observation . All stock on website not available and no listings on eBay store . Interesting to follow this . Interesting if greed or legal action might be involved . Could just be on holidays though I thought it was a business with distribution in a few countries , not that I really followed him and he was kinda rude at times on MR

 

[Synchro3]

Afaik surely no legal action involved . New GTX 9xx cards are hard to get these days, and there are no drivers for Pascal cards (EFI for Pascal cards already developped by MVC, but release makes no sense without Mac drivers).

 

[Redneck1089]

He's on Nekas' forum primarily and is still touting his advances on eGPU solutions with the nMP, yet never releases anything other than benchmark screenshots.

You could try him on Netkas and see if he responds. Don't hold your breath, though. MVC thinks responding to questions is beneath him if the answer could be found elsewhere, or it's a relatively simply solution to your problem.

Oh, and apologize profusely for Goalie. Even if you don't know who that is, apologize anyway. You must kiss the ring and feet of MVC.

 

[MH01]

He's on Nekas' forum primarily and is still touting his advances on eGPU solutions with the nMP, yet never releases anything other than benchmark screenshots.

You could try him on Netkas and see if he responds. Don't hold your breath, though. MVC thinks responding to questions is beneath him if the answer could be found elsewhere, or it's a relatively simply solution to your problem.

Oh, and apologize profusely for Goalie. Even if you don't know who that is, apologize anyway. You must kiss the ring and feet of MVC.

Yeah I followed his work for a while, but the whole nMP and his childish behaviour means I will never buy his product . I'll prefer to buy from one of his competitors who has some humility .

 

[flowrider]

^^^^I guess you mean that ones who steal his work. But, that's up to you

Lou

 

[Neutronnn]

Funny you guys are wondering. I sent in my video card for reflashing over 3 weeks ago and still haven't heard anything. No email response, not answering the phone and messages are full.

But he's still taking ppl's money on Paypal, keeping their video cards and ignoring them. I'm not the only one. Check out his blog. What the hell kind of business is this?

 

[steveOooo]

I wouldn't buy from him again - flashed 7950 was faulty so had to send it back from uk to la.

But things like that happen, got a full refund

 

[Silencio]

He rarely does have inventory of pre-flashed cards. When he does have some, he usually posts about it on Twitter and they sell out very fast. I managed to snag a flashed Titan X that way last year.

 

[Synchro3]

Give him some time: Got some events coming up (Dad turning 70, new UCLA class, winning a writing contest, etc) but will be moving to eGPU VR testing with a couple 2016 MBPs.

http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,13581.msg36669.html#msg36669

 

[Neutronnn]

Give him some time? He has my card and my money! That's freakin' criminal.

How about a message or response to his customers instead of leaving them hanging for who the hell knows how long. Not cool!

 

[Redneck1089]

Give him some time: Got some events coming up (Dad turning 70, new UCLA class, winning a writing contest, etc) but will be moving to eGPU VR testing with a couple 2016 MBPs.

http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,13581.msg36669.html#msg36669

So, basically like I said -- he'll be posting screenshots of his successes and yet offer nothing tangible for the rest of us. Furthermore, he's now taken to building him self up via boasting. Yeah, congrats on your spelling-B win there! Geez...

Don't get me wrong, it's cool he's got a bunch of eGPU solutions working on the nMP, but I'm not going to be part of the circle-jerk and throw praise at him if he's never going to release anything. Not to mention, he has an attitude when dealing with people.

 

[goMac]

I'm guessing Nvidia pulling out of the Mac is not great for his business. And AMD cards tend to have more freely available EFI firmware.

 

[thornslack]

I attempted to do business with him but his caustic attitude dissuaded me.

 

[MH01]

^^^^I guess you mean that ones who steal his work. But, that's up to you

Lou

Well given he was taking the Piss for so long with his pricing and given his work is hacking firmware, I don't exactly take pity on him . There are many in the community that believe this should be open source , he decided to turn it into greed, which I would not mind, except that he is an arrogant / patronising individual, so yeah happy to buy from a competitor. He did not write the nvidia firmware ! He found an exploit, let's call it what it is , he stole himself and turned it into $$$

What it means that what ever he has found with the nMP he cannot make money out of , so let's screw potential nMP owners by holding the info back and use it to tease and gloat.

