8800 Akimbo question

[nethfel]

Hi all,

I came across a few posts that said they have the 8800 Akimbo from EVGA working in their Mac Pro.

I have one of these cards and am having some trouble.

I have a '08 8 core Mac Pro. I flashed the akimbo, and inserted it (had to use the second pci x16 slot, it wouldn't fit in the first due to the rear heat sink) connected power, and when I turned on the system the screen was rather shakey (almost like bad sync), and when I put my 2600 back in to reboot it complained about the Xserver crashing (or something like that).

So, I'm thinking I must be doing something wrong. I have the current nv tool to flash the card, and the bios that was listed here... is there something else I need to change??

Thanks!

-Tony

 

[MacVidCards]

Very strange that it didn't work.

BTW.....you can remove rear part of Akimbo cooler by just pulling out the 4 screws, removiing the heatsink, and putting the screws back in.

Are you certain that you used the EFI64 ROM?

 

[nethfel]

Very strange that it didn't work.

BTW.....you can remove rear part of Akimbo cooler by just pulling out the 4 screws, removiing the heatsink, and putting the screws back in.

Are you certain that you used the EFI64 ROM?

I'm pretty sure, but I don't know how to identify if maybe I got the wrong one. The one I have is 124K size on disk...

Will removing the rear heat sink cause heat dissipation problems? I don't want to melt the plastic just next to it 😉

 

[MacVidCards]

Without the heatsink, you have a 8800GTS 512 style cooler.

Card will be fine.

Where did you get the ROM?

There are 2 posted on this forum, one for 2006/7 Mac Pro (EFI32) and one for the 2008 Mac Pro (EFI64)

WHat device id does the card show up with?

 

[nethfel]

I'm pretty sure I got it from this download:

http://a.mondit.free.fr/mp2008/mp8800gt.rom

posted in this thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/434092/

I don't have a spare system with pcie open atm (I'll have to power down the one I'm on now) to boot up and check the card out to find its devid

I'll download the rom again tho and do the checks. Unless it has something to do with me not putting it in the first pcie slot... I also bought the pcie 6pin power -> mini 6 pin connector on motherboard cable so I wouldn't have to do funky wiring to get to the harnesses where the superdrives are.

 

[nethfel]

I didn't want to double post, but incase the previous thread was read by Rominator, I wanted to make sure he knew I had more info.

I downloaded the rom again.

When I first booted my other computer with the 8800 in it, the text was garbled. luckily I could read enough and new enough of what I needed to type to get the card reflashed.

I flashed it with:

nvflash -4 -5 -6 mp8800gt.rom

I'm using version 5.72 of the utility.

and rebooted.

The display at that point was fine...

I did a query on the card with nvflash (I don't have any windows systems any more that use this card, so I couldn't get data from windows) and got:

<0> GeForce 8800GT (10DE, 0611, 10DE, 054F) H:--:NRM,B:01,PCI,D:00,F:00

In one of the other queries, it did show the bios to be EFI.

I took the card out of my pc, inserted in the mac, connected the PCIE -> minipcie power connector on the motherboard to the video card.

I booted the mac.

The screen was all wrong - to help make it clear - I took a picture of it - this is a small crop of the overall screen:

As you can see the display is way screwed up. and at this point all I can do is force power down. I haven't put the video card back into my other pc yet (I'm using it to type this now), but I'm not sure what is wrong.

Do I need to write protect the eeprom? Do I need to issue another command with nvflash? heck, do I need to use a different version of nvflash??

-Tony

 

[MacVidCards]

This looks like your RAM is of a different timing set than the ROM.

Did you verify that the card worked OK in WIndows?

And I do mean booting all the way into Windows and trying something in 3D.

If the card is A-OK in WIndows, you can try something that is little known, but quite powerful.

When you flash the PC ROM back on the card, add a "-j" switch into the commands. This forces the softstraps written into the PC ROM to overwrite Mac ones. When you reflash with Mac, use "-g" switch. This saves original softstraps which may or may not fix this.

Nvidia ROMs carry multiple speeds and timing sets (used to be 8 different per ROM). The straps at the open tell card which set of values to use. This will only work if the original PC Bios was also device id 611.

 

[nethfel]

This looks like your RAM is of a different timing set than the ROM.

Did you verify that the card worked OK in WIndows?

And I do mean booting all the way into Windows and trying something in 3D.

I can verify the card worked perfectly before the computer it was in was decomissioned . It was in my wifes old computer (she plays WoW about every free minute she can) - unfortunately, we scavanged out the stuff we wanted to keep before getting rid of it, so I currently don't have another windows system that is configured for this card (my pc system I'm disassembling to flash the thing is running crossfire, and as I still need it, I don't want to muck it up, and my wife would kill me if I took apart her current sli system I just built back in december 😉 ). But she was using it for wow up until the last day, and I had done 3dmark06 tests on it about 6 or 7 months ago when we first got the card (Granted, yes, the card could have died between then and now).

When you flash the PC ROM back on the card, add a "-j" switch into the commands. This forces the softstraps written into the PC ROM to overwrite Mac ones. When you reflash with Mac, use "-g" switch. This saves original softstraps which may or may not fix this.

Nvidia ROMs carry multiple speeds and timing sets (used to be 8 different per ROM). The straps at the open tell card which set of values to use. This will only work if the original PC Bios was also device id 611.

I'll reflash the device again with the pc rom and see what happens. I don't know what the original device id was.

Everyone what was successful also seemed to mention using 5.57 for nvflash; could it be that soemthing is different in 5.72 that could be causing me a problem?