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cjfp

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 22, 2019
1
0
I have a Mac Pro 1,1 running OS X 10.6.8 and Windows 7. The firmware is flashed to 2,1. I've had an XFX 6870 card in it since 2011, no bootscreen, but it died this year. Now I am back to using the stock GT 7300.

Fortunately, the 6870 card is under warranty! XFX is unsure whether they have any in stock, so I have offered to research other possibilities.

I am pretty sure that for 10.6.8 that 6870 is the best option, without a bootscreen. I would be willing to upgrade to 10.11.6, but it would be nice if it was possible to run 10.6.8 on the GPU without acceleration anyway. I read one report of that here:


So my questions are:

1) which cards will work without flashing under 10.11.6?

2) which cards can be flashed for 10.11.6 (presumably a subset of #1)?

3) which cards can I use for a bootscreen?

If you don't know whether or not XFX made the card, that's OK, I can Google the model. I have read many threads and pages on this topic, including collated data in wikis and tables and sticky posts, but I still can't seem to get a reliable list, beyond basically 7950, 7970, R9 280X from the macvidcards FAQ. And someone who got a GTX 980 Ti to work. I think XFX doesn't make NVidia cards anymore but I'm not 100% sure about that. Regardless, information about NVidia cards could still be useful for other 1,1 owners. Finally, it's also unclear to me where driver support ends in 10.11.6 - cards that only work under 10.12+ are no good here.

Thank you very much for your help.
 

orph

macrumors 68000
Dec 12, 2005
1,884
393
UK
1+2
7950, 7970, R9 280X
there all good options
3) which cards can I use for a bootscreen?
a mac card or one you can flash like the AMD cards you mentioned, the only DIY nvidia flash card is the gtx 680

if you dont need a beef cake GPU grab something low power or if you want more beefcake the AMD options you listed are your best options and can be flashed if needed
OSX likes AMD and the cards you listed are well suported
 
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