ATI Radeon HD 3870

Some background before my question:

I have been building all of my own PCs for years now. Was just looking at some of the newest hardware out there since my roommate was building a new gaming rig and I stumbled across Hackintosh's. All these years and I never knew you could do that. (Which I know only started after Apple switched to Intel based Macs.) So I would like to turn my current system, which is a few years old, into a Hackintosh.

Only had the one HD that I was installing OS X to, removed my 2nd ATI card, and everything else unplugged except USB mouse and keyboard. I can't remember if I got the boot0 error prior to getting the system working or not, but researched and fixed that. Overall, my hackintosh didn't work on the first couple attempts, but after awhile I finally got OS X 10.6.8 working following the iBoot + Multibeast guide everytime.

Initially, I could only get into the OS in safe mode. In the OS, Ethernet worked OOB, Audio didn't, and neither did my graphics. Got audio to work using what I think was the **889 kext and HDAEnabler (I don't quite remember all of the kexts involved, sorry in advance if I'm not being specific enough regarding the kexts.) At one point I did get most everything working except my graphics, I could only get the resolution to a fixed 1280x1024x32. Eventually was messing around trying to fix it and then made it so I couldn't boot into the OS at all, including safe mode, so I started all over again. Had lots of more problems just trying to get the OS installed fresh again. Which leads me to now.

I have the OS X 10.6.8 working, but now I have no audio and no proper graphics. I did notice one time during the 10.6.8 combo updater and run multibeast phase (I was also in safe mode at the time) that it properly showed my moniter model number in the color settings for the display and I was at the proper resolution that I would like (1680x1050x32). At that time it listed all of the available resolutions that my moniter could support. Having installed OS X so many (repeat) times I started to notice that when I was in the main DVD installer the resolution was correct too and looking in the system profiler I found:

While in the installer and during the patching and multibeast step

Chipset Model: ATI Radeon HD 3800
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe lane width: x16
VRAM (Total): 512 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
DeviceID: 0x9501
RevisionID: 0x0000

Any time after 10.6.8 is installed and system is in normal or safe mode

Chipset Model: not listed
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe lane width: x16
VRAM (Total): 3 MB (varies, I've seen listed as 5 MB before)
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
DeviceID: 0x9501
RevisionID: 0x0000

Based on what I have seen, my graphic cards work OOB. Digging in the system I found that they are loading S/L/E/ATI3800Controller.kext, ATIFramebuffer.kext, and ATISupport.kext with load addresses of 0x5e61e000, 0x5eabd000, 0x5e570000 respectively. I'm not sure if other kexts are being loaded for the video drivers as I am new to the Hackintosh community and using a Mac in general.

I know my graphic cards are very old and outdated and I would like to get the system working as is; without purchasing any additional hardware. So here is my main question. How can I get the OS to continue to load the drivers that load during these initial phases of installation and setup?

I'm currently waiting for my parts to build a hackintosh - with my old Radeon 3870, like yours. Did you get the card working or is it not possible at the moment?

Unfortunately, no. I was never able to get the system to recognize it. I am new to the hackingtosh world and wasn't able to get any outside help to fix it.

I decided to try and see if Lion would recognize it instead of Snow Leopard and keep the settings. But that didn't work either. Ended up giving up on my 3870 and bought a 5770 that was on the CustoMac recommended builds page for cards that would work straight out of the box, and it did.

Final result for me is a working Hackintosh with Lion installed (and a Unibeast flash drive with the Lion install on it instead of the iBoot CD).

I Hope you have better luck with your 3870 than I did.