The default video card, GeForce 8800 GT, in my Mac Pro 3,1 Early 2008 wasn’t performing well for games, so I decided to replace it. After extensive research, I decided on the.

This card, built on the ATI Radeon HD 6870 platform, has far superior performance to the Apple default GeForce card. It is most likely the quietest card due to the large heat sinks and two fans (instead of 1 like most video cards), and has two DVI, two mini DisplayPort, and an HDMI port.

Customer comments confirmed it was quiet and ran cool. More reviews confirmed it ran on the Mac Pro 3,1 (Mac Pro early 2008 running 10.6.7). Now that it is finally working, I can attest that it is a silent card, as quiet as the GeForce 8800 GT that it replaced. Below I explain what it takes to get the card working. Installed MSI HD R6870 Twin Frozr II After the card had arrived, I realized the sites I had reviewed were from people booting Windows natively on their Mac Pros. I had no idea so many people are running Windows on the Mac Pro. I spent the next several hours trying to find out how to get this card working.

I read articles on how to flash it, various articles on downloading a variety of programs to change parts of Mac OS to get the card working. Finally, after extensive searching, I found the. This posting is a “how-to” guide and hopefully easier to find than the posting where I downloaded the.

Note, these drivers aren’t required after Mac OS X Lion. The best price I found for the MSI R6870 was on, and you need to order the from Amazon along with it. If you are running Yosemite, you can download and install the while you wait for the Amazon order to arrive. The GeForce 8800 has a power cable that runs from the motherboard to the video card. You will notice that there are two 6 pin connectors on the motherboard right next to each other (visible in the top left corner of the picture below). The new cable will plug into the empty connector to provide two power cables to the new card.

Disconnect the power cable, unscrew the bar that holds the PCIe cards in place, and pull out the 8800 video card. Note that on the PCIe connector on the motherboard there is a plastic catch that you will need to pull up to remove the card. If you don’t, you will break this off. Not the end of the word, but not ideal. Remove the blue plastic cover over the PCIe connector before installation.

Slide the new video card into the bottom slot. Connect the two power cords and replace the bar that holds the PCIe cards in place. Close up the Mac and turn on. When booting you don’t see the standard boot screen. The screen stays black until the Mac is booted then you see the login screen. I started my career at a start-up, Sun Microsystems, and have been at start-ups ever since.

Small companies are always short on people giving me the opportunity to travel extensively for both business and pleasure. Two foreign assignments in the UK led to 9+ years living abroad and accelerated the travel my family, and I was able to do. Although I have worked in Asia (including a year working for a Singapore HQ’d company), the Middle East and Africa, most of my foreign experience is in Europe, the CIS, and Russia. Thanks for the info!!!

Radeon Download Drivers

I found this page recently via Google search. I have the same model Mac Pro & recently installed the same video card. It works fine, but I have some concerns dues to the absence of a boot screen. Have you tried using Boot Camp for one of the hard drives? I want to install Windows 7 on one hard drive in order to play some Windows PC games, but I am a little worried that I may not be able to boot back into Lion afterward. Any thoughts or experiences with this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!! I’m using a XFX 6870 – flashed it with a custom ROM (regular + EFI-Part).

Card works great but there are a few issue: 1. On MacPro 3,1 the card mounts only as PCIe 1,1 (both OSX and Windows) – regardless if the card is flashed or not! Should be PCIe 2.0. You can check this in the system profiler, PCIe 1,1 = 2.5GT/s, 2.0 = 5GT/s 2. Systems (iMac, MacBook, MacPro) with Radeon 4xxx, 5xxx and 6xxx have an issue in Lion 10.7.3: low gfx-performance after sleep mode, approx. Only 1/3 of the usual performance.

Boot-Screen only shows when Monitor is connected to the upper DVI-Port – only affects flashed cards. A friend gave me his MSI 6870 twin frozr when he switched to an Nvidia card for his PC. I have a Mac Pro 3,1 running the most current Lion and it works well with the ATY-Kext. However, I’m not sure the 6870’s fans are able to change speeds (spin up when I push it hard) when running Lion. When I run bootcamp, the fans will speed up when the card is pushed hard. Have you noticed this in your set up running Lion?

Will flashing the card for the Mac make the 6870’s fan change speeds according to GPU temp? I’m concerned that if the fans don’t speed up I could end up cooking the 6870 while running Lion and playing steam games.

So ive been using this card for a while now with bootcamp without problems. I never installed the aforementioned drivers and things just worked. When i first installed the card, the system had SL, and then ive upgraded to L and ML without problem.

Then, a few days ago, the fan started going intermittent. Now, it flat out doesn’t turn on when im booted in to OS X. If i boot into windows, i get it going on and off, but not always on. I really don’t know if its the mac’s power supply that isn’t powerful enough, drivers that could bad (in both win and mac tho?), or if its a busted fan/card.

I think im going to reach out to XFX to see if i can get it replaced but I was curious if you had seen anything like that in your travels. I am wondering if there is any point in flashing a 6870 card, when the login screen fails to appear ever. Well, this is a 6870m for imac of late2009 and the card is originally from an alienware laptop. I had the impression that with maverics the card should work without separate download of drivers. All, I get is black screen though.

Starting up in safe mode and zapping P(V)RAM did not help and that’s about all I can think of doing to fix it. I checked all the connections and nothing obvious seems to be wrong inside.