GeForce 8800GT Card and older Mac Pros - How to Setup

[moreno]

Well, sorry if this has been posted here already. I searched and didn't find anything other than in the Hackintosh sections.

 

So I have a 2.66Ghz Dual Core MacPro I bought over a year ago. I'm using the ATI X1900XT card. First, whenever I play games like Half Life 2 or Portal in my Bootcamp partition, I get these strange lines and artifacts. At first I thought maybe the card isn't strong enough to handle Windows Games like Portal so I downloaded Prey for the Mac demo. I played it maybe for 5 minutes before I started seeing a bunch of red pixels all over the screen (Gateway XHD3000 LCD). So, other than there being a problem with my ATI card, I thought, maybe I should look for a better graphics card.

 

Seeing that Apple is ready to sell the new nVidia GeForce 8800GT for the new Macs, I figured I could just buy one of those and upgrade. Come to find out, these new cards require the new MacPros in order to work and look like they won't work in my MacPro version. Other than waiting for nVida to put out an update for these cards which would make them compatible with all MacPros (according to a press release I read in Engadget), I figured, why not just buy an off-the-shelf 8800GT. But before I do that, is there a way to make an off-the-shelf 8800GT work on a regular, Dual Core MacPro? I keep reading about the EFI BIOS difference and about flashing the PROM of the video card. How is this done? Is this effective? Will I be able to use the flashed card in my OSX environment and then boot into Bootcamp and have the card work 100% in Vista there? Can you please post (again?) the link for the procedure (hack)?

 

Thanks

[macgirl]

Yeah, those cards are for PCI Express 2.0, but see this "old" news: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/01...r_mac_pros.html from: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=80575

[scottishduck]

ATi cards are very buggy, NVIDIA are very stale by comparison