[geeks] PCI-E video cards

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Mar 10, 2008, at 12:34 , nate at portents.com wrote:

>> Stupid on Apple's part, most certainly, but also stupid on the
>> industry's part because the technology to render this issue moot has
>> been around since 1994 or so.
>
> ATI briefly shipped a 9600 that had a Mac and PC compatible firmware  
> (so
> it could handle both an x86 BIOS and Apple's OpenFirmware).
>
> The current Intel Mac video cards have an EFI firmware on them that  
> also
> contains a traditional x86 BIOS compatible firmware, which together  
> need a
> 128KB EEPROM (most, but not all, PC video cards ship with a 64KB  
> EEPROM).
> Find the right PC video card with a 128KB EEPROM (or solder one on
> yourself) and you can flash yourself a video card.

Correct me if I am wrong, but you can only flash Apple EFI ROM onto  
cards that are very close to something Apple sells.

In other words, you can't flash an nVidia 7900, because Apple never  
sold one and thus never made a BIOS for it.

At least, that's what I've heard.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com