Sapphire 7950 Mac Edition now shipping

[mysticalos]

Card has escalated to full blown tearing at the severe level. I highly recommend just staying away from these. Their support is aweful considering first card i sent them got sent back with "nothing wrong" despite the problems. and now it's even worse.

[Squishy Tia]

I eventually gave up. I'm hoping for a new computer soon anyways. It acts up only in WoW and occasionally flickers on desktop with lines through top and bottom of screen or maybe a full screen flash of garble for a very brief second. The issue is super rare on desktop and I may observe it once or twice a day. In wow I avoid problem by turning texture resolution down. The issue only happens with high resolution textures based on my testing. It doesn't seem ATI, blizzard, or sapphire want to deal with this problem

Meowrs!

Which connector to you have the display connected to? If it is the DVI or HDMI connector, this may be a poorly shielded connection (and/or cable). All of the AMD cards I've had so far failed with the original HDMI cable I had before, including the HDMI-DVI cable I had for my old monitor (Westinghouse L2410NM). On that monitor and my TV DVI and HDMI connections would suffer flickering with the old cable while the 22 AWG cable from monoprice.com that I use now does not suffer this at all. MDP to HDMI/DVI should not suffer this at all except in very poorly shielded cabling situations as noted here.

If you could, I'd try getting a 22 or 24 AWG shielded cable (most are 28 or 30 AWG which is awful) and see if the black bars/flickering continues. The distorted textures could be the drivers or the card, but the flickering is usually endemic to the HDMI clock channel.

[mysticalos]

I use DVI.

[mysticalos]

Graphics corruption is now occurring in more places. Today it was dock. I'm skeptic to RMA again when last time I did they sent the SAME card back (matching serial) unrepaired



Tearing is also getting worse in games too. Guess I can attempt to RMA again and see if their support quality is even better. If they send it back still screwed up again I'll open a BBB complaint and demand a full refund. Their support is awful and nothing like EVGA.

[DeckardTrinity]

Where did you buy from? I bought mine @ Amazon back in April, and they gladly put in a replacement order after I detailed my woes. They even offered a refund, which after getting caught up on this thread, I may just do.

So... my issue is even worse. Machine won't boot half the time when this card is in - and sometimes won't even get to the Apple chime. I'm running a MP 5,1, 3.33ghz 6-core w/12GB of Crucial registered RAM. Originally I bought the 7950 to replace a failing 5870 (even after repairing that 5870 by swapping out the fan / hs, it still had issues).

I'm not 100% convinced that the video cards are the issue here tho, as I get brilliant performance on this machine when I can manage to get it to boot properly. But the number of times where I've booted and had the display go black before the login screen, or no chime, or wake from sleep and then get spinning beachball of death, etc... just one too many at this point. (and joy, a new symptom recently - boot or wake from sleep, and machine gets very sluggish, then stops - well, never fully stops, the mouse is ALWAYS moveable! every time! but everything else is frozen).

If any of you that have the 7950 in any sort of Mac Pro could do me a favor I'd really appreciate it. Just run the Apple Hardware Test on your machine, and see if it fails. Mine fails every single time with the 7950 in with the following error:

4SNS/1/C0000008: Te1S--124

which, I've been told by my support contact at Apple (yes I have been working these issues with them over the last couple of months as well, thank god they are so responsive) indicates an abnormally high reading on PCIe Slot 1 (exactly where the video card is installed). When I swap back to the 5870, AHT comes back clean every time (even with the Crucial RAM in).

[mysticalos]

Hardware test is clean for me. in fact, i even grabbed techtool for it better vram testing and still clean. I do know when i put 5870 back in, the problems do go away except for super minor WoW specific issues that may just be an actual WoW issue. When I put nvidia 680 in, problems also went away (although performance tanked pretty hard, which is why i ended up selling 680 and staying with 7950.)

I've pooled almost 6k waiting on a new mac pro (before i found out it was a trash can). I'm still waiting for the trash can to launch anyways to see what it does for modding. I can almost see TonyMac getting more traffic after that abomination comes out unless apple comes to senses by launch and make some revisions to that garbage (not likely).

[blacksheep]

Graphics corruption is now occurring in more places. Today it was dock. I'm skeptic to RMA again when last time I did they sent the SAME card back (matching serial) unrepaired



Tearing is also getting worse in games too. Guess I can attempt to RMA again and see if their support quality is even better. If they send it back still screwed up again I'll open a BBB complaint and demand a full refund. Their support is awful and nothing like EVGA.

Demand a refund now and buy yourself a nice PC 7950 w/ Boost (even from Sapphire) and flash it. Then OC it using Hex editor to ~1200/5500 + 5.0 GT/s mod and enjoy.
It's extremely weird that there is so many complaints on Mac Edition (tearing, flickering, artifacts etc.) while flashed PC ones perform great in OS X. Seems they screwed something up...

