[geeks] PCI-E video cards

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mar 11, 2008, at 1:25 AM, Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> 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.

As far as I know, you are correct, but it seems that numbers don't  
always correlate to how close the card is to another.

For instance on the ATI side of things, Apple never sold a 9700, yet  
PC 9700s can be flashed to work (I'm think they use 9800 roms).

It is always possible that the difference between two cards in the  
same family is a few resistors and that the ROM is actually the same.