7xxx rom creating test.

[Concorde Rules]

HI Thanks.

That worked!!

I then modified it using VBE, but then the EFI was disabled again.

Do you have any idea why VBE is causing such issues with it!?

[blacksheep]

Never used it. Compare both ROMs in HexEdit and see where exactly changes were made by VBE7.
What settings you want to modify with it? Clocks are easy to change in any hex editor, check this method out. Works for me beautifully. Fix the checksum of the BIOS part after that.

[Concorde Rules]

Never used it. Compare both ROMs in HexEdit and see where exactly changes were made by VBE7.
What settings you want to modify with it? Clocks are easy to change in any hex editor, check this method out. Works for me beautifully. Fix the checksum of the BIOS part after that.

Clocks, voltages and power limit.

975/1350/1175mv/190W

I'll have a look at HexEdit! Thanks.

Edit: I think I might have cracked it.

Offset 235 is changed from 80 to 00, thereby stopping the EFI working.

Changed the offset back to 80, corrected the checksum and we are in buisness!

Thanks for the help.

[blacksheep]

Great! Post your OC results (measured in Luxmark preferably), I'm curious what maximum stable clocks you'll manage to achieve with this HIS card.
I've pushed Sapphire 7950 w. boost from 925/5000 to stable 1175/5500 without touching the voltage and power limit. Runs like this since few months without single lock up.

[Concorde Rules]

Great! Post your OC results (measured in Luxmark preferably), I'm curious what maximum stable clocks you'll manage to achieve with this HIS card.
I've pushed Sapphire 7950 w. boost from 925/5000 to stable 1175/5500 without touching the voltage and power limit. Runs like this since few months without single lock up.

I can tell you straight off I won't beat that. My ASIC is abit low (60%) and 1125/1500 is as far as I can go on 1.25V.

Tested 1000/1400 @ 1125mv last night. I'll probably leave the bios as 975/1400/1125mv.

Going to enable 5 GT/s today and test.

Edit: 5 GT/s enabled. Luxmark scores for 1000 / 1500, Mac (Windows), 2 runs.

2.5: 1117/1115 (1107/1109)
5.0: 1125/1127 (1117)

[nsrexler]

I haven't really been keeping up with this, is this ROM tool still in a "testing" state? Is it fully working yet?

[blacksheep]

Edit: 5 GT/s enabled. Luxmark scores for 1000 / 1500, Mac (Windows), 2 runs.

2.5: 1117/1115 (1107/1109)
5.0: 1125/1127 (1117)

Pretty good!
I've just got mentioned Sapphire 7950 back (traded my R9 280x for it) and redid Luxmark benches. It does 1152 in a room scene.
That HIS has good memory chips, mine didn't want to go above 1375 (5500 effective) MHz.
Congrats.

[Concorde Rules]

Gone up to 1125/1500/1250mv and the scores in windows are 1222/1223 over two runs.

Not sure the memory makes that much difference?

[blacksheep]

Is Luxmark able to utilize in Win that same amount of vram as in OS X or more?

Mine now runs @1175/1500. 1250mV is its stock voltage in Boost state.
I've changed OC'ing methodology this time, thanks to your scores. Earlier I've found max stable core clock (on stock voltage), then increased mem clock by 50 (200 effective) MHz. It startet do lock-up at 5600, so lowered to 5500 and that was all.
This time I lowered core to 1125 and upped mem to 1500. And this was stable, but it gave more FPS increase in Unigine than computing power in Luxmark. Then started to increase core clock. Even @1175 core it did do only 1130 in a room scene.
Key was to increase power limit in VBE: I gave it +10% and now it scores 1270 in room. In Mavericks - I have Win only in VirtualBox. This card currently it's near to this R9 280x which I've traded it for. That one did 1315 in room with 256 stream processors more.

[Concorde Rules]

The stock power limit is 163W for my card, hence why I was surprised you could do 1175 core with no power change as my card throttles from 1050 MHz at 1.25V in Metro 2033 benchmark (this is the heaviest test I run, valley and luxmark (more so than valley) are tame in comparison).

My new bios has a 190W limit now, so even at higher clocks it doesn't throttle.

I think 1140/1500/1250 is the highest I will go.

Card is hitting 65% fan and is starting to get a tad loud.

I might try and attempt 1200/1500/1300mvish.

[TheObstacle]

Another data point: success!

Machine is a MacPro3,1, and the card is an MSI R7950 "Twin Frozr III"  (this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127734 ).  I'd previously been running an MSI R6870 "Twin Frozr II" in this machine, flashed using instructions elsewhere on this forum.

I dumped the ROM from the card using DarwinDumper, created the composite ROM using netkas' script, etc. from this thread, then booted into a BootCamp Windows install and flashed using ATI WinFlash.  Spend a couple days tearing my hair out before I realized I'd made a typo in the device ID when I initially ran the script (D'OH!), but once I fixed that and reflashed it worked like a champ, boot screen and everything.

I did see one odd thing -- I've got 3 displays hooked up, all different sizes (2560 x 1600, 1920 x 1200, and 1920 x 1080).  By default, the two smaller displays came up at a higher resolution than they support (2560 x 1600 and 2560 x 1440), and were displaying that size but scaled down.  I was able to work around this by manually setting them to the proper resolution, although they still show the higher resolutions as options in the Displays prefs. 

