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The "8800GT & 2600XT upgrade kits only compatible with the NEW macpro" thread

nihilisticmonk

nihilisticmonk

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 4, 2005
297
38
Hi all,
Thought I'd make a thread with the idea of a central place to discuss purely the shocking news that the old macpro is incompatible with the new graphics card upgrade threads.

For those who aren't aware, when the new macpro octo cores were anounced, Apple also posted two upgrade kits to the store, to allow you to update your macpro to a Geforce 8800GT or ATI 2600XT.

And verily, much rejoicing was had by all. Credit cards were raised to the sky, with beams of $ & £ flying into apples profit margin by dedicated owners of first gen macpro's.

"Could it be true, have apple actually recognised the fans desire for the latest cards. Is this turning over a new leaf for apple"

No. Infact, the anouncement was made of epic fail, and nothing more.

Everyone who's ordered the kit from the apple store have now got the announcement that the kits actually will not work, categorically in the old macpro's, and are purely for people who order the new macs with the standard card, and want to upgrade to the new hotness.

As time goes by, I'm hoping we get news from people that receive the upgrade, with proof of if it works or not.

I'm actually angry that the "upgradable" mac pro is actually a bit rubbish unless you want a pci-e soundcard, hardware raid, or a fiber channel card.

Sure, the new macpro's and cards are PCI-E 2.0, but 2.0 is backwards compatible with 1.0. There seems no legitimate reason to not release these cards to old macpro owners. In fact it reeks of false limitations to try and entice people to sell off old kit and buy the new macpros.

There are rumors of the fact it's the cards rom only being compatible with a new version of EFI on the new macpro's, and the cards not having enough rom to fit two different version of the EFI on the cards, forcing it to only work with the new ones because of hardware limitations. (Note, this has only been mentioned in the forums, we have no official confirmation if this is the case, as always, apple doesn't comment on diddly squat regarding customer issues such as these).

At the moment, this problem hasn't been mentioned by any of the mac news sites either, macrumors included.

I'm now debating if to cancel my order or not, and want to know what other people in the same position have decided to do about the order they've placed.

Apple is so close a lot of the time to making good choices, but then pulls daft stunts like this...

As news comes in, I'll update this post with links, bullet points etc of the state of play.

More info

XLR8yourmac did comment on this

Apple Changes spec to 2.0 only
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/jan08/011508.html#S23844

And apparently steve jobs himself (or staff) replied to the thread urging for calm
http://xlr8yourmac.com/archives/jan08/011108.html#S23824

Reps state is definately IS NOT compatible
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/jan08/011008.html#S23822

and there is a petition (not that these usually change anything)
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/geforce8800/

apple official support boards discussion thread
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1331147&tstart=0&start=100
 

Attachments

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Maybe its just me but I've never understood the benefits of EFI over BIOS. I dont mean to derail this thread, just thinking that this whole 8800GT EFI issue seems a bit silly. Wonder if older 32bit EFI cards will work in the newer Mac Pro. If so, maybe the 8800GT should have been a 32bit EFI card.

Seems like its more of a pain no? Other than providing a shiny pre-boot interface, what other advantages does EFI provide?
 
I thought the 2600XT was compatible with the first-gen Mac Pro. But I'm clearly wrong.

I believe the 8800GT does work in Boot Camp if you wanted it for gaming however.

All of this is just what I've read on Arstechnica so, I could be wrong.
 
Eraserhead said:
I thought the 2600XT was compatible with the first-gen Mac Pro. But I'm clearly wrong.

I believe the 8800GT does work in Boot Camp if you wanted it for gaming however.

All of this is just what I've read on Arstechnica so, I could be wrong.
Click to expand...

If you mean a vanilla 8800GT, yeh, you can use two cards, run the power for both cards and all the other hacks. but both your cards can't run at 16x, and it's fiddly.

I was so excited for a fully 100% working one card solution for osx and windows that'll just bump the speed of the 1900xt, but apple have left us out in the cold.
 
Smells fishy to me. Someone buy it and throw it in and try to get it to work. While Apple is bad for upgrades, I am surprised they let this go on and let everyone buy them.

I'm guessing you can put two 2600 in the computer?
 
elcid said:
Smells fishy to me. Someone buy it and throw it in and try to get it to work.
Click to expand...

Nope its true

elcid said:
While Apple is bad for upgrades, I am surprised they let this go on and let everyone buy them.
Click to expand...

It was in the small print, but got picked up by Ars readers, Apple just noticed that there were more purchases than expected who hadn't bought rev B Mac Pro's.
 
Pressure said:
Don't we have enough threads about this already? :confused:
Click to expand...

We have one thread about the anouncement of the "official" apple upgrade kits.
I've created this to track the fact that the "upgrade kits" are only for brand new octo core macpro's. Not for existing 1st gen macpro customers.

Think you're confusing this issue with all the "getting a windows only 8800gt to work in a macpro" threads floating about.
 
