If Machines is the Emperor, I'm the Court Jester.

Recently, after a many year hiatus I've gotten back into 3D work.

Back in the day I was an ElectricImage user, and after resubmerging myself in this stuff (Rhino Mac Beta / Blender) I was getting up to speed quite nicely.

Well outside of the abysmal render speeds.

Gotta MP 5.1 Xeon dual 2.4. While Rhino Mac seemed to be acceptable (outside of taking pretty long time to calc some operations) Blender was just dog slow on the GTX285.

Thus began the upgrade path. I got a flashed 4GB 680 off eBay. That helped, but was still pretty dog slow. 10 second anim took almost 3 days to render on the 680.

Furthermore it's flaky. It's locked up the box completely mid frame render on several occasions.

So I started looking for better cards, scouring the sites, picking up info from other forums, looking at the work MacVideoCards has been doing and the guy from the other site Ketavas? Can't remember off the top of my head.

Anyway I run into Machine's post about the 970 non flashed pair he's been running and his blender benchmark floored me. The box on CPU takes 2.15 to render that, the 680 does it in 1.05.

So hell yeah, off to Fryes I go and come home with a brandy new 970 to start with until I get the cabling and power issues for 2 cards sorted.

Based of what I knew already from here and the other forums I knew I'd have to jump from 10.9.x to 10.10. Ok so where I'm at I have zero net. Ok, a wifi hotspot I use for work email and whatnot, certainly nothing to do a full 10.10 install on, so I DL the yosemite installer at work, toss it on a USB flash drive, and bring it here to install.

That part I detailed in another thread.

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20864479#post20864479

So now my dilemma is how to get back to getting this box to run. I guess I can try reinstalling yosemite, (damn installer self deletes after running). Time machine's of no use as it didn't get a chance to do a backup before I tried installing the NVIdia drivers, so I don't even have the stock nvidia ones from the 10.10 install.

Not sure what to do.

This is ridiculous. Avoiding this kinna crap is the entire reason I've been a mac guy for closing on 3 decades.

The details of what broke are in the other thread. I didn't want to be accused of spamming.

The other thread was about the security patch from today, and others hoping it wouldn't break the Nvidia drivers. It does. And in my case, a whole lot more.

Update:

Had to reinstall Yosemite from scratch.

After probing around, the security patch DID change the nvidia stuff (at least the creation and mod dates are totally different than the 10.10 install in looking at the KEXTS). So yeah, do NOT apply the security patch if you're running Nvidia unless you want to watch your screen refresh a line at a time.

After a complete reinstall at least I'm back at square one. Still no Nvidia pref pane, still no support for the 10.10.x Nvidia Web drivers, so I'm stuck in limbo, but at least the box runs.

FWIW the 10.10.2 install (if you were as hapless as I was and installed it today) shows up as 14C1514. If only I'd downloaded the installer yesterday everything would be fine would be my guess. IF Nvidia does release drivers that WILL install, I'll be searching for some way to shut off Apple's annoying nag screens prompting me at every opportunity to install whatever flaky assed patch they put out to fix the bugs they brought on from the last flaky assed patch.