br35 Posted January 14, 2009 Share Posted January 14, 2009 Hi. I am in need of urgent help concerning a graphics card ATI Radeon 9800 XT that i flashed to work with my mac. Equipment: Powercolor ATI Radeon 9800XT 256MB (PC Retail Version) Power Mac G5 Dual 1.8Mhz (June 2004 model) Formac 2010 Monitor (ADC) with Apple DVI to ADC Adapter I flashed the card with an ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 256MB ROM. I used the PRO ROM MAC EDITION (ROM 113-A07552-134) and not the XT ROM because i read the DVI port wouldn't work with the XT ROM. To flash i used Graphiccelerator and had a friend do it using a remote application since before flashed the card wasn't working with my monitor, being a PC card. In Graphiccelerator, the Core Frequency of the rom i used was 378.0 and The Memory Frequency was 337.5. I did NOT change these values even though they are different from the 9800 XT published frequencies which are 412 for Core and 365 for memory. After flashing the card the monitor started working but it shows only grey noise, horizontal bands of artifacts so bad that i can't see any menu or anything else. When MAC OS X is loading, though, the screen will sometimes go blue as it normally should but this only lasts a fraction of a second. After that, MAC OS X loads all the way but the screen is unreadable. As such, i can't even use ATIcelerator to switch to a different efrequency to see if this is what is causing the problem. Is there a way to fix this card? If i could use Graphiccelerator in the log in items and have it set the card to the correct frequency that might solve the problem (?) but graphiccelerator requires user input. I don't know what to do and i fear i have rendered the graphics card useless. Does anyone know what is going on? Is it the wrong frequency or is it something else? I would much appreciate some help. Thank You. br35 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Generic George Posted January 14, 2009 Share Posted January 14, 2009 Hi. I am in need of urgent help concerning a graphics card ATI Radeon 9800 XT that i flashed to work with my mac. Equipment: Powercolor ATI Radeon 9800XT 256MB (PC Retail Version) Power Mac G5 Dual 1.8Mhz (June 2004 model) Formac 2010 Monitor (ADC) with Apple DVI to ADC Adapter I flashed the card with an ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 256MB ROM. I used the PRO ROM MAC EDITION (ROM 113-A07552-134) and not the XT ROM because i read the DVI port wouldn't work with the XT ROM. To flash i used Graphiccelerator and had a friend do it using a remote application since before flashed the card wasn't working with my monitor, being a PC card. In Graphiccelerator, the Core Frequency of the rom i used was 378.0 and The Memory Frequency was 337.5. I did NOT change these values even though they are different from the 9800 XT published frequencies which are 412 for Core and 365 for memory. After flashing the card the monitor started working but it shows only grey noise, horizontal bands of artifacts so bad that i can't see any menu or anything else. When MAC OS X is loading, though, the screen will sometimes go blue as it normally should but this only lasts a fraction of a second. After that, MAC OS X loads all the way but the screen is unreadable. As such, i can't even use ATIcelerator to switch to a different efrequency to see if this is what is causing the problem. Is there a way to fix this card? If i could use Graphiccelerator in the log in items and have it set the card to the correct frequency that might solve the problem (?) but graphiccelerator requires user input. I don't know what to do and i fear i have rendered the graphics card useless. Does anyone know what is going on? Is it the wrong frequency or is it something else? I would much appreciate some help. Thank You. br35 You had to be careful what PC graphics card you tried to flash for use in a mac, because most of the PC cards used a 64kb rom and the mac cards used a 128kb rom. So not all PC cards could be reflashed. http://thomas.perrier.name/otherStuff/ati9800convertEN.html Here's the important part. 2) Determine if your card has a 64 or 128 KiB flash chip. Two possible ways: Install the card in an AGP 4x or 8x PC running DOS (the real thing, not a Windows command prompt), grab the latest version of flashrom, and type flashrom -i. In the romsize column, 0x10000 indicates a 64 KiB flash, while 0x20000 means a 128 KiB one. Locate the flash chip on the card (see picture below), read the part number and brand, and search for its specifications. Some common parts: STMicroelectronics M25P05 = 64 KiB ; M25P10 = 128 KiB PMC Pm25LV512 = 64 KiB ; Pm25LV010 = 128 KiB The first method is the safest one, since sometimes markings are incorrect: some ST M25P10 were marked M25P05. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
br35 Posted January 14, 2009 Author Share Posted January 14, 2009 When i flashed the card with the ATI 9800 PRO ROM (113-A07552-134) - which is 128K in size, the progress bar went up to 100%. I read that means a 128K ROM CHIP. Also, the following text is on the text file that was dumped from the PC ROM on the card: flashRomTypePStr "ST M25P05 SEPROM" romDelay_ms 10 romSize $00020000 Although the flashRomTypePStr says M25P05, the romSize is 20000 so i gather, from your post above, that the card does indeed have a 128K ROM CHIP. I don't have access to a PC. Is there a program that i can use in MAC OS X to re-flash the card but that doesn't require user input like graphiccelerator does? If i could place a flashing program somewhere in the boot process of mac os x i could re-flash without having to use this screen. Before i flashed the card the first time, a friend connected to my computer through Apple Remote Desktop and he could see my OS. That is how we were able to flash the card. But after flashing, since the screen became heavily corrupted, he can't see my Desktop now so we can't re-flash using the same method - Graphiccelerator. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Generic George Posted January 14, 2009 Share Posted January 14, 2009 When i flashed the card with the ATI 9800 PRO ROM (113-A07552-134) - which is 128K in size, the progress bar went up to 100%. I read that means a 128K ROM CHIP. Also, the following text is on the text file that was dumped from the PC ROM on the card: flashRomTypePStr "ST M25P05 SEPROM" romDelay_ms 10 romSize $00020000 Although the flashRomTypePStr says M25P05, the romSize is 20000 so i gather, from your post above, that the card does indeed have a 128K ROM CHIP. I don't have access to a PC. Is there a program that i can use in MAC OS X to re-flash the card but that doesn't require user input like graphiccelerator does? If i could place a flashing program somewhere in the boot process of mac os x i could re-flash without having to use this screen. Before i flashed the card the first time, a friend connected to my computer through Apple Remote Desktop and he could see my OS. That is how we were able to flash the card. But after flashing, since the screen became heavily corrupted, he can't see my Desktop now so we can't re-flash using the same method - Graphiccelerator. Yes, but it also gives the part number for the 64kb version, even though it does give the rom size for 128kb. So something odd is going on. AGP equiped PCs are antiques at this point so you might be able to pick one up for a song or free, I'm not sure what else to suggest unfortunately. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
br35 Posted January 14, 2009 Author Share Posted January 14, 2009 Well, thanks for your help anyway. I don't know what´s going on. The strange thing is when MAC OS X is loading the screen sometimes goes blue (which would indicate everything is ok) but then it goes back to that gray unreadable stuff. Maybe i have to use some welding and move a couple of the transistors. I don't know. I thought it would be simple to re-flash the card again with the correct rom. It seems it isn't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts