video card DVI help
 

Hello everyone,

First off, I've looked in google, ati.com, irc, etc. and still can't even begin to find the problem

I have the ATI Radeon 32MB DDR PCI Mac edition video card. OSX.3.8
The VGA output works fine, the DVI doesn't work at all.

I know my IBM T85D LCD DVI monitor works, because it works flawlessly with my PC.

When I plug in the DVI monitor to the Mac, nothing is displayed. (no, i dont' have both dvi and vga plugged in at same time).

I now have the mac running with just the DVI plugged it, booted it up, connected with VNC and tried the detect monitors, changed resolutions, etc.

Does anyone have any idea what it could be?

This video card was in an old Beige G3 and outputed to the same DVI monitor just fine.

Oh, and I tried switching PCI slots... 3 times.

ANY help or tips would be greatly appreciated.

Thanx

You never mention exactly what Mac this card is in.

Trevor

Does the system profiler see the card ?
Is it properly seated in the PCI slot ?
Does the card still work with the Mac you took it out of ?

Sorry about that missing bit.

It is in an old Blue&White G3 300mhz.
I no longer have the Beige G3 that it worked in before... I just moved to Denver from Florida and left the system there.

Yes, it is seated in the PCI slot, and the Profiler sees it everytime.
When I have it hooked to the VGA monitor, it says Display: CRT. When I have it hooked to DVI, it completely ignores the Display option.
And at the bottom is says Resolution: 1x1, even though I've changed it from 800x600 to 1024x768 and reverse.

HELP!

Would you mind giving us all the information on the card from System Profiler > Hardware > PCI/AGP cards?

Trevor

ATY,RADION
Type: display
Bus: PCI
Slot: J12
VRAM: 32MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x5144
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-77701-225

Display:
Resolution: 1x1
Depth 32-bit Color
Mirror: Off



and i've tried changed the resolution in sys pref, and the change goes through fine, but doesnt change the profilers output

Hmmm. I thought that perhaps you needed to update your firmware, but the 113-77701-225 ROM Revision makes it appear that you already have.

There are some reports here of problems with Mac Radeon cards and IBM LCD displays. Have you tried this card with any other DVI displays? Perhaps it is an issue just with this display and not with the DVI output.

Trevor

Hmm,

I really don't know. The thing that bugs me is that this card and monitor worked fine in an old Beige G3 that I had. Then someone give's me an old Blue&White G3 their getting rid of, and it doesn't output.

Given it was a great while between the machines, but still.

I don't know.

Do you know of any cheap cheap DVI PCI video cards that will work? I'm talking less than 50? I'm not video editing or playing games with this machine...

Thanx

There are three choices of DVI PCI video cards for Macs:

Radeon Mac Edition PCI
Radeon 7000 Mac Edition PCI
Radeon 9200 Mac Edition PCI

The 9200 typically streets for around $110-130, so it's more than your price range. The Radeon 7000, in my opinion, is not as good a card as the Radeon Mac Edition PCI, so if it was working for you at the moment, I'd say to stick with what you've got. But since what you've got doesn't work, you could look into trying a Radeon 7000 ME PCI, which should be easy to find for less than $50. Or spend a little more and get the 9200.

Trevor

If you don't use the same cable than on your PC, you might also want to try another cable or at least visually inspect yours for bent pins.
If you can't test with another monitor or machine, buying another card may or may not resolve the problem.
If I were you, I'd go to an Apple dealer with the card and the monitor and ask nicely if he would check it in one of his older machines.

Only then you'll be able to assess what compenents work together.

Well, I use the same cord on the Mac and the PC, so I'm pretty sure the cable is ok.
I visually inspected the DVI port and see that the pins are fine, but I see a hair-thin line on the left side of the port, where the "cross" connection is. This COULD be the problem.

Either way I went to Apple store yesterday, they didn't sell video cards. He referred me to CompUSA. I just checked their website, they don't have the 32meg or the 7000 Mac.

I was going to get the 32meg and test it out, and if it didn't work, return it to local store.

Gah!

Is the DVI connection on the radeon card a DVI-I or DVI-D? That could make some differences. Also, I have run into similiar problems with upgrading older macs. I just buy cheap PC versions of video cards and flash them with the mac rom. You can buy a 9550se Radeon for under 50 dollars and flash it to work on a mac. There is one side effect that they all mention though when flashing it. They all disclaim that the card will run a bit warmer after being flashed. I found this to be true, but I also found it does not fully effect the video card that much. I installed a PC version video card in a client's cube. Normally apple wanted around $300.00 USD for their version of the video card (since it has to be specific deminsions to fit). I found one that would fit but ATI only made it for the PC. I ended up flashing it and she has never been back since to complain about her cube not running right (been over 6 months now and it still runs fine).

Here is a thread where I explain the procedure.

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...light=pc+video

The DVI ports on those video cards I flashed work fine. The one thing that kind of seems no one has looked at yet is the connection type of DVI. There are two different DVI connections, one is stricktly digital (DIV-D) and will not work with any analog signal. The other one is DVI-I and runs both digital and analog signals out from the card.

Well,

Thanx a million for the 7000 info. I happen to have an extra ATI Radeon 7000 PCI 64MB laying around (from past job) that was for my PC. I tried loading it in the PC and flashing.

The 208 BIN file didn't flash. Came up with some error code, even with the "-f" parameter. It did flash with the other MAC7k.BIN. I used the "-f" and it said something like "35000 out of 35000 verified."

Mind you, it didn't say it was flashing or anything, just did that. I tried flashing it again with same command line and it said "ROM Already updated" or something of the sort. So this leads me to believe it is flashed.

