Sapphire ATI HD 4670 - display problems with 10.6.6

[382jsl881]

Hi,

 

the Sapphire Ultimate HD 4670 (passive cooling, [1002:9490]) doesn't work under 10.6.6 (perhaps also with 10.6.5).

 

Issue:

10.6.6 boots up normally, including QE. But (mostly) when the mouse is moved or a button is pressed on the keyboard, the screen flickers/shrugs.

My setup:

• 10.6.4 does work with modified chameleon bootloader (which uses Shrike framebuffer for ATI 4670 with DVI output) and GraphicsEnabler=yes. I even could enable HDMI output with this patch.
  
• Shrike framebuffer can be set with a patched Chameleon build, or (better solution) using Kaby's chameleon build which allows setting the frambuffer with AtiConfig=Shrike at bootup.
  

What i tried:

• Underclocking the graphics adapter from 1000mhz to 873 Mhz using Radeon BIOS Editor as it's suggested in the osx86 wiki didn't work for me.
  
• booting with old 10.6.4 ATI*.kext files didn't work, WindowServer crashes
  
• Other framebuffers, like Motmot, Flicker, Peregrine, Eulemur, didn't work (even under 10.6.4)
  
• i noticed, that with dual mode DVI Monitor + Analog Monitor and Shrike framebuffer, the flickering issue doesn't happen that much anymore
  

 

Other threads with this issue:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=...&hilit=4670

http://osx86.co/f19/guide-ati-radeon-hd46x0-t6193/

 

What I learned: I can't recommend ATI graphics adapters for an Hackintosh anymore, although they are reasonable fast and do support passive cooling. OSX support is dropped somehow and you can't update anymore. I previously had an ATI HD 2600, which isn't compatible with Snow Leopard. Never ATI again

 

Do you have hints?

[josjev]

Other than the cooling solution I think my card might be identical to yours, so let me share my recent experience installing 10.6.6 on my Sandy Bridge configuration using H67 chipset and i3-2100 CPU.

 

btw my card is: http://www1.sapphiretech.com/us/products/p...ew.php?gpid=279

 

Using [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] legacy I had to install SL 10.6.3 retail using the onboard graphics as my Sapphire Ultimate HD4670 512 GDDR4 would show a black screen. To this end I configured my BIOS to initialise the onboard graphics first.

 

As bootloader I installed (because of SB) a mixture of Kabyl's and Valv's Chameleon as compiled by ^Andy^ but I am sure Kabyl's most recent regular version should also work. You can find this in [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] 3.4

 

In the process of using Andy's bootloader I decided to install his full package which also contains the ATI kexts from 10.6.7 MBP 2011 update. Again, I think this should work just as well with the regular ATI kexts in 10.6.6 as 10.6.7 probably only adds support with the latest ATI cards. His package can be found here: http://www.mediafire.com/?r52bv1otbovc9ci

 

After changing the BIOS to initialise the PCI-E graphics first (ATI card) and rebooting into the fresh install I again had a black screen until connecting to the 4670's DVI port using a DVI-VGA adapter. Directly connecting to VGA while leaving the DVI-VGA adapter attached also worked. All of this ofcourse using GraphicsEnabler=Yes.

 

Default enabled framebuffer for my card was Flicker.

 

When using the bootflag AtiConfig=Motmot I managed to get both the VGA and HDMI working perfectly, also in dual screen and with full CI/QE. So I moved this flag to my boot.plist to make it permanent. The DVI-VGA adapter is no longer required. I did not have a chance to test DVI, but HDMI audio is not working so I may try the VoodooHDA solution at the expense of the onboard ALC889 sound. I haven't yet tried updating to 10.6.7

 

Not sure if this is important to mention but I used a auto-patched DSDT for my board...

 

Hope this helps.

 

[edit: using Graphicsenabler=Yes without specifying a framebuffer results in Flicker, with VGA monitor detection on the DVI port (using DVI>>VGA adapter) but output on the VGA port. Therefore I have a black screen on VGA monitor on DVI. When hotplugging from DVI>>VGA to VGA (while leaving DVI>>VGA adapted attached to DVI) it works well until screen detection resets the VGA to VESA modes only.

 

Trying to load another framebuffer does not result in loading Motmot as suggested above but loads the default Radeonframebuffer. This works great but DVD-player and Geekbench crash]