PC ATI 5770/5870 cards flashed to work with Mac Pro

[pipkato]

Thanks a lot +Boz for the terrific and detailed flashing tutorial.

I have a couple of questions I hope someone can help with about single/dual PCIe slot versions of the ATX card.

I?m thinking of having a go at an ATX ATI 5770 for my Mac Pro (now that Final Cut Pro X refuses to even download because I have an older non-OpenCL Radeon HD 2600 card installed).

I?m not a gamer, so my principal interest is in having an OpenCL compatible card in my Mac Pro. Obviously, a relatively powerful card is better, since the GPU will be doing a lot of the grunt work in rendering files. I?m also concerned about space and cooling, since I already have one PCIe slot occupied by a BlackMagic Design ?Intensity Pro? card (see http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/).

I?ve had a look at your link to NewEgg, but I?ll be buying from the UK, so my choice is more limited, and usually more expensive. It seems that the more popular and common version is a single PCIe slot version of the XFX ATI 5770, which claims to have more efficient cooling and lower power consumption. It?s usually available as a Dual DVI with mini DisplayPort and sometimes including HDMI.

Do you know if your flashing procedure will work just as well on an ATX single slot version of the 5770?

If so, am I missing something in going for what seems to be a newer and more efficient version? Is there an argument for opting for the dual PCIe slot card?

[fix-this!]

flashing a new bios to your gpu is some dangerous stuff IMO. my radeon hd 5770 works fine in osx86 as is.

[pipkato]

Thanks smooth3006.

But my understanding was that the PC version of the XFX ATI 5770 will not run in a Mac Pro unless the BIOS is flashed - no?

flashing a new bios to your gpu is some dangerous stuff IMO. my radeon hd 5770 works fine in osx86 as is.

[Olemus]

flashing a new bios to your gpu is some dangerous stuff IMO. my radeon hd 5770 works fine in osx86 as is.

It's not dangerous at all nowadays, it's the same as BIOS flashing on a motherboard really.

[.Neo]

flashing a new bios to your gpu is some dangerous stuff IMO. my radeon hd 5770 works fine in osx86 as is.

I've flashed a lot of hardware over the years: DVD burners, GPUs etc. nothing ever went wrong.

[payday0023]

Hi all, new to the forum here...

I can only get to about step #10 before I start to have problems!!!

After booting from my Win 95 boot disc, I see the DOS prompts but it says "No valid CDROM device drivers selected." What the entire screen says is:

CD-ROM Device Driver for IDE (Four Channels Supported)

© Sopyright Oak Technology Inc. 1993-1996

Driver Version : V340

Device Name : BANANA

No drives found aborting installation

Device driver not found: 'BANANA'.

No valid CDROM device drivers selected

A:\>

So I get to the point where I can enter in the "C:\" command, but once I hit enter it says: "Invalid drive specification"

Any ideas??? I'm trying to flash an ATI Radeon 5770 in a Mac Pro 1,1. Please help!

[payday0023]

Any ideas??? I'm trying to flash an ATI Radeon 5770 in a Mac Pro 1,1. Please help!

Woooohooo!!! Got it working. This is a great How-To guide, thank you so much for posting. Two things that I ran into:

1) I was having trouble getting into DOS so I used this as my boot disk fdbasecd.iso and it worked no problem (just press 1 at the first prompt, then 2 at the second prompt when you boot from a CD with this on it).

2) this is probably a super-noob thing, but it's been a long time since I've used any DOS commands so remember that to change disk drives, type:

C:

(or use whichever other letter your drive is called) and press Enter. And to bring up the directory, type:

dir

and hit enter. Again, this is probably ridiculously simple stuff, but may be helpful to someone out there.

Thanks again!!

[marta]

Hi all, new to the forum here...

I can only get to about step #10 before I start to have problems!!!

After booting from my Win 95 boot disc, I see the DOS prompts but it says "No valid CDROM device drivers selected." What the entire screen says is:

CD-ROM Device Driver for IDE (Four Channels Supported)

? Sopyright Oak Technology Inc. 1993-1996

Driver Version : V340

Device Name : BANANA

No drives found aborting installation

Device driver not found: 'BANANA'.

