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Dual Card/Triple Monitor, 8800GS+8400GS, WORKING!


Avalance
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A success story, finally :D

 

I've tried installing Leopard for about a week now... Got most things working eventually, but couldn't get my two graphics cards to work! I'm using 3 LCD monitors, and this is important for the kind of work I do, so I kept trying..

 

Originally I had an X1900 and X1300, but I never got the X1300 to work in Leopard, even if I removed the X1900. Then I bought a new ASUS EN8400GS (Geforce), but I couldn't get that to work with the X1900 (seems the ATI driver crashed as soon as the nVidia driver was loaded). Tried everything (EFI-strings, different installers etc), but nothing worked.

 

Finally gave up the X1900 and bought a new ASUS EN8800GS (also Geforce). After many failed attempts I finally found two EFI-strings that did the trick! I used spamwax' string for 8800GTS 320MB, as well as peach-os' string for 7300GS. Merged them with PlistEditPro, used gfxutil to get the address of both PCIExpress-slots, converted the plist with gfxutil, put in Boot.plist, set PEG2 as primary in BIOS, restarted and YES! Working perfectly with CI and QE enabled for both cards!

 

8800GS card is reported to have 320MB memory in System Profiler (it actually has 384), but who cares, it's working! :D

 

Hardware: Gigabyte EP35-DS4 (Bios version F3), Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q9300, 4GB RAM, WDC 640GB SATA, WDC 200GB SATA, SATA DVD.

Graphics: ASUS EN8800GS, ASUS EN8400GS, DELL 19" LCD (with DVI), DELL 20" LCD (with DVI), DELL 24" LCD (with DVI).

Software: Installed using Leo4All v3, upgraded with Kalyway 10.5.3 update. I'm NOT using vanilla kernel right now since it's messing up my audio.

 

I'm attaching the merged plist file if anyone is interested.

dualgf.plist.zip

 

EDIT:

 

Decided to add more specific installation instructions. I tried installing again on another partition just to test it, and it turned out to be more complicated than I thought.

 

1) Set PEG1 in BIOS! (important, or the installation will fail)

 

2) Install Leo4Allv3, with the nVIDIA kexts but without nvinject and natit.

 

3) Install Kalyway 10.5.3 update. I'm not using vanilla kernel since it messes up my audio, but maybe others will have better luck with that.

 

4) Reboot, and don't forget to run "update -v".

 

5) Update your boot.plist, you can use mine dualgf.plist.zip if you have similar cards. If you have a Gigabyte card of similar model (mine is EP35-DS4) the PCI paths you need are PciRoot(0x1)/Pci(0x1,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0) for the first card, and PciRoot(0x1)/Pci(0x1c,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0) for the second.

 

6) Reboot, and change to PEG2 in BIOS. MacOSX should now boot with both cards active! However, CI and QE will probably not work (didn't for me anyway).

 

7) Now you need to install new nVIDIA-kexts to enable CI/QE. I honestly don't know where I got mine, I've checked out many packages and compared the files, but the ones I have seems to be newer versions. During my testing before I installed a lot of driver packages and apparently I got the new kexts with one of them, but I can't figure out which one. I've uploaded the kexts to RapidShare, so you can get them from here: http://rapidshare.de/files/39727835/gfxdrivers.zip.html

 

Good luck!

Edited by Avalance
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Hello, good work!

 

At the moment I have ATI 3650 on two 22" lcd screens, but I still have third 22" here unconnected. What do you think I should do at the moment? Buy the same one 3650? These two screens works flawlessly, but I'm not sure what happens when I will connect second same graphic card.. By the way, I don't want to make whole reinstall, it is many hours of installing all stuff, so I need some elegant way to try it;)

Thanks for advice.

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I was very close to getting an ATI 3650 also, but after reading a lot in this forum I got the impression people seemed to have better luck with nVIDIA-cards than ATI ones...

 

But sure, it should work! Having two identical cards should be no problem, in fact it should make it easier since you can use the same EFI-string for both cards (just change the PCI path). I'd advice against using mixed ATI and nVIDIA cards though, that configuration didn't even work in Windows last time I tried.

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I have pretty much the same setup. I have a 8800 and a 8600. When you install Leo4all v3 do you have your initial network card working other than 1024x768. Does it show the proper drivers and such?

 

I cannot get the drivers loaded properly. When I do the GFX strings, and switch to PEG2, all I get is a black screen.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I didn't install nvinject or natit with Leo4All, so no my screen defaulted to 1024x768 after installation (with no driver information). If you get a black screen I would guess that the EFI-strings don't work. Maybe you can try them one at a time (one card at a time) and confirm that both are working. Good luck ;)

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