As a nMP owner I would have paid for a solution, though his antics , gloating while delivering nothing has resulted in me loosing all respect for him. Jokes on him, the nMP is so underpowered now, with a 980ti being the best solution. So his next big thing is slipping so fast due to nvidia not supporting 10xx cards on mac

I use a 980ti in a in a core plugged into a MacBook Pro , Could not careless about my nMP with a egpu anymore , this is too damn slow, a cheap PC hackintosh kicks its ass though yet again, pascal drivers are the issue here. I've got a titan x pascal , and am not going back to a much slower gpu.

The future should be just plug and play with these egpu solutions, though the reality is greed by apple, MVC etc means we mac users are using some of the worst GPU solution on a platform we love. The pascal drivers have all but killed future progress.

 

[Fl0r!an]

Well given he was taking the Piss for so long with his pricing and given his work is hacking firmware, I don't exactly take pity on him . There are many in the community that believe this should be open source , he decided to turn it into greed, which I would not mind, except that he is an arrogant / patronising individual, so yeah happy to buy from a competitor. He did not write the nvidia firmware ! He found an exploit, let's call it what it is , he stole himself and turned it into $$$

That's true for older GPUs such as Nvidia Fermi/Kepler or AMD HD 7xxx, which had an official "Mac Edition". Applying this EFI to similar cards from the same family isn't trivial, but it's also no rocket science. He has done it, I have done it, other people have done it.

His Maxwell GPUs are a different story though, they are not based on any hacked Apple firmware, so it's a completely different approach. I'm quite sure that the EFI driver which enables boot screens and sets up the IOReg injection is completely self-developed by MVC & netkas. Dumping such a ROM from his GPUs and selling this as their own is no different than selling a pirated copy of any other software.

And btw, the "community" around this Mac GPU development consists of very few people who do actual work and a lot people selling that work on eBay. It's no wonder that people who can do barely more than launching nvflash from a DOS prompt demand open source firmwares.

Personally I'd be fine with releasing public guides & firmwares, so everyone can DIY flash their GPUs at home. That's not going to happen though, as very few Mac users dare to paste a few lines in the terminal and flash a ROM to their GPU. Most want to buy a complete product even if that means getting ripped off by the eBay guys (which I won't support).

So I've stopped publishing any complete, "sellable" firmware. Instead I'm helping people who are willing to do actual work (which are very few, as I said). It's a lot more fun to do work in the hackintosh scene though, as the seeder/leacher ratio is a lot better there.

 

[MH01]

That's true for older GPUs such as Nvidia Fermi/Kepler or AMD HD 7xxx, which had an official "Mac Edition". Applying this EFI to similar cards from the same family isn't trivial, but it's also no rocket science. He has done it, I have done it, other people have done it.

His Maxwell GPUs are a different story though, they are not based on any hacked Apple firmware, so it's a completely different approach. I'm quite sure that the EFI driver which enables boot screens and sets up the IOReg injection is completely self-developed by MVC & netkas. Dumping such a ROM from his GPUs and selling this as their own is no different than selling a pirated copy of any other software.

And btw, the "community" around this Mac GPU development consists of very few people who do actual work and a lot people selling that work on eBay. It's no wonder that people who can do barely more than launching nvflash from a DOS prompt demand open source firmwares.

Personally I'd be fine with releasing public guides & firmwares, so everyone can DIY flash their GPUs at home. That's not going to happen though, as very few Mac users dare to paste a few lines in the terminal and flash a ROM to their GPU. Most want to buy a complete product even if that means getting ripped off by the eBay guys (which I won't support).

So I've stopped publishing any complete, "sellable" firmware. Instead I'm helping people who are willing to do actual work (which are very few, as I said). It's a lot more fun to do work in the hackintosh scene though, as the seeder/leacher ratio is a lot better there.

