GFX Strings - DUAL CARDS - How To

[heythisisdave]

Hey aquamac, thanks again for your help on this topic. I will post again if I find a good solution to cooling this board although since I don't really play games I may never need to find a better solution (this current one is pretty loud though).

I don't think the Cartri bios is available for this board yet, I just found out about those and I'm guessing they make the machine more hackintosh friendly?

[bairda]

I have read through this thread and I am still having trouble getting my dual cards working. I have SL 10.6.4 running with two cards: A Geforce 9800 GT and a Geforce 9800 GTX. Either card will work with two monitors. However, when I plug in a third monitor on the second card (doesn't matter which), no video signal. If I try to make the second card the initial boot video device it chokes on me and asks me to reboot. I have tried using EFI Studio to add the cards manually to the com.apple.Boot.plist but this seems to have no effect.

I believe that the problem is incorrect PCI addresses but I am not sure. I have a seperate copy of windows 7 running on another drive in the same machine and it boots fine with the 2 video cards and three monitors. Can I get the PCI addresses from Windows 7 and use them in the mac?

I am a newb at this so any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
-Alex-

[aquamac]

Yes you have the wrong PCI address, I suspect the fan also runs loud on the second card, or certainly louder than it should. Can you change resolutions easily or are you limited to the basic res?

1. Boot into windows and open up device manager.

2. Double click the card that is in the second PCIe slot to open up a new window.

3. Click on the tab named "Details" and scroll down to "Location Paths" and select.

Make a note of the PCIe address. Post it back here as it will then need converting to a Mac PCIe address.

In fact do the same for both your cards.

What motherboard do you have and also which card is in which slot?

[bairda]

Thanks for the quick reply!

The PCI address in Windows 7 for the Nvidia Geforce 9800 GT is: PCI bus 5, device 0, function 0
The PCI address in Windows 7 for the Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ is : PCI bus 3, device 0, function 0

I am running these on a Gigabyte X58A-UD5 rev 1 with the latest bios update.

The 9800 GTX+ is in the 1st Video Adapter position (PCIE 1)
The 9800 GT is in the 2nd Video Adapter position (PCIE 2)

The fans on the cards don't seem to be abnormally loud. I can get all the res on either card on either DVI port in SL. However I can only see one card at any one time.

Thanks,
-Alex-

[aquamac]

You need to find Location Paths, they should look something like this:

PCIROOT(0)#PCI(0300)#PCI(0000)#PCI(0000)#PCI(0000)


PCIROOT(0)#PCI(0700)#PCI(0000)#PCI(0000)#PCI(0000)

You have given me location Information!

[bairda]

Sorry about that!

How about these:
Nvidia Geforce 9800GT: PCIROOT(0)#PCI(0700)#PCI(0000)
Nvidia Geforce 9800GTX: PCIROOT((0)#PCI(0300)#PCI(0000)

Thanks,
-Alex-

[proximus]

Jul 19, 2010 21:47:16 GMT proximus said:

hello,
thank you aquamac for this tutorial, i do everything like you said, and now got working 260 GTX + EN6600 with three monitors...

but i made out.hex on my snow leopard and i don't have Quartz Extreme...

i need to know can i make this file with my in.plist on my friends hackintosh with Leopard only, or i must instal leopard to my machine and made it?

thank you!

can anyone help me with this?

[aquamac]

Hello Proximus,

You can make the out.plist on any computer running Leo if you place your files on the desktop of that computer. I have since found that GFX strings are working again with Snow Leopard 10.6.4.

[aquamac]

Bairda,

Check out this in.plist I made, it may help. I am not sure which slots you are using but if this plist is no better, then you may want to try your card in the 2 furthest slots from each other, but that will of course involve finding the PCI address of the slot furthest from the CPU.

Attachments:

[bairda]

Thanks for the plist!

Unfortunately it was the same result. On PCIE-1 boot nothing but a black screen on the GT. On PCIE-2 boot, the restart screen shows up after the apple screen.

I repaired all the permissions on the disk and pasted it correctly. I will try moving the cards.

I am assuming that you want me to keep the GTX+ in slot 1 and move the GT to slot 3, correct? Then get the location Path for PCIE-3. My bios does not permit me to boot from PCIE-3 so I guess stick with 1?

Thanks again.
-Alex-

[aquamac]

Yes, try the very top and bottom slots. I don't really know about your motherboard, but on my P6T7, the original bios without modification would only support cards in 1 & 5 not 1 & 3 without modification in OSX.

[tommyosx]

Need some help guys, I've gotten my EVGA 9800 GTX+ 512MB working on my iPC 10.5.6 with NVDarwin 512MB, but I wanted to add my XFX 8600GT 256MB. How would I go about doing this? Right now my computer locks up with both cards in... Installed on my EVGA 680i Mobo.

[aquamac]

Have you made a dual card string! There is a certain amount of info - some about NV boards here and other stuff here.

Being an Nvidia board I am pretty sure that you do not have an option in the bios to boot from the second card. My first recommendation would be to make a dual card string and take it from there. Make sure you have a bootable back up in case you get yourself in trouble though!

[tommyosx]

I have not made a dual card string yet. How do I get the position of the second card?

Also do you have a string for an 8600GT 256MB?

[aquamac]

The first post in this thread is a walkthrough telling you exactly what to do. Are you looking for a string for a single 8600GT or two of them?