1. How To Flash Graphics Card For Mac Pro
2. How To Flash A Video Card For Mac Pro 2012
3. How To Flash A Video Card For Mac Pro 5 1

Last updated on November 1, 2009

This is how to flash an nVidia GeForce 8800GT or GTS graphics card (512 MB variant only) for use on a Mac Pro. The things you'll need to do this are a PC wit. A card flashed with a Mac BIOS will be able to work at PCIe 2.0 speeds, supporting twice the data rate. Cards with our Mac BIOS are able to run their full monitor arrangement (unless specifically noted) and make use of the most up to date technologies, including 4K monitor support and CUDA, OpenCL and OpenGL support. These graphics cards are custom designed for the Cylinder Mac Pro, and although they use a PCI 3.0 x16 interface, the Cylinder Mac Pro is not compatible with any standard Mac or Windows compatible PCIe video card. Both the physical dimensions of the card and the connector are specific to the Cylinder Mac Pro. @oliverb I’m not too familiar with EFI. Maybe one trick could be to boot and immediately close the lid before display starts up while eGPU is plugged in (for pre-2016 macs this did work I think, at least on my 2018 attempting so prevents boot - anyway, can test on older mac by plugging in monitor directly to Mac and trying - boot screen would show on external monitor - could have weird.

I’d occasionally been considering picking up a new video card for my Mac Pro (MacPro1,1) to replace my NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT, but the new ones are very expensive. Typically there are ways to flash PC video cards with Mac-compatible (OF or EFI) firmware, but reliable methods and card versions aren’t always the easiest to find. However, last week I was looking into it and all the pieces came into place, with good flashing instructions and firmware available and a relatively cheap, compatible card appearing on eBay.

First, I ordered two power cables from ATI, Power Cable for Radeon® X1900 MAC G5 Edition. These cables allow one to get PCIe6-pin power connectors from the Mac Pro mainboard. Most modern video cards require more power than the slot can provide, so these connectors are generally connected directly to a PC’s power supply to provide the extra needs. As Macs tend not to have extra connectors just hanging around in the case, Apple provided the power connectors right on the main board. These cables thus plug right into the main board (Picture) up near the SATA connectors, then connect right to the back of the video card (Picture).

Next I purchased a Sapphire 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4870 from eBay with a winning bid of $110 (Auction Mirror). This shipped quite quickly, and arrived in great shape with all the original retail box items, which was a pleasant surprise.

After getting the card and the cables, it was time to install it and flash it. To do this I followed Alexandre Boeglin’s article entitled How to flash a PC 4870 for a Mac Pro, using only Mac OS X. I’ll recap the steps that I performed here:

· Acquire the iMac Graphics FW Update 1.0.2 and use Pacifist to extract ATIFacelessFlash.app and ATIROMFlasher.kext from it. This will be used as an OS X native ATI video card flasher for doing the firmware update.
· Acquire the appropriate firmware. I used sapp-512-4870.rom from this MacRumors: Forums post. If you don’t have a 512MB Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 you will likely need to find another or make your own firmware image.
· Remove all the .ROM files in .../ATIFacelessFlash.app/Contents/Resources and put your .ROM file in there.
· Ensure that ATIROMFlasher.kext will load. The command sudo kextutil -nt ATIROMFlasher.kext is useful for this, and you’ll likely have to do sudo chown -R root:wheel ATIROMFlasher.kext and sudo chmod -R 644 ATIROMFlasher.kext to get it loading.
· Once the .kext is loading and ATIFacelessFlash.app is prepped, shut off the computer, move your old video card up one slot, and install the new one in Slot 1 as shown in this picture.
· Boot the computer with the monitor connected to your old video card. Load the kernel extension for the flashing (sudo kextload ATIROMFlasher.kext), then run the flash utility: sudo open ATIFacelessFlash.app.
· Shut down your computer, pull the old card, and boot up with the monitor connected to the new one. Everything should work great, and you should now have an ATI Radeon HD 4870 for Mac.

After the flashing is done, System Info showed the following under Graphics/Displays:

ATI Radeon HD 4870:
Chipset Model: ATI Radeon HD 4870
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
Slot: Slot-1
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 512 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x9440
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-B7710C-176
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.318

How To Flash Graphics Card For Mac Pro

Now that the upgrade is done I can run Google Earth with all the quality settings turned up. I also did a quick compare with two graphics benchmarks, CINEBENCH and OpenMark. With the old card on CINEBENCH I got a score of 3380, and with the new one 5427. Under OpenMark, which seems to test OpenGL, I went from a score of 8520 to 22579.

Having a fan the new card is slightly louder than I’d like, but I was a bit spoiled before with the old fanless card. I’ll try and investigate a way to quiet this one down, but all things said it is still quite quiet. If it ends up being a bit much I can always sell the card with its Mac firmware upgrade for at least as much as I paid.

If you’d like to see a few more pictures, they are all available in this album entitied ATI Radeon HD 4870 in Mac Pro.

How To Flash A Video Card For Mac Pro 2012

How To Flash A Video Card For Mac Pro 5 1

I've been reading, researching, etc like crazy on flashing PC video cards for mac. Cindori's Post: The Golden Guide to Flashing Graphic Cards how-to-flash-a-video-card-for-mac-pro.html. This guide is GOLDEN!! And Rew's post: Step by Step: How to flash a PC 4870 1 Gig Video Card for your 2006 Mac Pro (1,1) how-to-flash-a-video-card-for-mac-pro.html. Have been really helpful. Only my ATI Radeon HD 2600XT stock card in my 2008 mac pro, totally fried/died out. So I have zero video card (I'm using a PC laptop now). And the tutorials on how to flash a PC cards requires plugging in both the old card (using it while dumping the ROM) and new card. I was looking into buy a Sapphire 4870 1G and I don't want to pay the $300 and plus already used flashed cards on eBay. The 4870 are cheaper compared to the 5870 at $400 plus. I was wondering if anybody got to flashing the 4870 using just the one video card on a mac pro 2008 (3.1)? I need a good video card to do 3D modeling in Maya and Mudbox. But don't want to pay double the price, or lesser choice for 'apple' approved hardware?