After following for years and it was really an exciting prospect for Mac users, I see it as a dead path now . Hackingtosh all the way, and respect you are helping out .

Fudementally the situation with the nMP I find disgusting, it's just teasing and gloating, sorry it's pathetic from my point to view . Hence my view . Which in some ways is not right and does not give credit where credit is due .

 

[Flint Ironstag]

Auggie, search and you'll find that every 3 or 4 months there's a similar thread here. Each one I've read was eventually resolved (if a bit more slowly than the buyer would have liked).

 

[theitsage]

Well given he was taking the Piss for so long with his pricing and given his work is hacking firmware, I don't exactly take pity on him . There are many in the community that believe this should be open source , he decided to turn it into greed, which I would not mind, except that he is an arrogant / patronising individual, so yeah happy to buy from a competitor. He did not write the nvidia firmware ! He found an exploit, let's call it what it is , he stole himself and turned it into $$$

What it means that what ever he has found with the nMP he cannot make money out of , so let's screw potential nMP owners by holding the info back and use it to tease and gloat.

As a nMP owner I would have paid for a solution, though his antics , gloating while delivering nothing has resulted in me loosing all respect for him. Jokes on him, the nMP is so underpowered now, with a 980ti being the best solution. So his next big thing is slipping so fast due to nvidia not supporting 10xx cards on mac

I use a 980ti in a in a core plugged into a MacBook Pro , Could not careless about my nMP with a egpu anymore , this is too damn slow, a cheap PC hackintosh kicks its ass though yet again, pascal drivers are the issue here. I've got a titan x pascal , and am not going back to a much slower gpu.

The future should be just plug and play with these egpu solutions, though the reality is greed by apple, MVC etc means we mac users are using some of the worst GPU solution on a platform we love. The pascal drivers have all but killed future progress.

I agree with your assessment. MVC with the help of netkas would show working solutions and use them as marketing tools. I have no problem with that; it's hard work and they deserve to make money off of it should they choose to.

What I take issues with is his attitude. Dude would engage in childish name-calling and belittling people he disagrees with.

 

[MH01]

I agree with your assessment. MVC with the help of netkas would show working solutions and use them as marketing tools. I have no problem with that; it's hard work and they deserve to make money off of it should they choose to.

What I take issues with is his attitude. Dude would engage in childish name-calling and belittling people he disagrees with.

Spot on. The community is small enough without childish arrogance to push people away. Having a nMP that runs an egpu, who cares, a fool would buy a Mac Pro right now .

 

[toomanydatsuns]

Well, that sucks. I sent in a card for flashing a few weeks ago and I was wondering what was happening. "Radio silence" isn't exactly an ideal way to conduct business in a niche community...

 

[Neutronnn]

Let's see what the cops will have to say about it

 

[AidenShaw]

Let's see what the cops will have to say about it

If MVC promised "5 day turnaround", then you might have an argument. If the "contract" is non-existent or vague - the "cops" may ask 'why on earth did you give this dude your credit card number?'.

 

[toomanydatsuns]

Turn around time is typically two-four days depending on our current amount of orders.

http://www.macvidcards.com/how-does-the-flashing-and-mod-service-work.html

I'd be willing to accept an explanation of "extenuating circumstances" if there had been any attempt at communication at all, but this experience has been pretty stressful so far.

 

[flyinmac]

If you're wanting to find someone who can deliver what they promise, check out this guy:

http://old-macs.com/

That's where I got my flashed video card. And he's extremely easy to communicate with. Answered all my questions, and even brought up stuff I hadn't even thought about.

He stepped me through everything to help me get my old Mac Pro updated and running El Capitan.

Helped me sort out what I needed. Helped me get it set up. Answered all my questions, and even checked on me after I had it all running to see if I had any more questions.

His stuff arrived quickly, tested, and guaranteed to work. His packing and shipping is impressive. There wasn't a chance anything was going to get damaged.

I had a lot of questions at the beginning. I was bringing a stock original 2006 Mac Pro up to El Capitan with a lot of upgrades. And every question I had was answered by him. And it went smoothly.