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How to use a 48xx ATI card together with a OSX supported ATI Card!


pino72
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Hi there,

 

since I don't want to wait that long for 4870 Leopard drivers to come out (if ever!!!), and since Snow kittty doesn't seem to be a short term option too....I installed 2 ATI's in my system as follows:

 

Board: Gigabyte EP35-DS4

PEG1 Slot: ATI 4870 (the one nearest to the CPU)

PEG2 Slot: ATI x1900GT (had to get a PCI-E Power adaptor)

 

In order to get the 1900 running in OSX and the 4870 to be running in Vista you should do the following:

 

For ease of use connect your display with each of the two cards, for me it's DVI input for the x1900GT and HDMI input for the 4870.

Now in Bios select PEG1 as the first display to initialize...that would be the 4870.

Boot into Vista. It will find the x1900GT as a second card, now you can use it in order to attach 4! screens or if you don't really want and need to use it like me you can just disable it in system settings. You should be fine with vista at this point.

 

In order to get your x1900GT running with OSX I changed the bios setting to PEG2 as first card to initialize and boot my OSX, install your drivers for X1900GT card or whatever supported ATI you have (a cheap 2600XT would be a great buy!) and you are done. Booting into osx now gives you full display support, a second ATI card (our 4870 sitting in PEG1 slot) is visible in system information but will not be use by Leopard, which was what I intended (since we don't have drivers!).

 

With this setting you have a fast 4870 for gaming within Vista and a fully supported Quartz etc. ATI X1900GT for OSX working like a charm :D

 

Now for the P35 chipset the 4870 is accessed with a PCI-E 16x bus and the X1900GT is running in PCI-E 4x mode. This is no problem since it is very much fast enough for Leopard (I am NOT gaming in Leopard so can't tell you how much the inpact is on gaming performance).

 

There is one little drawback though, I thought since I disabled my x1900GT in Vista I could keep my bios setting as PEG2 as first card (X1900GT) and boot into Vista and hoped that Vista would switch to the active 4870...this is NOT the case, Vista still gives me a picture over my X1900GT but doesn't switch. Vista gets loaded but then stops working.

 

Sooooo...in order to switch operating systems I have to get into the bios to switch the INIT setting for the graphics cards from PEG1 to PEG2 and vice versa .....well I can happily live with this...no big deal.

 

Anyone got a solution to the Vista glitch?

 

I think any combination ATI 4870 with another OSX supported ATI card should work with this board....anyone has something similar running? Maybe a mix of 4870 with an NVIDIA card?

 

Still waiting for a 4870 driver though.....let's keep fingers crossed! :angel:

Hope this will help some guys with a 4870 wanting a fully running osx in the meantime!

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I have something similar with my board, you can see my sig for an example. I blocked out all of my windows issues by disabling the 9800GT in the device manager. So windows doesnt see the card at all. Everytime I boot into leo i just have to hot swap the cable and change a couple of bios settings.

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Just tryed this: since it didn't work with Vista I must tell you that OSX too hangs apple boot screen and doesn't switch to use the card with the drivers installed. Well no prob for me, just a quick switch in bios does the trick ;-)

 

Do you think it's possible to have a HD4870 and a 9800gtx+ together with the set up you guys having now?

 

I do not see why it should not! If you install the 9800gtx drivers in osx and have the bios option to select which card to boot from then you should be fine.

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ROX!

 

Thanks netkas for pointing me towards this!

Thanks to the rest for pointing this out!

 

 

I got two hacmacs, dualcore AMD with HD2800Pro

and my quadcore intel with (for now) GT9800... bleh

 

Got a couple of options so to say, i will get me another

highend board to try things out... various combinations..

 

 

keep up the great work!

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I bought a cheap second hand Geforce 6200TC to couple with my Ati 4850.

I use the first one on Leo and the second one on Xp & Ubuntu.

I also need to change bios value to boot.

Anyway I disabled the first one in Windows and if I boot winxp with 6200 enabled, I get a black screen, but the sistem boot.

I usually press power button to have a regular reboot and switch to Leo.

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