I’m not responsible for your computer or problems created by these hacks, beware.

Flashing your graphics card to enable boot screens on your MP. Firstly, I know that there are a multitude of cards that are capable of being flashed, but I only have experience with one particular card – by choice…I’ve not bricked anything yet, and I’d like to keep it that way, and they work.

This details flashing the Gigabyte HD 7950 3 GB Version 2 card from a stock Windows card to a Mac card. I have utilized a windows machine to do the flashing, and then placed the card into the MP to run. Here’s how you do it.

You will need a windows machine capable of running a PCI 2.0 card, a small flash drive, a Mac Pro Tower, a Gigabyte HD 7950 card with two sets of power cables for it…  one set for the windows machine, and one set for the MP machine (they are different – or you could use the same cables), and the software provided here:

GPU-Z.0.8.5.exe

atiflash.exe

MAC7950.rom

HP USB Format Tool

DOS Start Files (win98boot)

Remove the video card from the windows machine and place the 7950 in it’s place, hook up the power cables and the video output to a monitor.

Boot the machine to desktop and run GPU-Z.0.8.5.exe

You may get warnings about not having the correct drivers for the card in… ignore them, you do not need them for this project.

In the GPU-Z program, your card should be identified correctly and there is an icon on the right side that looks like an arrow… click it and click, Save to File.

This backs up the original rom (firmware) of the card just in case you need to revert back to it for some reason.

You can exit out of this program, that’s all we needed it for.

Place your USB drive in a windows USB hub, let it be recognized.

Run HPUSBDisk as Admin (Right Click on the HPUSBDisk and choose, Run As Administrator – you may be prompted by UAC, just skip through it).

Select your device, and double check you’ve got the correct one selected.

File system should be FAT 32

Label can be anything short and sweet.

Do a Quick Format.

Create a DOS startup disk using system files located at – now browse to where the win98boot folder is and choose it!

Then click Start and sit back for a minute – relax.

Once it’s done, you can close the HPUSBDisk Format Tool.

Then Copy (Right Click on – then choose Copy) atiflash.exe and MAC7950.rom and the rom that you backed up earlier onto the thumb drive.

Now boot from the USB thumb drive. You might have to enter your BIOS and change the startup disk order – too many options for me to guess what you’re dealing with – Google is your friend.

Once booted to the prompt, type

dir

and hit enter.

This will give you a listing of the files on the thumb drive.

Now type this:

atiflash -f -p 0 MAC7950.rom

and hit enter – sit back and relax a minute. (that’s a zero after the -p up there…)

When it’s done, you can shut the machine down and pull the card.

Place the card in the MP and boot after connecting all of the power cables and a video cable of some kind, yes you will need both power cables connected for it to work.

Let it boot up and make sure you’ve got a good working desktop.

Reboot and hold down the Option key after powering on, this will be a good test to see if you’ve got your boot screens showing with the new card…  you should get to a screen where you can choose the hard drive to boot from, pick your normal drive and hit enter…  It must be working…  enjoy!!

These instructions were pieced together from these sites as well as others:

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/how-to-use-atiflash.57750/

http://forum.netkas.org/index.php?topic=5588.0

How to upgrade your Mac Pro Tower (MP) from 1,1 to 2,1 and 4,1 to 5,1.

You have to have a dmg from Apple mounted prior to opening the MP Firmware Tool, you can download it here:

MacProEFIUpdate.dmg (just mount (double click) this, don’t do anything else with it)

There is a utility that will allow us to do this relatively easily. If you run into problems, you may have to use the original video card and an actual hard disk drive instead of an solid state drive, but try before to you switch things out, it might just work the first time.

Download the appropriate file from below:

MP 1,1

MP 4,1

Double click on the file you downloaded and choose to Upgrade to the newer model, then enter your admin password if needed.

Reboot when it tells you to.

You can check if this worked for you by booting the machine all the way to the desktop and going to the Apple in the upper left corner of the screen, clicking ‘About This Mac’, and then clicking ‘System Report’. You should see under the Model Identifier, MacPro2,1 or whatever you upgraded to.

This information came from netkas.org forums located here:

http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,1094.0.html

Now, assuming you’ve put in a modern graphics card that has been flashed to Mac, or a official Mac card, you might want to enable the HDMI audio out of the card.

Prior to doing this, lets make sure it’s not already working by some mysterious way. Click the Apple in the upper left, then About This Mac, then System Report. In the left hand column, click on PCI. You should see something to do with audio (HDMI or something….) and look across to the right and if it says No, then we’ll go ahead and do the upgrade. If it says Yes, jump down to the end of this section and test it out!

So, before you do too much, you’re going to have to reboot and disable the lock that Apple put on the system files and keeps you from modifying things…  this sounds scarier than it really is.

Restart you Mac

As soon as you hear the boot chime, hold Command-R on the keyboard until you see the Apple icon and progress bar, you will be booted into Recovery.

From the Utilities menu, select the Terminal command, and enter the following commands at the shell prompt:

csrutil disable

Then from the Apple menu, select the Restart command.

Then download the HDMIAudio1.1 file located here:

HDMIAudio1.1

Double click on the dmg to mount it.

Open Terminal located in the Utilities folder in Applications.

Enter this command and press enter:

cd /Volumes/HDMIAudio

Then enter this command and press enter:

./install.sh

Then enter your admin password and press enter.

You may receive a warning about an Unidentified Developer which is safe to ignore.

Then Reboot after the install.

Boot to Desktop again, and open Terminal again.

Type this command and then press enter:

sudo nvram boot-args=“kext-dev-mode=1”

Enter your admin password and press enter (you won’t see your password being entered – this is normal)

Then Reboot to desktop again.

Open Terminal again.

Enter this and press Enter:

sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel

Then enter this and press Enter:

sudo kextcache -system-caches

Reboot to desktop

Now, let’s see if it’s working! Click the Apple in the upper left, then About This Mac, then System Report. In the left hand column, click on PCI. You should see something to do with audio (HDMI or something….) and look across to the right, hopefully it should say Yes this time. You can close these two windows.

Now, test it! click on the Apple in the upper left, and then System Preferences, then click on the speaker (Sound) icon. Then click the Output tab, you should see something HDMI – and if you’re TV or stereo is hooked up via HDMI it might even identify it’s self correctly. Click on it, and try to play some music or sound (Youtube, an mp3 file… anything). The sound should be heard via that output if things went right!

These steps and the info used to create this guide was gleamed mostly from MacRumors Forum located here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-hdmi-audio.1499797/