[Tenacious Dyl]

I just thought I would share all of this with you all, so that if anyone had fixes I could give them a try, or at the very least others could realize that they may not want to actually make this upgrade.

I've had a Mac Pro, 2x Dual-Core 2.0 Ghz, 5 GB ram, ATI x1900xt for two years now, and its never really had a problem and been a great computer. I never even had any troubles (which seemed to be widespread) with my ATI x1900xt. However, after seeing that the 8800gt was available for the older Mac Pros, and after giving it some thought, I purchased it... then things went down hill.

First, I run 3 Apple Cinema Displays, so I need two graphics cards. Before the 'upgrade' I had two on the x1900xt and 1 running on the old nVidia 7300gt, which was slow as molasses.

So when the 8800gt arrived, I figured I would replace the 7300gt with it, as the mobo has two power plugs for PCI express cards, and both support 150 watts. So, I plugged the new card into the remaining power port, put the x1900xt at the topmost slot it could fit (4x but not too much slower in benchmarks) and put the new 8800gt in the bottom slot (16x).

After reconfiguring my displays set-up, resolution, backgrounds,etc. I naturally went to games. Unfortunately... both Diablo 2 LOD and Starcraft Broodwar (the newest versions of each which played GREAT on my x1900xt) crash on start-up, if the main window (dock) is on a 8800gt controlled monitor. I can only get them to play by moving the dock to the x1900xt controlled screen (not what I want).

I thought that I would give bootcamp a try, and it seemed like plenty of people had no problem. I could not, no matter what I did, get XP to recognize the card. The closest I got was a message "Windows has detected new hardware.... NVIDIA 8800GT" but it never got me anywhere. I tried countless different versions of nVidia's drivers, and Apple's, each time completely cleaning out the piles of drivers and remnants from before. It either wouldn't recognize the card at all, or it wouldn't let me install drivers (even when forced, they didn't work). After almost 4 hours of different attempts at this, I gave up and installed Vista. The only time I could get XP to display ANYTHING on the 8800gt was in safe mode, with only that card in the Mac Pro.

Vista (32 bit, home premium) was the same beast. It also recognized my ATI x1900xt and had no problem with it, but it would either completely not recognize my new 8800gt or it would tell me I couldn't do anything with it. I even disabled and removed the x1900xt, and it simply wouldn't display anything on the 8800gt (even in safe mode). After another 5 or so hours trying things in Vista, I just gave up.

The very few accounts online that describe running a 8800GT on a 2006 Mac Pro in bootcamp offer little to no advice, and the few that do post solutions didn't work for me in slightest.

I would definitely reconsider this upgrade if you have a Mac Pro 2006 model and want faster graphics. This has just been a nightmare.

[cgc]

I must submit the obligatory, "I upgraded my MacPro to 8800GT without issue" comment. Congrats on getting through them. Great card eh?

BTW, I went to the nVidia site and snagged their latest drivers as someone suggested in these forums.

[Tenacious Dyl]

I tried the following Video Drivers (Cleaning out all old ones before putting in new ones each time)

Apple BootCamp 2.0
Apple BootCamp 2.1
nVidia Forceware 174.19 (Official Site Recommends)
nVidia Forceware 174.53
nVidia Forceware 174.93
nVidia Forceware 175.12
nVidia Forceware 177.39
nVidia Forceware 177.72 (Newest)

Note that NONE of these even would let the card boot up the screen. They either would install fine, and then upon boot Vista would tell me that it had to disable them because they weren't with a compatible video card, or they would just error on install (in which case I would have to force them to install, and get the same result).

cgc: Did you have a Mac Pro from 2006? What exactly did you do (what Operating System, what exact driver, what cards do you have in your PCI-express slots (all) )

[mduell]

Does it work with the X1900 removed?

[cgc]

Originally Posted by Tenacious Dyl 

...
cgc: Did you have a Mac Pro from 2006? What exactly did you do (what Operating System, what exact driver, what cards do you have in your PCI-express slots (all) )

I bought my MacPro the day they were announced August 2006. The only card in my PCIE slot is the nVidia 8800GT. I have no idea what version of the nVidia drivers I downloaded, but I did keep them in case I needed to reinstall. They were from www.guru3d.com and I uploaded them to my site because I couldn't find version information within the .zip file. Here are the nVidia drivers I use for my 8800GT.

Oh, and I'm using Windows XP SP2 with all the patches.