No valid CDROM device drivers selected

A:\>

So I get to the point where I can enter in the "C:\" command, but once I hit enter it says: "Invalid drive specification"

Any ideas??? I'm trying to flash an ATI Radeon 5770 in a Mac Pro 1,1. Please help!

I have the same problem... I can't detect any driver through MS-DOS.

I've followed the guide to setup the partition. On the top the "ATIFLASHHDD" formatted with FAT32, and below the second one with MacOs Journaled.

On the "ATIFLASHHDD" partition I've dumped the ATIFlash 3.89 file. The second partition it's empty.

The drive I used to make the partition was an external drive via USB. Maybe that was the problem.

Should I use an internal drive? I have none available for the moment.

I would appreciate all your help guys.

Hope to here from you soon.

Thanks a lot.

:)

I would appreciate your help and contribution.

Success!

Flashed ATI 5770 (possible for 5870) to work in Macs.. I'm using it in Mac Pro 3.1 (early 2008).

Apple upgrade is $280.. Newegg price for the card is $136. Saving $140.. PRICELESS

This works on original Macs. Not for hackintoshes.

These are the cards you want to use for the seemless flashing:

5870 - http://www.newegg.co...&Tpk=XFX%205870

5770 - http://www.newegg.co...0-447-_-Product

Here's what needs to be done, not really a huge issue:

GUIDE:

1) Get the ATI 5770 or 5870 card linked above. I got the 5770 one.

2) You need to have a working mac graphics card in your system in PCI-E slot 1 just so you can do all this without problems and so you don't need a PC.

3) Insert the 5770 in your mac in PCI-E slot 2 and connect the power cable.

4) If you have an addition hard drive in your mac, or you have an empty HDD or the one you can tinker with, go to Disk Utility and create a partition on it as FAT. You can do this on your main OSX drive too I just don't like messing with Disk Utility and my main drive. But it's possible to just create additional partition there as FAT too.

5) Make a DOS boot disc.. The easiest way to do this is to simply go here: http://www.allbootdi...wnload/iso.html . Download Win95B bootdisk ISO ( http://www.allbootdi...5b_bootdisk.iso ) . Burn the image to an EMPTY dvd with Disk Utility.

6) Download ATIFlash 3.79 or later from here: http://www.techpower...Flash_3.79.html

7) Unzip the ATIFlash 3.79 to the FAT partition you created on your mac. We do this so your hard drive will be visible when you boot in Win95 DOS mode with the DVD.

8) Put the DVD with Win95 boot disc in the drive and reboot your Mac.

9) Hold C to boot from the DVD disc.

10) Once DOS loads up and you see A:\ type C:\ to switch to FAT drive you created earlier.

11) Type DIR to list the contents of the drive to see if you see ATIFlash files. If yes, it's all good you are on the right drive, if no, you will need to double check if your hard drive is partitioned ok or if there's another drive letter available like D: or E: or G:.

12) Now, when you are at C: and you can see the ATIFlash.exe file on it after the DIR command, you type: atiflash.exe -i to list out all available ATI display adapters in your Mac (just in case you have something beside the 5770 you are flashing). The result should be something like a list view and it should tell you first the adapter number (usually the 5770 will be adapter 0) and the rom size (which should be 20000) and the GPU core will say Juniper.. if you see more then one adapter you have to make sure to note the adapter number for the 5770 Juniper card.

13) Okay, now we are going to backup your existing ROM.. in case something goes wrong. We do this by issuing the following command:

atiflash -s 0 XFX5770.rom 20000

You would call the file XFX5870.rom if you were dealing with the 5870 card. Let me just explain what's going on here.. the -s switch means it will save the rom from the card. the number is the adapter number you would see which is mention one step above. Then we have the name of the rom file and the size (which again should be matching the rom size in the info list we did earlier, and with this card should be 20000).

14) That's about it. Now we have the original ROM saved. We should do another DIR command now and check out to make sure that the rom size in file is 128KB (131 072 B). If you used the cards listed above you should get this without problems. If you don't, well read the "IF SOMETHING WENT WRONG:" paragraph at the end of this post.

15) Now, reboot to OSX and we will do one small modification to our rom file to make it work with the OSX and then we will reflash the card with that new one and that's gonna be it.

