Issue with 4870 since Snow Leopard

[macz1]

I use a flashed a HD 4870 in my 2008 Mac Pro which has always worked fine with OS X 10.5 and my good old VGA monitor.

Since I installed SL, this combination does not work as well anymore.
I get a picture during startup (grey apple logo), but once the system finishes loading and the login window should appear the display turns black and shuts down.

When I add the 2600XT in order to get a picture, I can see in the system profiler that the 4870 is correctly recognized (including its 1024 Mb RAM) but it says "no display connected" on both connectors...

Therefore I think it's a software issue. SL seems to have problems in recognizing the display connectors of the card... Is there a fix to this problem? Is it e.g possible to install the old 10.5.9 drivers in Snow Leopard?

 

[macz1]

Am I really the only one having problems with Snow Leopard?

PS: The card is a Gainward HD 4870 Golden Sample 1GB

 

[rub]

i was under the impression VGA never worked with flashed cards.

 

[gugucom]

Agreed! I never got it to work either. I would check if you didn't mix up something there.

 

[macz1]

I do not mix up things. I guarantee VGA worked on my card, But in order to get a signal out of the VGA port (or DVI-to VGA converter) I had to put a HDMI-to-DVI stacked together with a DVI-to-VGA converter on the HDMI port... (signal termination, I think)
After doing this trick I had VGA.

And it's still working during startup at the moment, but as I said, as soon as OS X finishes to load, the screen goes into stand-by mode...

 

[irontony]

Am I really the only one having problems with Snow Leopard?

PS: The card is a Gainward HD 4870 Golden Sample 1GB

In the Hackintosh world all 38xx and 48xx series cards have issues with Snow Leopard, so no, its not just you.

http://netkas.org/ talks a little about it, but I doublt it will help you as you are running an actuall Apple MacPro. But check out that site as you may find some usefull info.


Kind regards

 

[gugucom]

I do not mix up things. I guarantee VGA worked on my card, But in order to get a signal out of the VGA port (or DVI-to VGA converter) I had to put a HDMI-to-DVI stacked together with a DVI-to-VGA converter on the HDMI port... (signal termination, I think)
After doing this trick I had VGA.

And it's still working during startup at the moment, but as I said, as soon as OS X finishes to load, the screen goes into stand-by mode...

OK, I understand that you found a trick with Leopard that I never found. It sounds like the ATI EFI driver runs until OS X 10.6 kicks in when it all goes south.

 

[macz1]

Thank you for the replies

As I suspected, the problem seems to be exclusively related to the VGA output. I tried the card on a DVI display and there everything works flawlessly, so the Gainward I am using does its job perfectly in Snow Leo as long as you use DVI (95% of the people I guess...).

(Grrr, Altough belonging to the computer stone age I don't want to replace my good trusty CRT... I love its colors, black levels and viewing angle independency...)

I will keep you informed if I find a solution to my problem.

 

[sboerup]

Interesting. I have a flashed 4870 and have never had a problem since upgrading to 10.6. Both monitors are DVI though.

 

[Professor Rob]

Apologies for resurrecting an old thread, but this one most closely matches the problem I'm having.

I recently bought a Sapphire 4870 512Mb, part no. 288-10E85-030SA, SKU: 11133-03. I managed to flash it OK and it's working flawlessly in Windows under BootCamp, but I'm having the same issue as the thread starter in OSX.

Starting up with the monitor plugged into the 4870 gives the usual grey startup screen but then it does one of two things: if the monitor is plugged into port 1 it gives no picture and the monitor goes to sleep. If it is plugged into port 2, the screen alternates between dark blue and medium blue every few seconds. The monitor is plugged into the DVI via a VGA adapter. Am I right in assuming that this still just doesn't work, and that I need to get a DVI monitor (which I can't afford)?

I tried installing the Netkas 10.6.6 QE/CI patch but with no success. Actually, that's not strictly true: before the patch, the screen remained black on the second DVI port rather than doing the dark blue/light blue thing.

I can still use the machine as I still have the previous 7300GT installed, but it'd be nice to be able to use the 4870 in OSX as well as Windows. Surely this is software-related, as it's the same monitor plugged into the same card using the same adapter. The card is recognised correctly in System Profiler.

 

[gpzjock]

LCD DVI doesn't cost the earth.

I appreciate your predicament but if you save up you can buy a good quality monitor for not much at all: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ilyama-E2208HDD-inch-1080p-Monitor/dp/B003GXEWEI/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1296027864&sr=8-4
Not IPS but not expensive either, I have the 3 year old version of this screen and it is very nice indeed. My Sapphire 4870 Vapor-X 1 GB had no trouble with it at all. Neither does the Sapphire 5870 I replaced it with.

Or this one with added HDMI: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ilyama-PLE2209HDS-B-22-inch-Widescreen-Monitor/dp/B001O8XEF0/ref=cm_cr_pr_sims_t

 

[Professor Rob]

Thanks, gpzjock.

It's a shame, because I only spent £50 on the card. If I knew I'd need to spend another £120 on the monitor, I'd have been better off spending the £170 on a better card.

Anyone want to buy an Acer x233h widescreen monitor?

 

[gpzjock]

£50 for a 4870 card? Fantastic bargain!
You can sell me it for £50 so you can upgrade to a better one if you like!

 

[Professor Rob]

I got it working properly, for a short while at least. I'm nearly there.

Last night, I installed Keita's 10.6.6 complete patch from this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1077090/ (Thanks, Keita 1).

This gave a lo-res, stretched image and I wasn't able to set it to the correct res for the monitor (1920x1080 @ 60Hz). I faffed about with SwitchresX for a bit but had no success so I uninstalled it again. A short while later I decided on a whim to plug the monitor into the other port on the card (the one that had never even given a picture previously) and was astounded to see it working properly at the correct resolution. I tested it with a couple of games then went to bed a happy chap.

Booted up the machine this morning and was greeted with the lo-res stretched image and non-working port again. So, I need to try and replicate whatever it was I managed to do right yesterday.