As I was feeling confident after getting it working, I also did the "remove R17" mod from http://forum.netkas.org/index.php?topic=5933.0 , and it's reporting 5 GT /s in System Profiler.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

[Rominator]

Yes, it's very odd that they haven't fixed the resolution bug.

It might require a firmware flash and releasing OSX flashers usually lead to more flashing so they may have decided that we will live with the res bug.

It's odd because one of the first things a GPU and display do is ex have EDID and a list of supported display modes. Many people have seen these overdriven resolutions so it isn't just a single display that has bug.

[formalworldwide2012]

Hi, could Netkas or Rominator provide a tutorial on how to execute this script, I have installed python and Java but still nothing, do I hit the makerom icon? Sorry I couldn't find any info and I am completely stuck! thanks

[salektro]

I can't get the script to work with the bios of an club3d hd7950. Id is 679a
I get Error Message: "ValueError: chr() arg not in range(256)"

Could somebody be so nice to check my bios? Or has anybody an advice?

The card uses Tahiti Pro2 Chip. Is this a problem?

Thanks

Complete log message is

Desktop/7950script$ ./makerom.sh --efifile=7950mac.efi --romfile=efiromheader.rom --originalrom=Club3d.rom --devid=679A
running on 7950mac.efi, efiromheader.rom with devid 679A
Patching files 7950mac.efi, efiromheader.rom for device-id 0x679A
Successfully patched efi file
Successfully patched efi rom file

Orig Size = 125440
Comp Size = 47591
47591+0 Datensätze ein
47591+0 Datensätze aus
47591 Bytes (48 kB) kopiert, 0,0992144 s, 480 kB/s
EFI part is ready at 679A.efipart.rom
orig size - 65536
65536+0 Datensätze ein
65536+0 Datensätze aus
65536 Bytes (66 kB) kopiert, 0,138323 s, 474 kB/s
Before:
OpRom (size=65536, indicator_offset=0x22d, indicator=0x0, checksum=0x0)
OpRom (size=48128, indicator_offset=0x31, indicator=0x80, checksum=0x0)
RawData (size=17408)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "fixrom.py", line 110, in <module>
    op_rom.fix()
  File "fixrom.py", line 90, in fix
    self.data[-1] = chr(0x100 - sum)
ValueError: chr() arg not in range(256)
the rom is ready at Club3d.rom.efi.rom

[pajamajam]

First, thanks to netkas for creating the rom-generating script and Rominator for sharing the 7950 rom.  Very, very much appreciated.

I just purchased a new "ASUS HD7870-DC2-2GD5-V2 Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB" (Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121649) for my my Mac Pro 4,1.  My plan when I ordered the 7870 was to flash it, but now that I've verified that everything works perfectly in both OS X and Windows 8.1 (via Boot Camp) I am left wondering if it is worth flashing just for an EFI boot screen.  I'm hoping the knowledgeable folks on this thread can answer a few questions to help me decide which way to go.

Q1: My understanding is that netkas' script is combining the EFI portion of the Sapphire 7950 rom with whatever bios I dump from my own video card.  Is this correct, or are we really hacking the Sapphire 7950 rom to work on all 7xxx cards?  In other words, when all is said and done will I end up with an Asus 7870 rom + efi or a Sapphire 7950 for Mac rom with some minor text changes in the rom file to make it display "7870"?

Q2: Does anyone have experience flashing this particular Asus 7870 card for OS X?  Anything I should be aware of before I start such as losing port functionality, fan issues, decrease in speed, etc.?

Q3: Is DarwinDumper a reliable way to backup my video card bios in OS X?  Since I have Windows 8.1 available via Boot Camp, should I use GPU-Z instead?  I'm hoping to dump the bios from OS X or Windows as I've had zero success booting DOS via USB (booting from CD is fine, but then I don't have a writeable disk to store my dumped bios).  FWIW, booting DOS via USB on my Macbook Air 2010 works just fine.  It's the Mac Pro 4,1 that has issues with DOS & USB.

Q4: Is ATIWinFlash a reliable way of flashing the new bios?  If DOS is required/preferable I can burn a bootable DOS CD with the custom rom, but it would be nice to have the option of doing this from Windows if possible.  I'm assuming there is no way to do this in OS X, correct?

Q5: Some of the threads I've stumbled on while researching video card flashing mention the bios size being a potential issue.  If I remember correctly, the threads mentioned most PC cards having 64k of available space for the BIOS, while most Mac cards required 128k. This may be outdated information though (from the nVidia 8800 era).  Is this something I need to worry about?

Q6: A few posts here refer to changing the video card timing in the rom files before flashing.  What is the best way to ensure the video card clock rate and voltages are set properly after the flash is complete?  I know Windows offers a variety of utilities for tweaking these settings, but these are harder to come by on the Mac side.

And finally...

Q7: All this for an EFI boot screen?  I don't mean that to sound negative or critical at all, just clarifying what the end result is for my own evaluation.  For me personally, I am wondering if it isn't worth skipping the custom rom and simply using an alternative boot loader like rEFIt (http://refit.sourceforge.net/) or rEFInd (http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/) when needed.  I would prefer to have everything work as it is supposed to (EFI boot screen and all), but the fact that both rEFIt and rEFInd boot just fine on a USB key and provide all the functionality of Apple's built-in EFI boot screen make me hesitant to risk bricking a brand new video card all for an Apple logo.  Again, not being critical, just asking if others had considered this.

Thanks in advance for any help provided.