Quadro 1700 on Mac Pro 8 core

my advice: DO NOT DO IT!

if you take one wrong step then something could really go wrong. its not supported by apple either so whatever goes wrong isnt covered under warranty.

you can put the card in and use it under windows xp/vista etc with no troubles, but it wont be recognised with osx.

Huh? I don't get the anal retentive paranoia.

Whatever, but if there are system files and ROM images available for that card then sure, you can get it up and running in OS X with very little trouble. I dunno it that's a card that's been tested to work with OS X or not tho.

Save all the added and modded files that you have to add to the system though (I guess there's only one or two?) so when you update your system (from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7 for example) then you can re-add or re-mod the needed files.

Tesselator said:

Huh? I don't get the anal retentive paranoia.

Whatever, but if there are system files and ROM images available for that card then sure, you can get it up and running in OS X with very little trouble. I dunno it that's a card that's been tested to work with OS X or not tho.

Save all the added and modded files that you have to add to the system though (I guess there's only one or two?) so when you update your system (from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7 for example) then you can re-add or re-mod the needed files.

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seems like a lot of hassle to me

you calling me anal lol?

Use under Windows for now

My advice is to set up your system as dual boot Mac/Windows and, for now, run the card under Windows. There are indeed all kinds of hacks to get PC cards up under OS X, and I have flashed and reflashed roms and fiddled with boot settings etc. Right now I have a PC GTX 285 happily running under Windows coexisting with an 8800GT that appears under OS X and Windows. The 285 is still kinda half-dead under OS X - it appears under the sys info but does not do anything.

My advice would be to check back on these forums from time to time and see if things have moved. 10.5.7 should support the new Quadro 4800 and might just provides some insight, but the consensus seems to be that Snow Leopard has a much better chance of working. Unless you are comfortable fiddling with boot settings and roms I would stay well away - or if you do start to fiddle back up everything, including ROM files and boot files, and search for and read the relevant postings by netkas, aquamac, rominator and others before doing anything. The only other thing is that your Windows life might be easier if you are all NVIDIA.

DoFoT9 said:

seems like a lot of hassle to me

you calling me anal lol?

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Hehehe... not personally. Just the attitude seemed a little. Yeah, I guess it's some hassle - of COURSE it would be better if Apple was actually sane.
Still, I guess it only takes a few hours of research to know if it's possible and how to do it and then 30 min to actually do it.

Tesselator said:

Hehehe... not personally. Just the attitude seemed a little. Yeah, I guess it's some hassle - of COURSE it would be better if Apple was actually sane.
Still, I guess it only takes a few hours of research to know if it's possible and how to do it and then 30 min to actually do it.

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my advice was by no means an indication to my own opinion. that is just my general 'reaction' to threads of this sort, we have no indication of the OP's knowledge on computers etcetc.. so yea

im a modder lol, in my spare time you will find me tinkering my hackintosh

mdennison said:

Thanks for all the responses,

my instinct is not to mess around with the system on OS X too (i guess that makes me anal), I get the impression it would work fine though. Maybe when i'm more confident at re-installing if it goes wrong.

I'm probably going to fit it as a second card, will OS X just ignore it then? I'll try to get Vista Ultimate to use the quadro card instead of the ATI, this could be tricky I think.

Magnus

ps. here's the link to the hacking process:
http://aquamac.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=hack1&action=display&thread=509&page=1

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Two things - 1. that aquamac link is very neat but note it is for a hackintosh and not a mac pro - I am in the middle of trying to get it to work on a mac pro, which uses Apple EFI rather than EFI 8 that PC based hackis use.
2. OS 10.5.6 almost ignores my PC card - it does no harm sitting there. I guess the same will be true of 10.5.7 but what Snow leopard (unhacked) will actually do is anybody's guess right now. 3. On the windows side you might find it easiest initially if you plug your monitor physically in the the Quadro and use NVIDIA drivers.