16) Once you have rebooted, you will download the following file http://hotfile.com/d..._Tools.zip.html

17) Extract the content of the zip file in your home folder on your Mac. You should see 3 files: 5770_vervet_netkas.efi, 5870_vervet_netkas.efi and fixrom.py. These are the EFIs compatible with the Macs and the small utility tool that will fix your original card's EFI to work with Macs..

18) Okay.. we are almost there.. Now copy the XFX5770.rom file you created with ATIFlash tool to the home folder as well (where the other 3 files you just download are) and make sure you still keep the original copy of the XFX5770.rom somewhere just in case something goes wrong and you need to re-flash your card to the original rom.

19) Mucho awesome! Now, in your home folder on your Mac (that's your username folder you click in Finder) you should have 4 files.. 3 of the flash helper files and 1 rom file.

20) Great, now all you have to do is run TERMINAL (you can start it up from Spotlight if you don't know where it's located) and copy paste these:

If you are flashing ATI 5770 paste this:

blocknum=`printf %d "'\`dd if=XFX5770.rom bs=1 skip=2 count=1 2>/dev/null\`"`
size=$(($blocknum * 512))
dd if=5770_vervet_netkas.efi of=XFX5770.rom bs=$size seek=1 conv=notrunc

If you are flashing ATI 5870 card, paste this:

blocknum=`printf %d "'\`dd if=XFX5870.rom bs=1 skip=2 count=1 2>/dev/null\`"`
size=$(($blocknum * 512))
dd if=5870_uakari_netkas.efi of=XFX5870.rom bs=$size seek=1 conv=notrunc

Once you have pasted into terminal window hit ENTER. Let it do it's thing and you should be good. I used 5770 approach.

21) Now, let's check if everything is going smoothly. Now you will open the XFX5770.rom (or XFX5870.rom if your card is 5870) from your home folder, with the Text Edit and you will search for string instance "mcuc". If you find 2 instances, everything is AWESOME. If not (if it's only 1 or more than 2), you will need to skip to "IF SOMETHING WENT WRONG:" paragraph.

22) So far so good, you got 2 instances of "mcuc" and now you are ready for one small last step before you flash the rom back to your card.

23) Open terminal again and run:

python fixrom.py XFX5770.rom XFX5770.rom

(you would use XFX5870.rom if you were using 5870 card). After the small script finishes, you are READY TO FLASH again!

24) Before we do flash it, let's rename the XFX5770.rom in your home folder to something like MAC5770.rom.

25) Copy it back to that FAT partition where you placed the ATIFlash file. Remember you should also have the old rom there so that's why we are renaming this one, so when you flash you are 100% sure that you are using the modified rom.

26) Okay.. that's it.. now we gotta reboot into DOS again using that DVD and when you boot, you switch back to C:\ where the ATIFlash utility is and you run the following command:

atiflash.exe -p 0 MAC5770.rom

now let's analyze this again.. -p switch means that the BIOS should be written to the card. The is the adapter number of the 5770 card (or 5870) you have identified earlier when you used atiflash -i switch. And finally the name of the rom (MAC5870.rom would be the name if you are flashing 5870).

27) When the flash is done, you should see on the screen a message that says you need to reboot in order for VBios to be refreshed or something similar..

28) Power down the Mac. When you hear the bing, hold ALT key to boot into OSX.

29) You should see your ATI card now working natively in OSX. You are done.

This is guide was basically a more descriptive process recommeneded and outlined by jeanlain on netkas forums and thanks to the netkas and rominator efi mods to make sure you are working with your card's original EFI/BIOS and not using some custom ones that might cause issues and even kill your card.

IF SOMETHING WENT WRONG:

If something went wrong there are several issues that might have happened. You might not be using the card I recommended. Your cards are simply not as compatible as they should be and you will need to do some heavier modding to make them work. In order to find help and make things work, go here and read the steps that deal with your problem (if you have only 1 or more then 1 instances of mcuc in the modified rom file, or if your rom size is more or different than the 128k one mentioned in the tutorial.

Link: http://forum.netkas....php?topic=692.0

In case your card is not powering up or you think you messed something up, reboot the mac with the boot DVD we created and flash the card with the original rom. So it would look something like this: atiflash -p 0 XFX5770.rom. Power down your computer, turn it back on again and your card should be operating with the old ROM as originally created.

