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No video and other problems on startup Mac Pro flashed 5,1

N

nbwallace

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 18, 2011
58
6
I recently purchased a 12 core mac pro for my consulting work from an ebay seller. I also procured a gt 750 Ti which I had flashed by macvidcards. I am using an Apricorn dual ssd to pci card for my boot disk and another ssd for my work data. Up until yesterday the machine worked quite well.

When I went to wake it from sleep the monitor wouldn't wake up, well it would come on and say no signal. I tried rebooting to no avail. I plugged a different monitor using dvi rather than display port but no dice. I zapped pram and could see all the disks from my laptop (except for my data ssd). I tried safe mode but still couldn't get video.

I am a pretty skilled hardware/software guy (I've gone the hackintosh route) but I am a little stymied. I haven't yet switched out the graphics card for the original gt 120. I am still concerned about not seeing the SSD.
 
I am hearing the chime and again when I reset pram. I have no checked the internal leds. I will look into that tonight.
 
So I've been playing with it this evening. No LEDs lit up on the mobo. I put the original GT 120 in the second slot and I get no video from that either. I can still get to the disks (except for that second SSD.) I'm kind of at a loss. Maybe a surge?
[doublepost=1471999349][/doublepost]Now I've taken out the 705 Ti and have just the 120 in and still no video. I have looked at the diagnostics LEDs near the front of the mobo. When the button is depressed I see a green at the very top, a amber below and two greens in the lower bank. I have no idea which ones.
 
nbwallace said:
So I've been playing with it this evening. No LEDs lit up on the mobo. I put the original GT 120 in the second slot and I get no video from that either. I can still get to the disks (except for that second SSD.) I'm kind of at a loss. Maybe a surge?
Click to expand...

Do you have screen sharing turned on? If so use your macbook to see if you can get onto your desktop.

Are you able to see the apple boot screen after the chime? OR are you not even seeing that?

If you have no video at all then id suggest starting fresh by pulling out everything, all hard drives, all ram sticks except (1 for each processor, keep slots 1 and 4). Then try and boot with either video card, if still no single switch cards. Then if you still dont have a signal switch pci slots. If you still dont have one, then the only other thing i can think of would be some type of motherboard failure. also If you had a surge anything could happen, so its a possibility.
 
Ok with an older 1018P monitor it's showing video with the 120 card. I looks like it wasn't using the nvidia drivers. However, now I've reinstalled the 750 and it doesn't show video. Hmm
 
I'm going to try various cards and monitor combinations and see what works and what doesn't. I really liked using the 750 Ti with a curved 3440x1440 monitor. Hopefully I can get that combo working again.
 
nbwallace said:
I'm going to try various cards and monitor combinations and see what works and what doesn't. I really liked using the 750 Ti with a curved 3440x1440 monitor. Hopefully I can get that combo working again.
Click to expand...

Trying using different hdmi ports on the card, or different display ports, or hdmi to dvi if thats what you have. I'm not sure what ports you have on that card, but i had a similar issue a while back when I lost the ability to see the image from my display port so i had to use the dvi port instead. I reformatted then did a pram reset and it was back to normal. No clue on what it was just gave up after that lol.

Another thought, maybe your card is going bad which could cause the video loss as well why? If so the RX480 seems to be a great cheap up to date choice in regards to a compatible video card out of the box. You just loose your boot screen, but if you keep the gt120 in slot 3 you can use that one to see the boot screen if you ever need to.
 
Salve di recente o comprato un APPLE MAC PRO 3,1 XEON 8 CORE Ghz 2,8 / 32 GB RAM / SATA 320GB usato
per velocizzare sono in possesso di una ATI AMD Scheda Video Radeon HD 5770 Vapor-X OC 1GB PCIe PC/Mac Pro 1.1/5.1
che avevo su PC, ho messo la scheda sul Mac e non si vede la mela all'avvio: qualcuno mi può aiutare
Grazie
 
buster84 said:
Trying using different hdmi ports on the card, or different display ports, or hdmi to dvi if thats what you have. I'm not sure what ports you have on that card, but i had a similar issue a while back when I lost the ability to see the image from my display port so i had to use the dvi port instead. I reformatted then did a pram reset and it was back to normal. No clue on what it was just gave up after that lol.

Another thought, maybe your card is going bad which could cause the video loss as well why? If so the RX480 seems to be a great cheap up to date choice in regards to a compatible video card out of the box. You just loose your boot screen, but if you keep the gt120 in slot 3 you can use that one to see the boot screen if you ever need to.
Click to expand...

I'll give this a try, by reformatting do you mean you wiped the system disk? That card going bad would be painful. I have been thinking about the rx470 or rx480. I don't know if they're supported in El Capitan, it sounds like they are in Sierra.
 
nbwallace said:
I'll give this a try, by reformatting do you mean you wiped the system disk? That card going bad would be painful. I have been thinking about the rx470 or rx480. I don't know if they're supported in El Capitan, it sounds like they are in Sierra.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure how supported they are in El Capitan but a lot of People have made it work. When I reformatted my main drive it fixed the problem, but my issue might have been different, hard to say.

Another thought since you mentioned two cards not working is the pcie slot, have you tried moving the card to the other x16 slot (slot 3), or even to a x4 slot 1,2?

Also do another pram reset with each change to make sure it's updating. I forgot if this was with my Mac Pro or mackbook pro, but if you press the power button (when completely off) and hold it till it boots up it should boot with the fans on full to bypass the pram/smc, which more that I think about it I think it was my MacBook Pro I did this on. I'm not home to test so give it a try, worst case nothing happens lol
 
Well the 120 worked. As I flushed PRAM I think it reset the nvidia driver. My understanding is the 750 TI will not work without it. SO now I am going to try to have a monitor connected to the gt120 and a monitor connected to the 750 Ti. I wonder if something could have corrupted the nvidia driver.
 
Ok so I think I've gotten to the bottom of this. The display port on the 750 Ti is dead. I now have the widescreen monitor running on the GTX 750 Ti on HDMI. Display port won't work with any of my monitors. Perhaps soon I will upgrade to an rx470 or 480 but for the moment this seems to be the limit.

Thank you all for your help.
 
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