Can I put a regular 5870 into a mac?

rjk

rjk

rjk

Caporegime
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Hi guys

lets start this off by saying the obvious, I know next to nothing about macs so this is a very noob question.

a friend of mine has a mac pro with a X1900XT in there

he wants to upgrade to a 5770 or 5870 like they are offering in the current models

would he just be able to get one of the regular cards from OcUK and install it?

any advice appreciated as I'm not really 100%
 
:confused:

do they have specific graphics bioses for the mac then?

as mentioned i dont really know enough to advise him properly
 
Macs use EFI instead of a BIOS, which means video cards need a special BIOS of their own to be compatible. Thus, he could use any regular card but he would only be able to boot Windows, not Mac OS.

I think that's correct anyway! :)
 
When you say a special bios do you mean using the existing 5870 bios hardware with different software, or physically a different bios? I.e. you could flash it to work?
 
For desktops, I'm a lifelong PC user - always built my own. Despite converting to Apple for Laptops, I really don't like the graphics card situation.

How it should be I reckon (all IMHO of-course) is that ATi/Nvidia make and OcUK sell graphics cards. You can then download from the ATi/Nvidia websites the latest GPU BIOS for your card - both the Mac and PC BIOSs are there, in their latest revision, to download (not from a forum where someones just dumped it from their card, officially from the manufacturers). I can see the logic in the cards coming with the PC BIOS version as standard, as that's what a greater proportion of the end users will want.
Drivers for the cards are made by ATi/Nvidia and are available on their websites - both the Mac and PC drivers are there, in their latest revision, to download. Once Apple have approved a driver (kinda like WHQL) it's also available from Software Update, and once Microsoft have approved a driver it's also available from Windows Update.

That way both Mac and PC users have access to the latest and greatest cards (and that's actually more money for ATi/Nvidia) and the cards they buy are identical. Easier for retailers - they don't have to stock duplicate items, and the same price for Mac and PC users.
Some retailers could, if they wanted to be extra n00b friendly, offer the service of flashing the card for you.

Scougar said:
When you say a special bios do you mean using the existing 5870 bios hardware with different software, or physically a different bios? I.e. you could flash it to work?
Click to expand...

In most cases it's the software ROM that's different, not the hardware.
 
Yep. EFI, I think is backwards compatible. Like, a graphics card using EFI can be used on a PC using BIOS, but because EFI is supposed to be the successor to BIOS a BIOS board won't work with EFI.

I may be wrong on that though, but yeah - it is purely software, the cards physically, are the same.
 
Dunno if its still the case - but it used to be a lot of GPUs that werent made with apple hardware in mind didn't have enough space to flash the EFI ROM.
 
Apple sell 5870's and 5850's now for Mac's, and given that they are pretty much exactly the same physically, I think you should be fine with flashing it on to them.
 
Surely you can find a website that will let you flash the cards, I remember a while back I found some site that had loads of of different BIOSs readily available, including ones that allowed you to change the voltage and what not to try and get a better overclock.

If you did some digging and found out the exact model number of the card you can probably find a site with an applicable EFI somewhere, unless the hardware is radically different.
 
I was of the opinion that Mac cards had a different bios chip, so it's not just a software issue. Don't know if that's right though.
 
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