Comments for A Digital Nomad

Comment on MSI HD 6870 Video Card – How to Install on Mac OSX by mormith

mormith — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 23:33:34 +0000

Hi. 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.

Comment on MSI HD 6870 Video Card – How to Install on Mac OSX by Marke Clinger

Marke Clinger — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:14:31 +0000

Thank you for adding to the discussion. I have seen the problem you describe after sleep mode prior to 10.7.3.

What does flashing buy you?
Do you know of a site with a simple explanation on how to do the flashing process?

Comment on MSI HD 6870 Video Card – How to Install on Mac OSX by HotSix

HotSix — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:59:27 +0000

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.
3. Boot-Screen only shows when Monitor is connected to the upper DVI-Port – only affects flashed cards.

Comment on MSI HD 6870 Video Card – How to Install on Mac OSX by fiatlux

fiatlux — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:09:47 +0000

I’d like to go this route as well, if only to gain decent OpenCL acceleration at a reasonable upgrade price. Is there any issue with subsequent system/OS updates (drivers being deleted and the like)?

Note, for what switching back and forth between Bootcamp and OS X concerns, you don’t need the boot screen, selecting the boot partition in the Startup/Bootcamp control panel should be enough.

Comment on MSI HD 6870 Video Card – How to Install on Mac OSX by jd400rr

jd400rr — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:10:13 +0000

I checked out the first link and it pretty much confirms what I had already suspected – the graphics performance takes a hit using virtual environments. My main concern now is just being able to switch back and forth between Boot Camp & Lion. I guess the worst case scenario would force me to reinstall the old video card in order to get the boot screen to come up?

Did you have an opportunity to experiment with this setup at all?

Comment on MSI HD 6870 Video Card – How to Install on Mac OSX by Marke Clinger

Marke Clinger — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:56:39 +0000

I haven't tried high end PC games in VMWARE, but I am sure it is slower than bootcamp. There is a good article on Bootcamp vs Parallels by Ed Bott on ZD Net and another in-depth Bootcamp vs Parallels by Sandro Villinger at ITWorld.

Comment on MSI HD 6870 Video Card – How to Install on Mac OSX by jd400rr

jd400rr — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:54:23 +0000

Hi Marke,

I thought about VMware Fusion, but wouldn’t that diminish some of the performance vs. running the Windows OS directly?

Have you run any high-end PC games using Fusion? I am currently using Fusion for QuickBooks & ProSeries tax software, but I haven’t tried running the more demanding gaming apps.

Please let me know the results if you do decide to experiment with Boot Camp.

Thanks again,

Jeremey

Comment on MSI HD 6870 Video Card – How to Install on Mac OSX by Marke Clinger

Marke Clinger — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:08:57 +0000

Hi,

Thanks for letting me know you where successful with the installation.

I don’t know about boot camp working with the 6870. However you have given me a challenge to find out. Check back after the weekend. I will test it out.

Have you thought about using vmware or Parallels? I use vmware with this card just fine.

Marke

Comment on MSI HD 6870 Video Card – How to Install on Mac OSX by jd400rr

jd400rr — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:09:05 +0000

Thanks for the info!!! 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!!

Comment on iPad Excel Compatible Apps – Call for Input by SBUN

SBUN — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:03:05 +0000

I work in sales support and we use excel documents that have dropdown boxes and option buttons that we need our sales reps to be able to quickly fill out using their ipad when they are at a client site. Most are not detail oriented so if there is a lot of information they get confused so we have some questions hidden and only populate if they answer another question a certain way. I have tried numbers and docs to go but I haven’t been able to get either one to work on the ipad where it is very simple for our sales reps to use. Do you have any suggestions?

Thank You,