I now have the flashed PCI 7000 card in my Blue&White G3 but no signal, VGA or DVI. (the monitor is DVI-I btw).

I tried installing the 2004 Universal ROM update and custom picked the 7000 208 driver, didn't work. Rebooted, still no picture.

The System Profiler says it's just a VGA Compat Controller, but doesn't list it as a display, even though it is the ONLY card in at the moment.

Any ideas?

You haven't flashed the card correctly yet. Remember you need to have two video cards installed in your PC. Boot off your AGP card to initalize video. Then boot off a bootable floppy with the flash files copied to it. Flash the rom with the proper commands. You should use the -pm paramater for power macs. Mind you this only falshes the basic 208 mac rom on the device you will still need to load the drivers.

Now, I am confused you said you got no video what so ever, but you were able to load the drivers?

Ok, right....
I put the 7000 in my main PC which has a Geforce AGP card, so that was no problem. I do NOT have a floppy drive, so I had to make a DOS bootable CD. I booted up with that, browsed to directory with flash files, issued the commands:
flashrom -i
flashrom -pm 0 mac7k.bin -f

It then did the "35000 of 35000 bytes verified" (not exactly 35k).
I issued the last command again and it said "ROM is already updated" or something of the sort.

I then put the 7000 in my Mac, booted up, VNC'd in, downloaded 2004 ATI Universal ROM update, checked the Radeon 7000 208 option, clicked install. Told me I had to restart for updated ROM to take affect. Rebooted... nothing.

I want to primarily use this card for the DVI port, but the VGA didn't work either.

And after reboot, and VNC'd in, the System Profiler saw the card, but didn't have any info as far as Display or anything an active card would have, even though it is the only video card in the system.

Also, System Preferences | Displays | doesn't allow me to "Detect Displays." Almost like it doesn't see a monitor attached, even though I can change the resolution via VNC.

Make sense?

I think you have to use a floppy b/c the flasher wants to write to the disk. That cannot happen if you use a cd since the flasher utility will not be able to write to the disk.

Also, I never had to use the -f switch on the commands.

I think you need to use the m208full.bin file too. That puts the basic 208 mac rom on the card. In the OS you have to run the driver updates.

Grr,

Ok, I just went out and bought a Floppy drive. Booted up with a win98se bootdisk. Put in another floppy that had the flashrom stuff on there. This is my exact output (copied it down)

flashrom -pm 0 m208full.bin <tried with and without -f>
Serial ROM
BIOS DeviceID: 0x5159
ASIC DeviceID: 0x5159
Flash Type: ST
Error: write error at 65536

then i tried
flashrom -pm 0 mac7k.bin -f
BIOS DeviceID: 0x5144
ASIC DeviceID: 0x5159
Flash Type: ST
65535 of 65536 bytes verified.


i then tried to do the exact same command it it came back with:
"ROM already programmed"


is all this correct? the correct output?
i put it in the mac, and nothing. where do i get the drivers for the 7000pci for 10.3.8? all that's listed on ati.com is for 10.3.6 only.


SO CLOSE!
8)

http://www.mail-archive.com/supermac.../msg10254.html

8(

Didnt see a mention of this in the thread but not all mother boards support the built in power needed through the video card to power the LCD screen. My old G4/400 doesnt have the power supply on the mother board whereas the G4/466 does. It might be asking the obvious but does your video card have 3 connectors not connecting to anything on the mother board.
Hope I have not missed the point!!

Only if the monitor is an apple flat panel and has the ADC connection will it run power through the video card. If its a normal LCD it will have its own power plug to draw power from.

Okay, I think I know what you are missing. You need to flash the rom then run the 208 rom udpate in the os. You can find that here:

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/R7000-ROM-208.html


Sounds like you have the card flashed, you just need to run the rom enabler now. You can run that in the OS.

Ok, I really do apologize if it's right in front of me, but where is the download link for the file on that page?

Not seeing it anywhere

well, i found the link, i dont think there was one posted on the site, but if you do at.com/drivers/R7000-ROM-208.hqx i think thats what i did.

anyway, a 1.7 meg file downloaded, ran it, and as i hit CONTINUE it said "This installer will not work on this OS. Please contact ATI for updated installer"

Are you flashing it in OS 9? OS X does not have a native flash utility in it. This has nothing to do with ATI, its how apple designed OS X. Try flashing it in 9, or perhaps try a third party flash utility.

Grr.

Ok, I booted up and installed OS9.2.2.
Booted INTO OS9.
Ran the Flash utility, got further than on OSX.
Started doing the:

Your Device ID: <nothing was shown here>
New Device ID: 113-######-#### <some sort of BIOS new number thing, i dunno>

Then, as it was about 60%-70%, it came up with an error of something like:
Error J11: ABsomethingsomething

J11 turned out to be the PCI port that the 7000 card was on, saw this through Sys Prof.
And OS9 sys prof doesn't read a ROM number on the card, says something about -1

HUH?!

I am not sure what to tell you at this point. It has worked for me and many others as well. Perhaps you have some other problem with your system that is causing this? OS corruption? I do not know. Do you still have the original m208 file? Try the original file first then try the updated one, thats just a shot in the dark. It will be hard for anyone to help you through this with out actually seeing the unit.

Best of luck

One last question,

On the 7000 video card, i see a jumper for NTSC or PAT

does it matter what this is on? should it be one or the other?

PAL perhaps?

PAL = European and australian standard of video signals

NTSC = what the USA uses.

I would only assume you want it on the NTSC setting.


Also, who made your video card? If its some kind of funy chipset revision or some really esoteric vendor the flash may not work. FWIW, I used cards made and manufactured by ATI everytime I tried it, with the exception of one time I used one made by a company called extasy.