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ATI 4870 in 2006 Mac Pro with 10.5.7 Update?

I just want to chime in and extra confirm that the 4870 card works flawless for me in my Mac Pro 1,1 on 10.5.7. Running CoD4, I get about 10 more fps than my 8800GT. This 4870 seems to be a killer card for the first gen Mac Pro. I'm pretty satisfied.
 
TheSpaz said:
I just want to chime in and extra confirm that the 4870 card works flawless for me in my Mac Pro 1,1 on 10.5.7. Running CoD4, I get about 10 more fps than my 8800GT. This 4870 seems to be a killer card for the first gen Mac Pro. I'm pretty satisfied.
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Good. Does the mini displayport work?
 
Can someone confirm

that the mini-display port on the back of Apple's 4870 works in a 1st gen mac pro?
 
Any owner of this card could tell me if it works in Bootcamp or only in OSX ?

Any kind of modification is neccesary ?

Thanks.
 
And I would like to know if it works with dual monitors. A few people in this thread have said it should work but has anyone actually tried this yet?

And what the heck is going on anyway with all you MacPro users anyways?? I mean you've got a MacPro and are buying this card and you don't have dual displays?? I'm shocked! :p
 
Tesselator said:
And I would like to know if it works with dual monitors. A few people in this thread have said it should work but has anyone actually tried this yet?

And what the heck is going on anyway with all you MacPro users anyways?? I mean you've got a MacPro and are buying this card and you don't have dual displays?? I'm shocked! :p
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Who needs dual displays when you can have one 30" display! :p;)
 
Tesselator said:
Really? Link us up bro!
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Yeah I've got two 4870s in my 2.66GHz 2006 Mac Pro. They're flashed PC cards though (luckily, since Apple's 4870 doesn't support Crossfire). They're both 1GB XFX 4870 cards with the flashed EFI/XFX XXX BIOS from this tutorial. I'm using two PCIe splitters to split the power on the motherboard into two. I do have a power lead coming from the optical drives that I ran down with my 3870s before but I've heard that the power from there isn't as stable.
Yes, I'm running them in 8x PCIe slots since that's all the 2006 Mac Pro can support but honestly, I don't think that's much of an issue. Especially since I'm using 1GB cards. I've played a little Crysis and some Red Alert 3 and didn't have a problem with either of those. I haven't booted up Windows for a while though and have just been playing a bit of WoW in OS X.
 

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What does that have to do with running a single 4780 card in the MP 1,1 with dual monitors? Or did I miss something?
 
Tesselator said:
What does that have to do with running a single 4780 card in the MP 1,1 with dual monitors? Or did I miss something?
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It doesn't, but it does answer this:

ArmouredGuitar said:
Can we use two ATI 4870's in bootcamp for crossfire? if so, what do I need to hook this up?

Thanks,
Ag
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Again, a word of warning, Apple has specifically disabled Crossfire support in Windows for their 4870 cards so you can only do this with flashed PC cards.
 
This is great news! I'd love to upgrade from my 8800 GT. I have two Apple ACD's, however, and if I purchase the Mac version of the card I'm stuck with one mini DVI port that I can't use. Does anyone know of an adapter that I could use so I'm still able to connect my 30" and 20" monitors?
 
Redneck1089 said:
This is great news! I'd love to upgrade from my 8800 GT. I have two Apple ACD's, however, and if I purchase the Mac version of the card I'm stuck with one mini DVI port that I can't use. Does anyone know of an adapter that I could use so I'm still able to connect my 30" and 20" monitors?
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You can buy mini display port to dvi adapters from Apple.
 
Spanky Deluxe said:
Yes, I'm running them in 8x PCIe slots since that's all the 2006 Mac Pro can support but honestly, I don't think that's much of an issue. Especially since I'm using 1GB cards.
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I can't reconsile your configuration with the info from my own 2,66 Mac Pro (2006). On mine the slot one is 16 lane and only slot 4 would give me 8 lanes but that would not be wide enough for a dual slot cooler. So normally I would expect your cards to work in 16 and 1 lane mode the way you show them in the profiler.

I see that profiler indeed says you got 8 lane. Would that be the effect of the crossfire connection? If it is then there is an effect of crossfire under OS X. It would pull down your bandwidth on the first card.

One question for you, Spanky: Have you ever run 1980x1080 VGA on your flashed PC cards?
 
gugucom said:
I can't reconsile your configuration with the info from my own 2,66 Mac Pro (2006). On mine the slot one is 16 lane and only slot 4 would give me 8 lanes but that would not be wide enough for a dual slot cooler. So normally I would expect your cards to work in 16 and 1 lane mode the way you show them in the profiler.
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No, you can use the PCI Express configuration tool to set the bottom two slots to 8x. The tool is located in /System/Library/CoreServices and is called "Expansion Slot Utility". It'll pop up automatically when you put the two flashed cards in and boot up OS X or you can set it manually beforehand.

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