This is going to be a bad year for steve jobs.

If the mac pro was meant to be a powerhouse computer offering superior performance in media, animation, video editing and all that other jive, jobs would live up to this 'status' and make upgrades possible.

I'm really pissed off from this embarrassing bullsh*t news. I specifically got a crappy 7300 GT so that i could switch to a better card later on with my 'old' mac pro and now apple pulls of a stunt like this? They better backpedal like they did after removing list view from folders dropped into the dock.
 
EFI vs. BIOS

There are lots of benefits to moving to EFI boot vs. BIOS, but most lie in the fact that the BIOS concept centers around a number of "legacy" assumptions about computer hardware. (EG. The standards for a system BIOS dictate that hard drives be identified and configured based on about 45 different sets of parameters. This group of 45 is so outdated, it only applies to hard drives so ancient, they had capacities of well under 1 gigabyte. The only reason this hasn't affected anyone is because the standards for a system BIOS also dictated they support a "custom" type. 99.999% of PCs in use today have hard drives in them configured through this "custom" BIOS drive type.)

To make this even *more* ridiculous, the "custom" setting doesn't even support numerical values large enough to accurately represent the true number of sectors on a modern hard drive. So IDE and SATA drive makers do "sector translation" on-board the drives themselves, and map specified "bogus" drive parameters detected in the BIOS to the real values the drive needs.

EFI is a standardized "platform-neutral" alternative to all this outdated stuff in the BIOS. Companies like Intel drafted a set of modern standards that any PC or Mac would need for booting up, and everyone's starting to move towards supporting it.

I think what we're seeing right now is mostly "growing pains" of the card manufacturers learning what is/isn't acceptable in the new world of EFI. My past experiences dealing with ATI and Mac-compatible cards tells me these video card makers only devote a *small* number of employees to those projects. There may, literally, only be one guy trying to write the code for an updated video BIOS for a Mac version of a card.

I agree that this EFI issue seems "a bit silly" -- but it could easily be what I suggested earlier; with limited space on the flash chip on the 8800GT, nVidia might have only been able to fit the EFI64 code on it. Apple probably just told them "Make this work with our new Mac Pro here, and here's a test machine to do it with." They did as they were paid to do and thought they were done with said project. Then it came out the lack of EFI32 support causes issues for older Mac Pros - and everyone's now like "Umm, these are already in production. Can't do much about it right now except telling people not to buy one for the older Mac Pro!" Eventually, a BIOS flash update could probably be released to allow changing over a given 8800GT for old Mac Pro use instead of new Mac Pro use.


contoursvt said:
Maybe its just me but I've never understood the benefits of EFI over BIOS. I dont mean to derail this thread, just thinking that this whole 8800GT EFI issue seems a bit silly. Wonder if older 32bit EFI cards will work in the newer Mac Pro. If so, maybe the 8800GT should have been a 32bit EFI card.

Seems like its more of a pain no? Other than providing a shiny pre-boot interface, what other advantages does EFI provide?
Click to expand...
 
Wont the easy thing to do is just provide a flash EFI upgrade for the older units to EFI64 and be done with it? Then the 8800 will work on both systems with no need for NVIDIA to make changes.
 
If you guys read it says:

"we are contacting you regarding your order for one or both of the following items."


The 2600 is known to work. They aren't lying. The were only referring to the 8800 and the put a hold on both because they are part of the same order.
 
Do we really need another thread about this? Let's try and keep our efforts all in one place so it's not scattered.
 
knome said:
If you guys read it says:

"we are contacting you regarding your order for one or both of the following items."


The 2600 is known to work. They aren't lying. The were only referring to the 8800 and the put a hold on both because they are part of the same order.
Click to expand...

Lies.

I only ordered the 8800GT.
They're halting shipments of both GPU's
 
timb said:
Do we really need another thread about this? Let's try and keep our efforts all in one place so it's not scattered.
Click to expand...

Not easy to do in a forum mate....it's a forum....constantly changing and shifting.

Hell, I went through a few pages before i made this thread, and got a 28 page thread that wasn't all that much useful, and didn't find much else.

This site has a wiki yes? perhaps we should make an entry on that?

I decided to make this thread so I could keep my first post upto date with all relevent info, to make it less scattered. Just trying to help it become more co-ordinated, instead of it getting lost in the mix.

I nearly put "the official" in front of my thread post, but then I realized I'd have to kill myself in shame.

This hasn't been posted to the front page as news, which makes it herder as well...
 
I'll make a wiki page if you won't. I'll get on that later tonight. First on my list is Tiger on Mac Pro (Early 2008) though.
 
Eidorian said:
I'll make a wiki page if you won't. I'll get on that later tonight. First on my list is Tiger on Mac Pro (Early 2008) though.
Click to expand...

Nice one!
I think that's for the best, and also push MR for a front page post regarding this issue. It's big news, because it's obviously got a lot of people frustrated and annoyed.
 
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