Hi all, new to the forum here...

I can only get to about step #10 before I start to have problems!!!

After booting from my Win 95 boot disc, I see the DOS prompts but it says "No valid CDROM device drivers selected." What the entire screen says is:

CD-ROM Device Driver for IDE (Four Channels Supported)

? Sopyright Oak Technology Inc. 1993-1996

Driver Version : V340

Device Name : BANANA

No drives found aborting installation

Device driver not found: 'BANANA'.

No valid CDROM device drivers selected

A:\>

So I get to the point where I can enter in the "C:\" command, but once I hit enter it says: "Invalid drive specification"

Any ideas??? I'm trying to flash an ATI Radeon 5770 in a Mac Pro 1,1. Please help!

I have the same problem... I can't detect any driver through MS-DOS.

I've followed the guide to setup the partition. On the top the "ATIFLASHHDD" formatted with FAT32, and below the second one with MacOs Journaled.

On the "ATIFLASHHDD" partition I've dumped the ATIFlash 3.89 file. The second partition it's empty.

The drive I used to make the partition was an external drive via USB. Maybe that was the problem.

Should I use an internal drive? I have none available for the moment.

I would appreciate all your help guys.

Hope to here from you soon.

Thanks a lot.

:)

[NeoandGeo]

Wow. This is why I am not stupid enough to buy a Mac for any purpose. That guide is ridiculously complicated and time consuming.

[Boz]

Wow. This is why I am not stupid enough to buy a Mac for any purpose. That guide is ridiculously complicated and time consuming.

This guide is depricated..

Any ATI 5xxx series and I think even ATI 6xxxx series cards excluding the 6890/6990 will work out the box with OSX Lion.. I strongly encourage you guys to not use this guide and just upgrade to Lion. Then you can use most Nvidia and ATI cards these days right out of the box on your mac without the need to flash anything.

I have the same problem... I can't detect any driver through MS-DOS.

I've followed the guide to setup the partition. On the top the "ATIFLASHHDD" formatted with FAT32, and below the second one with MacOs Journaled.

On the "ATIFLASHHDD" partition I've dumped the ATIFlash 3.89 file. The second partition it's empty.

The drive I used to make the partition was an external drive via USB. Maybe that was the problem.

Should I use an internal drive? I have none available for the moment.

I would appreciate all your help guys.

Hope to here from you soon.

Thanks a lot.

:)

I would appreciate your help and contribution.

I have the same problem... I can't detect any driver through MS-DOS.

I've followed the guide to setup the partition. On the top the "ATIFLASHHDD" formatted with FAT32, and below the second one with MacOs Journaled.

On the "ATIFLASHHDD" partition I've dumped the ATIFlash 3.89 file. The second partition it's empty.

The drive I used to make the partition was an external drive via USB. Maybe that was the problem.

Should I use an internal drive? I have none available for the moment.

I would appreciate all your help guys.

Hope to here from you soon.

Thanks a lot.

:)

Marta, you don't have to flash the cards anymore.. just upgrade to OSX Lion if it's possible and your PC card will work right out of the box.

[PhforAndAfter]

Hi guys, I'm desperatly looking for help with this exact subject, and this seems to be the only thread on the net that is specific to my current needs. So, sorry for drudging it back up.

I'm trying to install a PC HD 5770 into my Mac Pro 3,1 (2008), but it's not plug and play as this thread suggests for some reason. I'm not quite savvy enough to try a the flash suggested by the OP, and was hoping that it would 'just work,' since I upgraded to Lion for pretty much specifically this purpose.

When I install the card and boot the computer, I get nothing. I've waited about 10 minutes, and gotten nothing but a black screen. When I tried to boot off the old card with the 5770 still installed, it worked fine, but this is all that's showing up:

All software is up to date, and it seems that firmware is as well.

Any ideas? Help would be hugely appreciated - I'd rather spend the $$ on a new GPU for my gaming rig than on an old 5770 for my Mac :\

[9Charms]

First, this guide is NOT deprecated. I have a Mac Pro 1,1 running LION, and yes, out of the box it DOES work, but Steam and DVD Player don't work. Who knows what else doesn't work.

Second, because of this guide, I was able to flash my XFX HD-5770 to get everything to work properly. So yes, this is still an immensely useful guide.

