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MacPro 5,1 Radeon GPU driver issues.

S

sMAChead

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 13, 2010
19
0
Hello all! First of all I would greatly appreciate and help/advice anyone has to offer. I'm not very familiar with mac besides basic operation. I usually repair windows systems in my spare time and a co-worker gave me a MacPro 5,1 as compensation for repairing his laptop. The specs are as follows: MacPro 5,1 with a Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3565 @ 3.20GHZ (8CPUs), ~3.3GHz Wth 8192MB RAM, with ATI Radeon HD 5870. Excuse my ignorance on my explanation of my issue but here it goes. When I took on this computer it was partitioned with BOOTCAMP and had one partition with Mac Os Lion and the other partition was Windows 7 professional. The windows partition was full of viruses and the hard drive was full. I could never get into the Lion partition because my co-worker couldn't remember his login password since you only used the windows partition. So I decided I would use bootcamp to just delete the old lion partition, install snow leopard and do a clean install of windows 7 Pro. Before I re-installed the new operating systems the windows partition worked fine and recognized the 5870 GPU. But now with fresh install I did of windows 7 I cannot install the GPU drivers. Every time i try to install the appropriate drivers it tells me "We are unable to find a driver for your system. No supported AMD hardware was detected. Under display in DirectX diagnostic Tool it says "standard VGA Graphics Adapter". But in CPUID HWMonitor is shows the ATI Radeon HD 5870 but doesn't give any temp reading or other info just my clocks (graphics/memory). I've tried replacing the card with a Nividia GTX560TI, it works on my windows partition fine but when i restart and hold ALT to select my Mac OS its just a blank screen. Guessing Snow leopard doesn't support Fermi cards? I've been searching other forums and tried a few things, but non of the scenarios of fixes really pertain to my hardware. I'm fully up to date with my windows updates as well. If anyone has a solution I will sing songs about you to my future children and proudly pledge my allegiance to your mac genius. Thanks for any help anyone has to offer!

Edit: also I have 1TB x 2 HD's Snow Leopard is on one hard drive and Windows 7 Pro is on the other.
-Mitch
 
Last edited:
The reason why the screen stays black when you have your GTX 560 Ti in is because the Mac Pros need video cards that have Mac compatible EFI firmware. Without it, the screen will remain black until OS X and the video drivers are loaded. For more info regarding this, please check this thread.
 
I guess the Radeon is a special Mac Edition, which might only run with Apples bootcamp drivers but not on the generic AMD drivers.
 
Fl0r!an said:
I guess the Radeon is a special Mac Edition, which might only run with Apples bootcamp drivers but not on the generic AMD drivers.
Click to expand...
Excuse my ignorance but how do i load these boot camp drivers?
 
pastrychef said:
The reason why the screen stays black when you have your GTX 560 Ti in is because the Mac Pros need video cards that have Mac compatible EFI firmware. Without it, the screen will remain black until OS X and the video drivers are loaded. For more info regarding this, please check this thread.
Click to expand...

iv'e found this forum and been reading it, but am having a hard time understanding it! again I am a Mac idiot. So basically this card wont work with Snow Leopard and i need to load lion?
 
sMAChead said:
iv'e found this forum and been reading it, but am having a hard time understanding it! again I am a Mac idiot. So basically this card wont work with Snow Leopard and i need to load lion?
Click to expand...

Taken from the FAQ thread:

Note that the Fermi generation cards work with Lion, but in almost all cases the Kepler cards require Mountain Lion. You may find a GK107-based card that boots in 10.7.5, but it is highly recommended that you use Mountain Lion since there appears to be much better driver support in that OS in general.
 
pastrychef said:
1. Launch Boot Camp Assistant. (It is located in /Applications/Utilities)
2. Choose to "Download the latest Windows support software from Apple".
Click to expand...

When I open Boot Camp Assistant i only see "Create or remove Windows Partition" or "start the Windows installer".
I'm on Mac OS X Ver. 10.6.3 I have tried to update as well and it downloads wants to restart, when it comes back up if just stays on a blank desktop with no icons. So I just restart and its back to normal desktop with icons.
 
sMAChead said:
YOU ARE THE MAN! i'm not worthy! Thankyou so much man! Really! Wish there was some way i could repay you! Would this also allow me to run my 560TI? i saw that it added some Nividia files in the install.
Click to expand...
 
The link you gave more fixed everything, screen resolution, the gpu is actually recognized now, shows my temp read out and all additional info on hardware monitor. the only thing that is weird is that on my wifi network window it says not internet access and shows a yellow exclamation point, but my internet and browser and such are working just fine! Any idea on this? not anything i'm concerned about just curious.
 
sMAChead said:
YOU ARE THE MAN! i'm not worthy! Thankyou so much man! Really! Wish there was some way i could repay you! Would this also allow me to run my 560TI? i saw that it added some Nividia files in the install.
Click to expand...

You are very welcome.

In Boot Camp, you should be able to install the drivers provided by Nvidia to get your GTX 560 Ti working.

In OS X, you should read the first post in the thread I linked to earlier to get your GTX 560 Ti working.
 
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