To summarize my findings, in case anyone else out there is thinking of using a 690, the GTX 690 is NOT recommended for use in a Hackintish system running Mavericks (especially beyond 10.9.2).
(for clarity, this Inno3D GTX 690 card was an nVidia stock reference design with stock nVidia firmware with no vendor enhancements whatsoever. Also, it was a known good card pulled out of a working Windows 7 rig)
The problems I had under OS X included:
- System would freeze randomly - sometimes during boot, sometimes during normal use, sometimes at shutdown. There was no consistent pattern. This started in 10.9.3 with occasional occurrences but became more frequent in 10.9.4. This was a show stopper problem and the catalyst for me to pull the card out of this rig today.
- Black screen at cold boot upon arriving at GUI login (required a warm reboot to get to the GUI login screen - none of the different boot flag options fixed this). Annoying but not a show stopper.
- Card would not down clock back to 324 MHz with the Apple stock driver leaving one or both GPU chips (depending on how many monitors I had plugged in) hovering at maximum clock speeds with heat exceeding 50-53 C with almost no load. This was headache especially with two or more screens attached as both GPUs on the card would be generating unnecessary heat and wasting a lot of power which was totally unacceptable.
- Switching to the nVidia web drivers allowed the card to down clock back to 324 MHz but caused random and frequent kernel panics.
I had no choice but to go back to the Apple stock driver to avoid the problem.
Switching out the Inno3D GTX 690 2GB for my spare Gigabyte Windforce 3 GTX 780 3GB (non-Ti version) eliminated all the issues above. My system runs as it should now.
