ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Graphics Card in 'old' Mac Pro

I tried switching the display connectors on the 2600 card and the startup apple logo and cog wheel now appear on the main screen (30 in) but the dock and apple menu items are all on the 23 in secondary. As expected but not usable.

In the "Arrangement" tab of "Displays" system preference, drag the picture of the menu bar to the picture of the other display.

Thanks, I should have said I tried that, didn't fix it.

Not that there is really a problem. It just seems that with two displays on a 2600 in an old Mac Pro, othe start up cogwheel plus log is on a different screen from the dock and menu. They have always been on the same one before. Once booted up everything seems to be working fine.

Mike

Tried installing the four "ATI 2000..." files from 10.5.1 into 10.4.11 using Pacifist but no change. Only boots into Tiger with the 23 inch monitor. Not a big issue for me but I don't like mysteries.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Bit of a puzzle here:

Your Xbench results for your 7300 and 2600:

NVIDIA 7300 GT:
Quartz graphic test: 205
User interface test: 379

ATI 2600 XT:
Quartz graphic test: 163
User interface test: 293




My XBench results for 1900 and 2600:

ATI X1900:
Quartz Graphics Test 207
User Interface Test 272

ATI 2600 XT:
Quartz Graphics Test 191
User Interface Test 301

Both done on early Mac Pro 2.66 quads.

Seems your 7300 is better than my 1900, and my 2600 is better than your 2600!

I'm tempted to say I don't believe XBench, not the first time it is confusing.


Cinebench Open GL results are a bit more consistent and explainable:

Yours:
NVIDIA 7300: 2530
ATI 2600: 4550

Mine:
ATI 2600: 5331
X1900XT: 5208

The Barefeats test showed the 2600 a bit faster than 1900 for the Imaginator test, which I think is consistent with my result.

Any thoughts?

Mike

Message was edited by: Mike Boreham

I've found Xbench Quartz, OpenGL and User Interface tests to be not so predictive in the past. Even Cinebench's fly-through is suspect since it only runs at 1024x768. That's why I use real world tests like iMaginator, Motion, Prey, WoW and others.

As long as you are running Leopard 10.5.1 or later, the Radeon HD 2600 XT should run like a champ on the older Mac Pros and certainly run circles around the GeForce 7300 GT.

hello can any of you with the 8 core mac pro and the 2600 card run some games in windows XP via boot camp to see if they work?

I think these cards do NOT work on all games on windows XP running boot camp.

can anyone test it out?

I have not 8 core in my macpro but I have installed the card and the at catalyst drivers on win xp, I have one game (GTA vice city ;-)) and he run normally

in win xp the card is recognized like a HD2600xt but the frequency are not the same on the pc version (pc version=800mhz engine and 1400mhz memory)

result with the mac version in windows xp with and software called powerstrip:

engine (gpu) 700mhz

memory 800mhz



a reader of macbidouille.com have noticed:

"cinebench recognized that card like a HD2600PRO and the reference design of the HD2600XT mac corresponds to HD2600pro pc"

the pc version: http://www.revioo.com/news/ati-radeon-hd-n9885.html

the mac version: http://www.flickr.com/photos/15863412@N00/2208543937/

Message was edited by: lukalafaget

Message was edited by: lukalafaget

Just to verify, mine does the same thing...cog and apple on 2nd display, menu on main display. I have a 24" and a 22" Acer monitor connected. I am going to try my 21" Gateway tonight as a third on my old 7600.

Willy

For anyone interested... The 2600 and the old nvida work just fine together. I have not noticed any problems and I do not have the system slowdown that I have read about. All in all, it was a great upgrade for the price (got my corporate discount on the purchase).

Willy

I had a "brother" of the 2600 in an aluminum iMac. It was a horrible video card. For three months, the iMac constantly froze or produced visible artifacts on the screen. I had to hard reset it a few times a day. Eventually - Apple pushed a firmware update for the 2600 that eliminated the freezing issue, but the performance was still poor - for example, CoverFlow stuttered a lot more than on other machines, etc.

I've recently read of issues wiht the 2600 XT producing artifacts on new MacPros. My advice: get the nVidia card if price permits. I'm not nVidia fanboy, but these days AMD/ATI has lost more than one step vs. nVidia in graphics. It's totally unacceptable that they released such a bad firmware for the iMac, and evidently for the MacPro.

Hope this helps somebody.

Got my ATI HD2600XT from Apple and installed it into my first generation 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Mac Pro. It seems to work fine under Mac OS X 10.5.1 and it even booted under 10.4.11 although under the latter configuration the video was pretty badly distorted (almost like extreme interlacing artifacts). Here are my results on my 20" Apple Cinema display running at 1680 x1050:

Xbench v1.3

Quartz Graphics Test: 193
OpenGL Graphics Test: 195
User Interface Test: 312

CINEBENCH R10

OpenGL Benchmark: 5424 CB-GFX

I also tried the S-Video output from the 2600XT using Apple's DVI to Video Adapter. The output from that looks really good on my Sharp Aquos 13" LCD TV. Tried Apple's DVD Player and some QuickTime videos, everything seems to work fine with both the main Cinema display and over the TV out (dual monitor configuration).

Now if Apple would officially support this card in the original Intel Mac Pros under both 10.4.11 and 10.5.1 then I'd be in seventh heaven.

lukalafaget that flickr picture of the mac 2600 is mine 😀. Anyway I've not had any issues with the new ATI card on my 2006 mac pro it's running like a charm so far. Though once when I started up the display seemed to go into low res on the apple logo on grey screen but once mac os x booted it was back to 1920x1200 , though this only happened once and might be my monitor. Other than that everything seems to be working without a problem. The card is quite fast and even ram the new colin mc rae rally demo at 1920x1200 with medium to high detail so it's not that bad for my needs, I'm also starting to notice speed increases in aperture now where I'd use to get a bit more lag I'm not.

Does anyone know if 10.5.2 has done anything which affects using the HD 2600 XT card in an old Mac Pro?

I have one sitting in a box as a spare for my X1900 which I was sure was failing but has behaved well since I got the 2600! I tried the 2600 briefly in 10.5.1 when I got it, and it seemed to work fine except for the disconcerting behaviour on start up where the Apple logo and cog wheel appear on the secondary monitor. All is normal when fully booted. A few others have reported similar.

Wondered if this had changed with 10.5.2 + Graphics update ?

Mike