Xserve 2,1 Mavericks video card advice

[RedFlyer]

I've taken this Xserver to 10.9 by installing on an external drive, hacking the plist to support the xserve and then cloning the drive onto the internal RAID drives(with raid card).

With a monitor plugged in, it isn't pretty, but it's functional with it's 5MB(of the 64MB) of vram that it can see. The hope was to use the xserve with screen share, but when screen sharing the lag makes it unusable. I've found people get video cards and mount them externally, but I'm hoping to avoid having to do that level of surgery on the box, and really don't need that much power. Just need enough vram to get screensharing running.

Has anyone found any video upgrade solutions that are small enough to fit in the box and also work with mavericks. I've got NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 running in a bunch of Mac Pro 1,1s, and they look like they might be small enough to fit in the allotted space.

thanks!


Xserve2,1
2 x 3 GHx Quad-Core Intel Xeon
RAM 28gb
VRAM 64MB, sees(5 MB)
ATI Radeon X1300
RAID-5 3x1TB
10.9.5

 

[aarond12]

That card works great with Hackintoshes, so I don't know why it wouldn't work in an actual Mac. I've used both the 210 and the 610 in Hackintoshes in the past.

 

[jamall]

The most powerful single slot card that doesn't require additional power connectors is the GTX 750 Ti, which can be had for a bit over $100 on ebay. I managed to get the X1300 partially working under Mavericks by modifying ATIRadeonX2000.kext and ATI2600Controller.kext from Lion or Mountain Lion and making them work with Mavericks' AMDSupport.kext instead of ML's ATISupport.kext, but I couldn't get my HD 7950 working at the same time and ended up having to restore from a Time Machine backup which wiped all my changes.

 

[RedFlyer]

I put an NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 in and had to remove the old integrated card and it works great. I'll be sure to keep an eye on the heat, but seems fine thus far.

 

[jamall]

Having run unsupported OS Xs since Mountain Lion, the pain and frustration of not having access to the boot screen when an update went wrong became too much, and I put the x1300 mezzanine cards back in. I have SwitchResX installed (best software ever!) which disables the x1300's mini-DVI output after boot and makes screen sharing smooth again. It also unlocked extra resolutions on my projector. Great little utility and well worth supporting.