Third, here are the answers to some of the issues others are experiencing on this forum. I just went through hours of figuring this out.

1. You MUST be running SNOW LEOPARD. I have no idea why, but these steps do not seem to all work under Lion. You're welcome to investigate why, but it was faster to install snow leopard on a spare HD then to try and figure it out (for me anyways).

2. Grab another spare/blank HDD, stick it in the Mac Pro. Remove all other drives. So you should have your Snow Leopard boot drive, and this second blank drive in your tower. No other HDD's.

3. Use Snow Leopard's disk utility to create 2 partitions as per Step 4 in this guide. Make sure you click "options" and select Master Boot Record.

4. Create the Windows boot disk as per step 5. I used a CD and it worked. I had zero success trying to create a USB thumb drive.

5. When you boot off the CD, you will get that stupid error some of you have mentioned, but it doesn't matter because you can type in "C:\" and it will work

6. The rest of the guide proceeds as outlined above.

For the record, I have flashed a ZNFC and a ZNDC version of the 5770 and it works.

EDIT: To effectively boot off the CD, hold "option" at restart and select the CD.... Holding "C" sometimes results in a frozen DOS prompt.

[dev21]

hey great tutorial,

but what i have to do in part 20) ?

i paste & copy this into the terminal, but this is the awnser from the pc:

mac:~ user$ blocknum=`printf %d "'\`dd if=XFX5770.rom bs=1 skip=2 count=1 2>/dev/null\`"`

mac:~ user$ size=$(($blocknum * 512))

mac:~ user$ dd if=5770_vervet_netkas.efi of=XFX5770.rom bs=$size seek=1 conv=notrunc

dd: bs must be between 1 and -1

what i have to do now ?

thanks!!

Hi Newbie here

i got the same problem like this ! anyone can help me about this ??

[Boz]

Hi Newbie here

i got the same problem like this ! anyone can help me about this ??

What version of OSX are you using.. as 9Charms said.. the problem is that I did this guide a while back and it was using Snow Leopard. Terminal stuff and especially OSX level commands do change or they add things or change how some things work.

I would really love to help, but without going with you through the whole process it's going to be difficult to see what's up.

But let's start here.

1. What version of OSX are you using

2. Are you on a hackintosh or a real Mac?

3. What is your ATI 5770 card you bought?

4. Can you post the size of your ROM from step 13/14

we'll see from there what's up.

[Boz]

Also.. another note for newer OSX (like Lion or Mountain lion).. to get your PC ATI 5xxx/6xxx to work, you need drivers (kexts) for it.

On OSX Lion you will probably need to look for original ATI 5xxx kext that comes with iMacs and install them with Kext Utility before you plug the ATI card in. You can look for some advices and forum posts about this on http://www.tonymacx86.com/

I am not sure what level of support and whether or not Mountain Lion comes with those drivers by default as I have not tried it but I read that people had success installing without too much problems.

Since Nvidia cards are much better supported on latest OSX versions, I strongly encourage people to go with Nvidia cards instead of ATI if you do have a choice.

5xx and 6xx cards work flawlessly on OSX (Lion and Mountain Lion). I have even dual GTX 580s now working on it. No flashing, no patching.. works great.

Just FYI.

[dev21]

1. What version of OSX are you using i am using 10.6.8 (mac pro 1.1)

2. Are you on a hackintosh or a real Mac? no real mac just trying to be macer :)

3. What is your ATI 5770 card you bought? XFX Radeon HD 5770

4. Can you post the size of your ROM from step 13/1 XFX5770.rom size 131 KB

[dev21]

1. What version of OSX are you using i am using 10.6.8 (mac pro 1.1) 2. Are you on a hackintosh or a real Mac? no real mac just trying to be macer :) 3. What is your ATI 5770 card you bought? XFX Radeon HD 5770 4. Can you post the size of your ROM from step 13/1 XFX5770.rom size 131 KB

my terminal

unknown0017f2998008: user$ then i copy paste

unknown0017f2998008:~ user$ blocknum=`printf %d"`\`dd if=XFX5770.rom bs=1 skip=2 count=1 2>/dev/null\`"`

unknown0017f2998008:~ user$ size=$(($blocknum *512))

unknown0017f2998008:~ user$ dd if=5770_vervet_netkas.efi of=XFX5770.rom bs=$size seek=1 conv=not runc

dd: bs must be between 1 and 9223372036854775807

unknown0017f2998088:~ user$

[dev21]

BOZ i got it .... it flash already.... thanks buddy

[dsmmyth]

Hi Boz/everyone,

I actually followed this nearly to a T, and have the same exact graphics card with the Juniper core (ZNFC). The only difference is I booted into Win safe mode CMD and flashed the card.

