Updated January 1, 2012 (original – April 30, 2011)
This procedure for installing a PC R6870 Video Card into a Mac Pro works for MacOS X Lion with one change, you don’t have to load the drivers. The MacOS X Lion software includes the ATI Radeon HD 6870 required for a Mac Pro. Unlike supported cards, the screen still starts out black while the OS is booting.
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Recently I decided it was time to swap out my GeForce 8800 GT in my Mac Pro 3,1 for a new video card. I did a bunch of research and decided that for around $200 the MSI Radeon HD 6870 1 GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express Twin Frozr II
Installed MSI Radeon HD 6870
After the card arrived I realized the sites I had reviewed were from people booting windows natively on their Mac Pro’s. Who knew there were so many people 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, complicated 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 drivers. This posting is a how-to guide and hopefully easier to find than the posting that I finally downloaded the drivers from.
Although I have only tried this with the MSI 6870, I suspect it will work for any other brand of the 6870. Please comment below if you get use these drivers on another R6870.
The best price I found for the MSI R6870 was on Amazon
Before doing anything, download and install the drivers. This can be done while you wait for the card and power cable to ship to you.
The 8800 has a power cable that runs from the mother board to the video card. You will notice that there are two 6 pin connectors on the mother board right next to each other (see top left corner of 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 mother board 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.
There is a blue plastic cover over the PCIe connector that has to be remove before installation. Slide the card into the same slot you took the 8800 out of. 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 normal boot screen. The screen stays black until the Mac is booted then you see the login screen.
You are done!
I knew I made the right decision when I cranked up the WOW video setting to Ultra and it worked without any tearing or jumping. The 8800 has 512M of video memory opposed to the MSI Radeon HD 6870 which has 1G. Using iStat Menus 3 I found that more than 50% of the video memory is being used while WOW was running. Since the GeForce card had only 512M, I am sure it was running out.
DVD Player crashes after the card was installed. Lightroom, Photoshop CS5 and Dreamweaver all work. Windows running in VMWare also works.
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!!
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.