Indigo Renderer Forum

eman7613 wrote: Its actually ATI & Nvidia playing games, google for hacking PC gpus to run on macs, usually it is just re soldering certain points - otherwise they are the exact same.

Not quite true. Yes you can "hack" a PC gfx card to run on a Mac. The primary problem is the card's firmware. Mac cards require two set's of firmware, 1 for mac and 1 for PC (PC is needed for bootcamp). So enterprising users dump Mac card ROMs from official cards and then flash a PC card with it. Sometimes this requires replacing the flash chip on the card as well (as the combined firmware is obviously larger than normal). Unfortunately there is more to it than just flashing in straight up Mac firmware in a lot of cases as can be seen by the numerous threads on MacRumors to do with flashing various models with varrying levels of success.

Similar issues are faced by those building so called "Hackintoshes" it's definately not all plain sailing. The conclusion from my researching the subject prior to making my purchase was that hackintoshes are generally less hassle than the average linux system but still a hassle, especially around OS update time.

Here's an example thread on flashing PC 4870's:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=661681

Me, I would much rather pay a "premium" for a Mac Edition card and get something that works than stuff around trying to get some cheaper PC card to work...time is a commodity in short supply after all.

10 years ago I would have been all for "having a good ol' hack". These days I'm much more interested in getting things done than stuffing around with hardware.

my understanding is most of the hackintosh problems come from non existant drivers and people trying to put it on machines without SSE 3 (which OSX uses).

Have a hackintosh in a VM though

EDIT: Oh, and OpenFirmware is a *$&!. An OLD ppc mac with a 300mhz chip with openfirmware 1.x is the only thing ive never been able to get linux on!

Whats the upgrade path like wth Mac video cards when something better comes out? And CPUs?

on yeah overclocking on a PC is much easier, and the I7 920 can clock up to 4ghz on air cooling pretty easily, that's a massive performance boost when you consider it's stock speed of 2.66

And you think this overclocking comes for free? Why do you think there aren't any 4GHz i7 produced by intel?

apart from buying better heat/sink fan and maybe shorter CPU lifespan, I think it's free

the better heatsink and fan will keep the CPU temps near stock, the voltage will remain the same around 3.8, will need to be overvolted to reach 4 ghz though
Life span should not be much less if any

Case in point, the P4 2.8ghz cpu I use now has been running at 3.2ghz ever since I bought it, and it's stable up to 3.5. I run it everyday for at least 8 hours, and I put it together a year before HalfLife 2 came out. So about 6 years old now and going strong

And the P4 was a very hot chip, but the aftermarket heat sink and fans are vastly superior to the Intel OEM ones
That's probably the main reason why Intel doesn't run it higher, and they obviously want a bit of headroom for people with poor case airflow and such

The motherboard is likely to die before the CPU, something I know from personal experience!

There's more to it than life span I can assure you.

overclocking is most definitely "for free", since cpu manufacturers can't sell every piece of silicon that makes the top bin grade at its highest possible price. so they just warranty it for a lower speed.

that's not to say that 4ghz specifically is a good thing to try, but the take-away point is that many would-be i7 975s are being sold as 920s for market reasons alone.

the decision is basically whether or not you fancy voiding your warranty for the extra speed; people who upgrade their machines all the time and keep the overclocks sane generally don't see any problems with this.


ps. coolcolj, please think of the environment and put that crusty p4 out of its misery

I'm getting itchy feet - I did some price research on the cheapest prices online for PC parts, and they have come down a lot lately

I can put together a new PC system with an Intel I7 920 quad core CPU with 12 gigs of high speed DDR3 ram, a new 1TB HD plus the one I bought recently for backup purposes, new mid range silent video card, fan controller, aftermarket quiet fans and cpu heat sink, a new Antec P183 case and then have the CPU overlocked to over 3.5 ghz for under $1700AUD!

Ask yourself this (and perhaps do some research). Why are there no 4GHz CPUs? Why have we been hovering and 3 to 3.5 GHz for years now?

You might discover that that speed isn't as "free" as you might think even if a system appears to be stable.

Any way I'm at work and shouldn't be playing on forums

i think i know quite a lot about cpus (not that it matters for this discussion, but possibly more than you?), at least enough to know that overvolting and 3.5ghz are not so smart. but my point still stands, those are quite often 975s getting sold as 920s, and it's all about the warranty

As long as the calculations done by the CPU are accurate, it's all good, and you can run programs that test that stuff.
And by the time it blows up, it will be like a snail, like my P4

right at the bottom of this list....
http://www.benchwell.com/index.php

coolcolj i must disagree, it's not just about the computations being accurate at any particular time; to many people who seriously use and depend on their computers there is a strong emphasis on reliability.

if you don't care about reliability, which has been guaranteed by the manufacturer at the stock speed through thorough testing, then by all means overclock! it makes plenty of sense for those people who buy a nice 'n cheap cpu to play world of warcraft most of the time, and then need a bit more oomph to play crysis. but as a work computer, you're just begging for critical data loss!

but when you replace the OEM heatsink and fan, you greatly increase the envelope, and use a good case with good fans, etc

that extra headroom then can be used for your benefit, productivity and wallet wise

the fact that people can hit 4Ghz on air cooling with the i7 920 suggests that Intel has a massive headroom on their CPUs. And AMD is not pushing them that hard right now might have something to do with it
It gives them room to move upward if they ever need it.
Past Intel CPUs never had this much headroom!

coolcolj wrote:but when you replace the OEM heatsink and fan, you greatly increase the envelope

increase the envelope? which metaphorical envelope do you mean, since it can't be the thermal envelope, that stays the same (and the higher temps have to stay in that same envelope).

i think it's quite clear: if you push the cpu past its specs or use non-standard cooling, you lose all guarantees. if the box needs to do serious work that's not acceptable - those guarantees are very meaningful and valuable (imagine buying a cpu and it says on the box "this processor might work most of the time" - that's exactly the situation in nonstandard use).

coolcolj wrote:Past Intel CPUs never had this much headroom!

some of us are old enough to remember the wondrous celeron 336, and then the later "coppermine" p3s...