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Is it possible to use a Radeon x1600 card on a Mac Pro as secondary card?

R

rgomez

macrumors member
Original poster
Hi there,

I have a Mac Pro with the stock nvidia card, and I have a PC with a x1600 card to do the work stuff. I have been thinking in moving to the Mac Pro and working in Parallels or from time to time under bootcamp if needed.

My question is because I have my PC with 2 screens connected to the x1600, and I would love to put those 2 to my Mac Pro, apart from the one I currently have. Here in Mexico is pretty difficult/expensive to find a Mac Pro compatible card.

So, I don't need the card to boot. I just need it to be recognized by mac osx and use it. Do you believe is possible?

I'm going to try later, but if someone already knows the answer, you could save me from having to mess with my ugly PC case 🙂 (to be honest, is not *that* ugly, is a HP/Compac dc7600, but still nowhere as pretty as my Mac Pro)

Regards,

Rodrigo Gómez
 
Well... did the test. I have installed now the card in my mac, and it seems to recognize it (displayed the pci-express lane selection options, etc) but doesn't seem to load any drivers for it 😡

Any idea, or it's not really possible?
 
rgomez said:
Well... did the test. I have installed now the card in my mac, and it seems to recognize it (displayed the pci-express lane selection options, etc) but doesn't seem to load any drivers for it 😡

Any idea, or it's not really possible?
Click to expand...

It was my impression that the Mac version of video cards includes OpenFirmware and EFI drivers right in the firmware, while the PC version depends on Windows to install drivers. (That's why Mac hardware works even without booting into the OS.)
 
I think you need to flash your pc card to work into the mac. Furthermore, if you have two graphic cards from different vendors (ATI and Nvidia) it can cause interference (slow performance) with each other in the macpro, at least that was the experience of some having a 7300 and 1900.
 
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