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Radeon X1900XT reliable?

Unknown_K

Unknown_K

68040
I won an X1900XT mac edition video card that the seller said powers on but no video. Took a chance he either didn't have the 6 pin video connector installed or he tested it on a PC. Do mac flashed cards work on a PC as primary video? Were the mac editions less reliable then the PC versions?

Figured it would be better then the 6600LE cards I have now (G5 2.0DC) if it works.  

 
I have the same card I pulled from my Mac Pro. They run hotter than snot. OS X is fairly warm, Windows with Aero enabled is scorching.

 
Are you absolutely positive Is the card is the retail X1900 G5 Mac Edition and not an X1900XT pulled from a Mac Pro? Because the latter won't work in a G5 and the former doesn't have the letters "XT" in its name...

(On the reliability question, the X1900XT in my Mac Pro still worked fine last I checked, but I haven't used the system much the last two or three years. And yeah, it runs hot, just like the rest of a 2006 Mac Pro.)

 
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This has the red plastic extension (and looks like it takes up 2 slots) so its the Mac pro edition? Wonder what the difference between the two are.

 
Firmware at the very least. Also looks like the Retail G5 edition (usually) came with 256MB of RAM vs. the 512MB on the Mac Pro card. (Benchmarks show the G5 edition running quite a lot slower than the Mac Pro model on things that shouldn't be CPU limited so there may be differences in core revision/clocking/etc as well.)

You could try digging around and seeing if there's any possibility of flashing the Open Firmware card's BIOS over the EFI BIOS on the X1900 but you may be solidly SOL. (I get a terrible headache every time I try looking up information on flashing cards for Macs, that's why I've never done it.)

 
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I never flashed a card to Mac before either. Luckily the 7800GS I received today for my AGP Mac G5 was done already.

Wonder how easy it would be to flash it to a PC card so see if it actually works and then figure out how to flash it to PPC after.

 
All the information you need for flashing the 7800GS or X1900XT is all online. Make sure to backup the original ROMs first!

I have not looked at info for either of these cards in a long while but I would bet flashing them in a PC would be easiest.

 
Gorgonops said:
(I get a terrible headache every time I try looking up information on flashing cards for Macs, that's why I've never done it.)
Click to expand...
Do you have a chip programmer.   I find that it's often easier to desolder the firmware chip (typically an 8-pin SOIC Serial Flash) and read/program it on a chip programmer than it is to do all the gymnastics to flash the card in a machine.  

 
The card came in, X1900XT 512MB. Stuck it in a G5 with a rigged power connector and machine would not bong, won't work in a PC either (no video) just for a test.

 
You know, I have no idea if not working in a PC would be expected behavior. In the early days of Linux on x86 Macs one advantage of using BIOS emulation instead of EFI boot was the Radeon driver could use legacy calls for video mode selection (not being able to broke the accelerated drivers at the time) but I have no idea if the legacy BIOS being "present" to that extent would translate to the card being usable on a non-Mac.

 
I don't have a PC with the necessary six pin cables to stick mine in so I could try it. I know Macs can boot normal PC GPU cards these days, not sure if the reverse was ever true.

 
The thing about random video cards from ebay is you never know if anyone has flashed the ROMs. So I just stuck it into a PC to see if it would work or not. Those cards with the long extenders don't like to fit into most towers (the HD bays get in the way).

I do have some Apple 6 pin power cables coming in by next week to make testing easier, will use my beat up G5 for that too.

P.S. where is that little 6 pin power plug located on G5 PCIE machines?

 
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Call me Mr. Skeptical but I can't possibly imagine why someone would flash a card out of a Mac Pro. It's worth far more as a Mac Pro card than it is as a PC card; everybody wants to know how they can use a cheap PC card in a Mac, not vice-versa. I'm having great difficulty constructing a Google search string that gives me any clear information about whether you could even theoretically use the first-gen Mac Pro cards in anything else.

I did find this discussion that implies that the X1300/X1900XT cards are indeed *very* Mac Pro specific; they have a 32 bit EFI BIOS, that won't work with a generic UEFI BIOS, and also says the legacy BIOS that's referenced when running "Bootcamp", IE, BIOS emulation, actually resides in the host machine, not the card. If this is all true... and as bass-ackward as it is I can pretty much believe it, then yes, no video would be expected behavior. (I would expect the PC to produce some error beeps, however, unless the card is so shmucked it's preventing the machine from POST-ing at all.

So what did the auction for this card say exactly, anyway? Did they *say* it was for a G5, or just that it was a "Mac video card", or...?

What I would probably try at this point is putting the card in a PC with a second video card in it, seeing if you can get the machine to boot that way, and determine if the card is being detected at all. (For instance, if you can boot Linux grep through "dmesg" to see if it detected anything, run "lspci", etc.) IF it shows up, well, you can try banging on it with a flash utility. Unless you have a 2006-2007 Mac Pro to try it in and see if it works there you're really shooting in the dark. (My guess is if it didn't work in the Mac Pro it's DOA, period.)

 
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trag said:
Do you have a chip programmer.   I find that it's often easier to desolder the firmware chip (typically an 8-pin SOIC Serial Flash) and read/program it on a chip programmer than it is to do all the gymnastics to flash the card in a machine.  
Click to expand...
It's mostly just the navigating the forums and such where the magical firmware bundles and binaries are hidden. I know *why* they can't really make it too *easy* to find this stuff, since technically copying these hacked firmware bundles pretty easily qualifies as piracy, but... eh. I'll chalk my difficulties down to "insufficient motivation".

 
Paid under $7 shipped which is why I took the chance, besides the heatsink and fan might be of use on another video card.

 
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