GTX680 and startup manager

[zoomfinder]

Hi,

I'm using Elsa GTX680 S.A.C 2GB graphic card in my MacPro3,1 @3.2GHz. I bought the card as "over clocked" at an auction and it's working great with the Apple logo showing up at startup.

Lately I realised, however, that the startup manager is not working and I'm unable to select a startup volume, safe boot or clear PRAM when booting. I'm wondering if this is the way a flashed graphic card behaves. I want to clear PRAM to see how this will change but, since I cannot execute such a basic command with my Mac Pro, I'm stuck wondering if there is a way around.

I boot the machine from either an SSD attached to the Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus and configured with SoftRAID at RAID 0, an external SSD via eSATA 5G connection to Caldigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro, or an internal HDD on Mac Pro RAID in JBOD. I had no problem like this before customising my machine in this setup.

The Startup Disk in System Preference is working and selecting a different volume is no problem there but the Startup Manager remains dormant when I start my Mac from any of three startup volumes and, guessing from the black screen issue of the unflashed PC graphic cards, I suspect my GTX680 is the cause.

Can anyone help me on this? Thanks.

 

[orph]

are you using a wireless keyboard? sometimes they are not detected till to late in the startup to to a safe restart etc.

when you say you have the apple logo aka the boot screen, you mean you still have it now with the 680?

are you pressing the correct keys on the keyboard ?

do you still have your old card (an apple one), have you tired plugging it in with the display plugged only in to the apple card and then doing safe restart etc to trouble shoot

 

[h9826790]

The keyboard must be connected to the native USB port, but not the USB PCIe card (if any).

 

[nigelbb]

Your card will no longer be overclocked if it has been flashed with the standard eVGA Mac Edition code.

 

[carpsafari]

Obvious you have a GTX680 PC version, which will lack the bootscreen (startup manager???), you can however (as you discovered) change your start-up disk in sys preference/startupdisk.
PRAM should work too!
So no problem at all.

 

[zoomfinder]

Thank you all!

As suggested above, I put my older 8800GT back in the slot and see what would happen but to my big surprise it made no difference at all. The boot screen came up but no key would be accepted.

So, by instinct, I tried reconnecting the keyboard (old school USB) to the back of my Mac Pro, bypassing a USB keyboard switch and a hub, and there pressing the option key while starting up produced the wonderful parade of all startup volumes to choose from. I have put the GTX680 back in and connected the keyboard to the USB hub again but, as far as I know, I can clear PRAM like normal now. So the keyboard switcher I had set up to switch between two Mac Pros was the culprit.

The only thing still unclear is the safe boot by pressing shift key. When I tried that a kernel panic took place and the boot screen was smeared by black rows of technical terms which I didn't understand. That literary panicked me and I haven't tried it again but this may be a sign that the shift key is also working in the booting phase. I will experiment this further.

Also I've been enlightened by learning that "over clocking" and "flashing" are two different processes but it seems odd that I bought this board as over clocked (the guy had speed in numbers) and yet the boot screen appears and it looks like the board had been flashed. I know what happens when an unflashed PC board is used but I have never applied any flashing process myself.

Is the driver which is embedded in OS making the boot screen to come up while the board is still configured as over clocked? Is this possible? Or, should I dreadfully realise that I purchased a faulty product?

 

[orph]

if you see the grey boot screen with the apple logo your card is native mac or a flashed pc card
this is a photo of the official mac card (it says mac on it)

if it is a flashed pc card thats fine. the bios flashed on to it may have a slight overclock set to it if your lucky i gess

is this your card

if so then it's just a pc card (was it used?) looks like a Japanese model? (that brand is new on me)

thats not bad. lots of ppl buy pc cards and DIY flash them to mac, you just tend to pay a lot more for a pre flashed one.
ps nothing wrong with a pc card i have a gtx660 not flashed (just a normal pc card) and works fine for me, i have no boot screen but thats not a problem.

 

[h9826790]

The driver can't show you any screen until the card boot to desktop. Therefore, it's impossible that the driver gives you the boot screen.

Over clock and EFI can exist together, however, it require the user create the EFI ROM by himself. That's not the normal practice for GTX680 flashing. And if the seller did it wrong, or use a OCed EFI ROM which is not for this card, it can cause any strange failure (or even damage).

 

[orph]

ah well it may just be at normal clock and sold as OC'ed i gess
if you use cuda z you can check the clock speed of the card http://cuda-z.sourceforge.net/
id gess if flashed with the mac rom it will be the same speed as the EVGA mac card
http://www.evga.com/articles/00730/#3682
says
base 1006mhz boost 1058mhz
so cuda z will report one of those 2 numbers or be vary close
so for me cuda z reports my gtx 660 is 1137mhz which is the boost speed of my card (which is normal for my card)
ps
looks like ELSA is a Taiwaneses brand

 

[zoomfinder]

ah well it may just be at normal clock and sold as OC'ed i gess
if you use cuda z you can check the clock speed of the card http://cuda-z.sourceforge.net/
id gess if flashed with the mac rom it will be the same speed as the EVGA mac card
http://www.evga.com/articles/00730/#3682
says
base 1006mhz boost 1058mhz
so cuda z will report one of those 2 numbers or be vary close
so for me cuda z reports my gtx 660 is 1137mhz which is the boost speed of my card (which is normal for my card)
ps
looks like ELSA is a Taiwaneses brand

I live in Tokyo and it's night time and I'll have to wait until tomorrow to check out Cuda-Z but I can say my GTX680 has two fans and it's gotta be the PC model. I didn't know this.

BTW if you search on Yahoo auction site, which is like eBay here, Elsa seems to be a popular brand and you can see many products have been marketed.

 

[carpsafari]

The confusion is probably because you don't expect a PC GPU to not show a black screen, but a 'boot manager' as you call it.
The 600 and 700 series GTX are recognized by the standard Apple driver (because of the GTX680 Mac Edition).
I would recommend to DL the NVidia webdriver and the CUDA driver, as they are updated by NVidia.

 

[zoomfinder]

I downloaded Cuda-Z and it reads the clock rate at 1024 MHz and I guess this is the boost rate. I don't see any base rate in the window though. Also I went back to the seller's description of the over clock spec and it says

base clock 1006Mhz → 1059MHz
boost clock 1058Mhz → 1124MHz
memory data rate 6008MHz → 6208MHz

As for the driver, I have both Cuda and Web Drivers installed in ElCap although I'm still having problem installing Web Driver to an external boot volume for no apparent reason. Even when I don't have Web Driver installed, the boot screen appears.

Does this mean anything?

 

[carpsafari]

The 600 and 700 series GTX are recognized by the standard Apple driver (because of the GTX680 Mac Edition).
Just told you!!

You mix up the language!

What we call bootscreen is the grey screen and the progress bar!!!!!
You will NOT see the progress bar.
And you do not get a bootscreen using a PC card.
You make it confusing!

 

[h9826790]

To OP, please answer only one simple question.

When you boot to OSX, do you see the grey screen with the Apple logo after the "Bon" sound?

 

[zoomfinder]

To OP, please answer only one simple question.

When you boot to OSX, do you see the grey screen with the Apple logo after the "Bon" sound?

Yes, I do. I wrote that in the first paragraph of my very first post.

 

[orph]

your fine, you solved your problem aka usb hub
you have a flashed pc card which seems to work fine so no problem.
topic is solved

 

[zoomfinder]

your fine, you solved your problem aka usb hub
you have a flashed pc card which seems to work fine so no problem.
topic is solved

Right, all is in order. Thank you all for your great help!