hey guys it's Landsat McBee audio and today I'm going to talk about upgrading your video card in
your older Mac Pro the tower Howard Howard Howard Howard unfortunately for all US Mac Pro owners no
one's making a new video card to go in your Mac Pro so your choice really is the Sapphire Mac
Edition 7950 or the geforce gtx 680 Mac Edition those are the two certified cards to work with
your Mac Pro the problem is they're they're getting long in the tooth quite long in the
tooth it's old technology so I have installed a gigabyte r9 280x and if I just plug that into
my Mac Pro with the proper power cables which it does not come with um it comes with cables
to work in a PC it would work the only problem is is I would not get my boot screen I would go
right to the login it would be black up until the login screen and the problem with that is
you want your boot screen so you see that it's booting okay and also if you want to boot off a
different system drive when you hold down the option key you wouldn't be able to see it and
select the drive you want to boot off of so it's always better to have the boot screen but there's
ways around it one is you can have a secondary smaller card like the geforce GT 120 that came
with a Mac Pro you could have that as a second card or you can get your video card flashed or
you can flash it yourself but that's much harder than it sounds not easily done the first card I
tried was an XFX card I bought that first r9 280x it was flashable and it booted but the performance
was all screwed up it was not happy so I got rid of that when I sold it and bought myself the
gigabyte version because after looking at NetCast where all this stuff is discussed NetCast org if
you want more information on flashing your video cards that is the play to go 4matic people I will
now attempt to explain what it takes and how I flashed the gigabyte r9 280x PC video card so
that it works with my Mac Pro and gets the boot screen as if it were an Apple approved video card
I could not have done this without the help of a net cast member I barely understand it myself so
take my version with a grain of salt and do some reading up on net casts Org I'm also going to put
a link at the end of this video to the Mac rumors site called the golden guide to flashing graphics
cards it really explains the whole process and what software you need very well efi is
an additional bit of firmware that is taken from an apple approved video card and modified to work
with newer cards and then basically piggybacked on to were merged with the original PC cards bios
for instance my r9 280x it's EF i came from an older 7950 AMD card so that was already apple's
efi that they used to take a pc video card make it Mac approved so these geniuses take the efi they
modify it and they reemerge it with the original pc bios and then that's what you flash your card
with and enables you to get your boot screen but all biases are not the same it can be the same
exact card from the same company and they give it a slightly different name which means the bios has
been adjusted slightly for a faster clock speed or whatever if you bought the same card as I bought
but it's a slightly different version and I gave you my efi and then you flash the card it might
not work and you might wind up with a dead card so you really have to know what you're doing or you
got to find someone that does to help you out so the first part of the install is to obviously put
the card in your computer first connect the power cables to the logic board then put the card in and
then plug in the cables to the card you will need two cables a a pin 2 6 pin mini PCIe power cable
and a 6-pin two 6-pin mini pcie cable there's a few different 8-pin two 6-pin cables floating
around that are wired differently so you have to get the right one or it won't work here is
the one I got on Amazon that I saw other people used with macros and it worked great for me and
it's long enough to get from the card to the logic board you might already have a video card with a
power cable going to the logic board which is a six pin two 6-pin mini PCIe cable you can still
use that one for the six pin port so now you boot up under Windows and install the drivers that came
with the card or get them online and then install them then your card should be working fine if it's
not working and the screen is black then you have a problem with your card or you don't have the
right power cables I have Windows 7 installed on a bootcamp drives got to be a bootcamp Drive
it can't be parallels or VMware it has to be a bootcamp drive so I booted up off the bootcamp
Drive the card worked with one of the monitors then I backed up my rom off the card gpu-z is the
software I use to back up my BIOS basically you're backing up your cards firmware once you back it
up you should really make two copies one that you put away for safekeeping that you call the
original bios and the other one is going to be the one that gets modified with the mac efi you need
to keep a copy of the original bios unmodified so that you can reflash the card with it if the efi
bios doesn't wind up working then i sent it to a guy in germany who was nice enough from NetCast
to help me out and he attached the efi rom to my rom so he emailed me back that with the software
to flash the card with and the direction so I will put those on the screen as well
we can I use
I used a W flash was the application which was given to me by my friend in Germany and you can
just read the directions from here of what you have to do under windows and running a W flash
and here you basically enter some code which you see above and then you hit enter and the
flashing begins this part was actually quite easy and it didn't take a lot of time at all
and it worked so once you're done flashing the card you boot up under OS 10 hopefully
you then get your boot screen and everything is peachy keen this card works under mountain lion
Mavericks and Yosemite this card probably won't work with any earlier versions of OS
10 because of the driver so now I have three monitors running off my r9 280x gigabyte the
dual link DVI connection with my 30 inch Apple monitor and then two other monitors are also
running off the two display ports and it has an HDMI output as well and that does work but
not with all three monitors I can't run four monitors at once so I have upgraded processors
in my Mac Pro and now I have an R 9 280x I gain it full resolution on my 30 inch display at 1600
resolution and it works great and when I use Final Cut Pro X it also just really renders
much quicker than it used to I used to have a 58 70 so the r9 280x is a fairly pup from that in
performance so that's it thanks for tuning in please subscribe to my channel and I'll
be back with another video relatively soon take care bye bye I know it seems my begone
you