[DeckardTrinity]

Yeah, I got the refund, will continue to evaluate options. I'm actually starting to seriously consider putting all the stock parts back into my MP, sell it, and build a hackintosh. *sigh* this was not what I expected when I switched to Mac six years ago. (second machine in a row that has failed this spectacularly).

Flashed PC 7950 could be an option too... when it worked, Battlefield 3 absolutely screamed on the Win7 bootcamp partition.

[DeckardTrinity]

Well I decided to give the PC Sapphire 7950 w/Boost a try, and everything is working great! Flashed original ROM w/Netkas EFI script, popped the resistor, and now have glorious boot screen with decent graphics @ 5.0GT/s.

One thing I did notice is that I'm benching quite a bit lower on the Valley / Heaven benches than with the Mac version of the Sapphire 7950 (ran the benchmarks on Win7 BC). I haven't OC'd the PC one, but I am wondering if maybe the Mac one is already OC'd? (I never looked closely enough at the speeds).

Also I did a before / after bench with just the PC card on the two benches and there is little if any difference in speeds (less than 1FPS average before / after). So... I guess the 2.5 vs 5.0 really doesn't make much difference?

Oh... and funnily enough, AHT still gives an error (and no error on stock 5870). Of course, I was an idiot and didn't run it before I popped the resistor, so no clue if that is what is causing the problem.

[jimj]

For what it is worth (e.g. others may have different experiences...)

I have a mac pro 4,1 that I have flashed with the 5,1 mac ROM image.

I run a sapphire AMD 7950 boost (not the mac edition), and I have EFI flashed this card and removed the resistor for 5 GT operation.

I run X5680 processors (12 cores total).

I run Mac OS X 10.8.5

I have no tearing or artifacts, and I have no problems with the Apple Hardware Test from a 5,1 machine. The AHT that originally shipped with my 4,1 system will not work with my flashed motherboard and unsupported processors even if I use the original GT120 video card.

-JimJ

[detroit808]

I was keen to flash a PC card but couldn't get anyone to answer any of my questions here. So I bought a Sapphire 7950 Mac from OWC. I've put it in a Mac Pro 4,1 flashed to 5,1 with Xeon W3690, 32GB RAM. It didn't like being in the machine with the original NVidia GT120. I was hoping to leave that card in attached to the display (Apple Cinema Display 23" 1920x1200 non glass via DVI) while the 7950 took over at FCPX GPU processing, unfortunately, in this arrangement, FCPX will only use the GPU the display is connected to. To confirm this I performed the BruceX to ProRes benchmark with FCPX 10.1. With the display connected to the GT120 in slot 4 and the 7950 in slot one, the test took about 360 seconds, with the display connected to the 7950 in slot 1 the test took 39 seconds.

Luxmark 2.1 sala scene score is 1692, full room scene 932.

There's a massive issue with using the Apple DVI to MiniDisplayPort adapter, huge flickering, unreadable display. Another strange thing is that the frame buffer is fixed at 2560x1600 and the Display System Preference Resolution Best for Display is fixed at 2560x1600 on my Apple Cinema Display 1920x1200. I had to change this to Scaled and select 1920x1200. Weird.

In Safari I load http://www.apple.com/ipad-air/ it displays massive flickering and distortion. Not sure if the PC cards do the same thing, can anyone confirm? I'm guessing this is software related.

Running 10.9.1 (worst OS in Apple's history IMO)

[snakecoils]

Hello,
I joined this old thread because I've just purchased a second-hand HD7950 Mac Edition but I am having severe troubles in outputting a VGA signal (via DVI-I / VGA adapter).
If the VGA is the only monitor connected I can happily see the boot menu and the OSX progress bar until the moment the desktop should appear. But then, nothing, the display went off.
If a second display is connected either to HDMI or one of the miniDP port, the priority goes to the digital video out for boot menu but nothing is displayed on the VGA monitor.
Changing the video settings for the VGA monitor on the Control Panel didn't help at all, the monitor remains black.
Today I have also tried a DVI-D / VGA adapter (yes, they exists) and I had partially a success, one of the two adapter I purchased show the video signal on the VGA but it does not remain locked, I think because the converted analog levels are too low to be stable enough for my analog monitor.
The question is: has anyone experienced this issue on his Mac Edition card? Recently I have also flashed a Reference 7970 card using the "bundle" method and every video out port works as it should (including the HDMI) but the VGA part of DVI-I port has the same issue of the HD7950 Mac Edition.
This behaviour happened also before the BIOS flashing (using the video card unflashed in OSX environment) so I think it is not really a Mac firmware issue.

Any idea or suggestion will be greatly appriciated, maybe a different DVI-I / VGA adapter? For example the Apple adapter (the white short cable) show some signs of life while the common ones with connectors tied in melted plastic tends to show nothing. Of course on BootCamp side (Windows 7) everything works, no surprise here...