[Tenacious Dyl]

I tried it with the two cards and with just the nVidia 8800GT in both XP SP2, XP SP3, and Vista.

I also tried it at PCI Express 8x, and PCI Express x16, both alone and with the x1900xt.

I really have tried almost every combination of every configuration on both XP and Vista in boot camp. I would say there was something wrong with the card, but (starcraft and diablo withstanding) it works wonderfully in the newest version of OS 10.5

I'm half tempted to try Vista 64, just to see if anything is different, eventhough the reports show Vista 32 being a better install and fit to the 2006 Mac Pro (Apple only supports Vista 64 on the 2008 Mac Pros, but you can still make it work on the 2006's)

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Tenacious Dyl 

After reconfiguring my displays set-up, resolution, backgrounds,etc. I naturally went to games. Unfortunately... both Diablo 2 LOD and Starcraft Broodwar (the newest versions of each which played GREAT on my x1900xt) crash on start-up, if the main window (dock) is on a 8800gt controlled monitor. I can only get them to play by moving the dock to the x1900xt controlled screen (not what I want).

This is a known issue with the 8800GT and 10.5.2 and later. Under those versions of OS X, Apple disabled 256 color support on NVidia GPU's, so Diablo 2, Starcraft, or any other game that requires 256 colors will fail to launch.

[Rumor]

I've been playing NWN in OSX, and if I turned everything up (like I should be able to, even running in Rosetta), it became very clunky. Someone recommended this, and it has worked so far.

http://70.181.80.166:82/blog/archive...56-colors.html

It rolls back the nVidia drivers to before 10.5.2.

[Tenacious Dyl]

Rumor: Thanks, this did fix my Starcraft / Diablo II LOD issues. It is too bad that Apple just took out 256 support, when there was no reason to. Driver updates should update, and help not take away... meh, its inevitable I guess. I suppose now the other aspects will be a little less quick and optimized with older drivers but at least it runs the games I like.

Still no luck on the bootcamp end of things, the 8800GT just won't work in it.

[Tenacious Dyl]

Update: I started all over, reset the PRAM, formatted and reinstalled Vista, etc. Almost the same results as before. However, this time I was able to get the nVidia 8800GT to work, when it was the only card plugged in, and in the bottom slot when configured to 16x. Vista booted, and was quite unhappy (talking about an incompatible display adapter, etc) but at least it booted and let one of my cinema displays work with Vista and the new card.

I did more research and found that Vista doesn't actually support multiple graphics cards that are in different drivers. (You can't have an ATI and an nVidia card on a Vista machine... period). The best you can do is either have two of the exact same card from the same vendor, or two similar cards that share a common driver.

I still have NO idea why, when before I tried just the 8800GT alone it didn't work at all, but now it is. So I found the last driver from nVidia that supports the 7xxx family of cards as well as the newer 8xxx and 9xxx, which turned out to be Forceware version 175.19

I tried running 177.72, but it only supports 8xxx and 9xxx nVidia cards, and Vista won't permit me to run 177.72 on the 8800GT and 175.19 on the 7300GT. Thus, the ONLY way I can run all three of my cinema displays in Vista, regardless of the version of Vista used, is that I must run the 8800GT and the 7300GT (Forget about the x1900xt) and I MUST run them on the 175.19 driver, and nothing newer. Talk about a headache.

After doing this, it made me restart two more times before it finally labeled both of the cards as "Working Properly" in the "Device Manager" control panel pane.

So if any of you with Mac Pro's that wish to run Vista, keep in mind that any graphics cards you run MUST run from the SAME driver. You can't even just get away with two nVidia or two ATI cards, but rather they must have a driver that supports them both, and ONLY that driver installed.

This will be a royal pain, as I imagine all of the updates after 175.19 will continue to optimize and fix the 8800GT but will likely not work with the 7300GT and so I'll be stuck with 175.19 unless I want to invest in a 2nd 8800GT, at which point I could actually have fast speeds on all three monitors and the newest drivers.

I'll be upgrading from 32bit Home Premium to 64bit Ultimate tomorrow, which will mean finding the drivers that they released on the new 2008 mac pros, and installing them on my 2006 Mac Pro. At least then, I'll have the 64-bit compatibility, a lot more of my ram recognized, and a few other random features. I assume that the same 175.19 driver will continue to work for both cards after I make the upgrade, but my fingers are crossed.