I've flashed it somewhat successfully, but it's reading display connector as blank (see pic).

Now, I've actually managed to get signal off of it in Windows bootcamp, but I can't get anything going in OSX. Any ideas?

Edit: I'm in SL 10.6.8.

[dsmmyth]

Update: I actually fixed the problem above by reading this here.

http://macprovideocards.com/1068update/

10.6.8 actually renders some 5770 models useless, so I had to reinstall SL and upgrade from there.

[joyal]

Hello all. Big thanks to UNSTOPABLE for the post on flashing a XFX card to work in a Mac Pro 1,1. So here's my story:

I have two Mac Pros both 1,1 and about a year ago I used this quide to flash a XFX 5770 to work in MAC Pro A, the quide was PERFECT, it worked like a charm and I continue to have that card working. Last week I obtained another XFX 5770, actually three of them for I thought the first one was dead and I went through the same process as before, everything matched the guide except no video output from any of the ports I tried (2 DVD and the HDMI) so I flashed back the original ROM and tried again, still no luck and I have tried all three cards, which I know work on a pc after I have flashed them back to PC rom.

So after reading that LION sees these cards natively I decided to upgrade MAC Pro B to LION, since I tried both computers to perform the flashing. So now that MAC PRO B has lion I tried the cards, still no luck. Is it the fact that I have altered the Kernel extensions in the flashing is why LION can't use this card? If so, how can I get LION to see one of these cards in native form (Original PC form)? Is there a way to remove the Kernel extensions that were altered during the Flash, so That LION on mac pro B is "Clean"?

Any help would be appreciated..

Stuck with 3 XFX 5770 cards

Thanks

[topaz]

Hi guys, again that's to unstoppable for all his work :-)

I have a dell ati 5770 on the way.

Am I correct in thinking that if I upgrade my mac pro 1.1 10.6.8 to 10.75 then install the pc 5700 it will work without flash

But I will have no boot screen, Also DVD player will not work ( is there a fix for that) ?

If I had a 2nd monitor VGA would I see the boot screen?

Any help is much appreciated.

Best

Matt :-)

[NexusVirtual]

Wow. This is why I am not stupid enough to buy a Mac for any purpose. That guide is ridiculously complicated and time consuming.

This is info on flashing firmware from one computer world into another computer world. You thought that would be easy?

Blame PC! Not Mac!

You prefer WIndows where a crash means you have to format your entire drive, reinstall windows, and reinstall your drivers, and your applications?

On Mac, IF you ever crash, you reboot and you're done!

Hi guys, again that's to unstoppable for all his work :-)

I have a dell ati 5770 on the way.

Am I correct in thinking that if I upgrade my mac pro 1.1 10.6.8 to 10.75 then install the pc 5700 it will work without flash

But I will have no boot screen, Also DVD player will not work ( is there a fix for that) ?

If I had a 2nd monitor VGA would I see the boot screen?

Any help is much appreciated.

Best

Matt :-)

Your DVD player has nothing to do with a graphics card.

If your DVD player does not work, buy a new one.

Flashing a GPU has nothing to do with your DVD player.

If you have a second Graphics card with VGA, for your second monitor, that will work. Not sure what you were trying to say.

[123456789A]

You prefer WIndows where a crash means you have to format your entire drive, reinstall windows, and reinstall your drivers, and your applications?

On Mac, IF you ever crash, you reboot and you're done!

Uhhh... What?

[NexusVirtual]

Add a zero to that $140, and you're talking about Macs in general and not just a single hardware part in one.

If you are suggesting a Mac is a ripoff, why does US Military Nucular Submarines use Mac and not PC?

Why does the movie industry use Mac for Video Editing and special effects rendering?

Why are Mac the ultimate in graphics and audio editing?

Why are you here?

Trolling for a higher post count?