6850 Triple Monitor DisplayPort Monitor works badly on boot

[lorewap3]

I finally got a DVI to DP active link adapter in the mail so am able to use all 3 of my monitors.

Problem is on boot the monitor plugged into the DisplayPort looks horrendous. It's like one of those old color test patterns they used to air but with the background in it. You can make your way around it barely but just enough to log in, nothing else productive.

It does work, however, if I unplug and plug it back in after boot. But if there's a solution other than pulling the video out and putting it back in every time I boot I'd much rather that.

Any thoughts? Specs are:

Gigabyte 6850 Video
i5-2500 CPU
16g ram
Seagate 1TB Barracuda
GA-H67MA-UD2H-B3 Motherboard


Thanks Gurus!

 

[thomasames]

Could you make the DP monitor not your center monitor? That way you could still login clearly

 

[rhalls]

I have a powercolor ati 6850 silent card which works... well... mostly with three monitors (2 x DVI, 1 x active DisplayPort->AIT Adapter, all 1600x1200 pixels). Mostly because it is not always reliable. What exact configuration do you have?
i have:
- PowerColor ATI 6850 silent 1 GB Card
- Gigabyte GA-Z68P-DS3 Mainboard, 16 GB
- OSX 10.7.2 Lion
- Chimera 1.54 bootloader, MultiBeast 4.03 Installation, DSDT F4 from DSDT Database
- GraphicsEnabler=No Flag in org.chameleon.Boot.plist
- AppleRTC.kext patch via cmops reset fix (sudo perl...)
- Lnx2Mac Network Driver 0.90

This results in
- Working three monitors. If sometimes one of those three (normally the one connected to the upper DVI Port) if kind of "fraggled", sometimes only two monitors are detected. i can send the machine to sleep and wake up and then it works. But sleep is another issue with my install at the moment... I notice that, when i first boot in one of my test-10.7.2 installations and then reboot to my normal installation, it works without "frazzles" of missing screens.
- Qe/Qi not enabled (don't know how to fix that....)
- DVD Player crashes
- Cinebench Score 52.52 (good)
- Geekbech works, 64 Bit 12470 without overclocking

What I want to achieve is:
- DVD Player Working
- Qe/Ci Working Works, I just had to set "System Preferences -> Mission Control -> Show dashboard as space inactive. It worked before but i thought it does not because the ripple effect in dashboard was missing...
- Stable boot and stable sleep

 

[lorewap3]

Thanks for your input guys, I haven't been able to get back to it until now.

More details on my setup:
- Gigabyte 1gz 6850 Video Card
- i5-2500 Intel Sandy Bridge CPU
- 16g ram 1333mhz
- Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200mhz
- CCC'd 1TB Seagate
- 500 gb Seagate with Windows 7 on it
- All are bootable which makes switching between them take a long time sometimes...and after using the Mac OS X and switching back to Windows 7 the clock in Windows is always off by 6-7 hours. Not sure about that one.
- Gigabyte GA-H67MA-UD2H-B3 Motherboard
- OSX 10.7 Lion (have not upgraded to 10.7.2 last time I did sound and other options didn't work)
- Chimera 1.54 bootloader, MultiBeast 4.03 Installation, DSDT F6 from DSDT Database
- GraphicsEnabler=No Flag in org.chameleon.Boot.plist

The DP port is the left monitor so it's not the center. This is my layout:
Left - DP Port
Center - Top DVI port
Right - HDMI port

On boot it always shows the startup on both left and right screens but not center. I also get frequent resets whenever I switch from Windows to my Mac. It's never more than one, but when I reset from Windows, the BIOS will load, and then the computer will reset again before F12 even works to choose what to boot from. (No I don't use Chimera to load into Windows, making that to work right makes Windows 7 unable to boot on its own if I were to take out all the Mac drives. I don't know why, but it just does. This is after trying to make 4 hard drives bootable at the same time. 2 identical Mac and 2 identical Windows for the redundancy. I am a programmer and am trying for the ultimate uptime machine

I have NOT done this I don't think please elaborate. I read mostly that 6850 was natively supported with Multibeast, etc so if this is something extra I might try.
- AppleRTC.kext patch via cmops reset fix (sudo perl...)

 

[M0KUJINKEN]

how did you get hdmi port to worked?
i just gets a black screen after the apple logo finish loading.
even with a clean install i still gets no picture.

at the moment i use dvi to hdmi

this card [newegg]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125353[/newegg]

 

[moarfish]

It seems that HD 6850 got better Triple Monitor support than HD 5770?
HD 5770 require using old Kext file from Snow Leopard but your HD 6850 is working OOB.

I don't mind to unplug and replug the display port as I rarely turn my computer off.
It would be nice if it got triple monitor support with full QE/CI OOB without modification of kext files.

Benchmark of 6850 also much higher than 5770 as I've read from other sites.

Should I go for 6850 instead of 5770 if I plan on building triple monitor?

 

[lorewap3]

HDMI port worked OOB. The trick to triple monitoring is you HAVE to use the displayport. You can't use Dvi/Dvi/HDMI. You have to use Dvi/Dvi/DP or Dvi/HDMI/DP. If you don't the monitor won't get a signal on the 3rd port. Not sure if it favors HDMI/Dvi over Dvi/Dvi or not. (Don't know which port would not be given signal)


So it seems like I'm having ALOT of BSODs from this card in Windows and a few kernel panics on my Mac 10.7 . I've read almost nothing but great reviews on this card, so does anyone agree that I should exchange it?

I might expect the drivers to cause a BSOD, but I'm updated to the latest (I re-installed windows, started over and made sure of that) and I still get it. And I don't hear of anyone else having this 3rd monitor unplug/plug issue or the kernel panics so I'm about to try to exchange it and break out my 6950 and just use windows until it returns. The BSOD is ALWAYS atimag.sys (something like that) and even the address seems familiar it's happened so much.

Anyone with this card I plea for you to chime in and just give me your experiences with it so I can have a point of comparison. I'm using the Gigabyte one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004F6GJAU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=tonymacx86com-20

 

[cpukid]

I'm currently using the Gigabyte 6850 with dual displays, one DP and one DVI. If I remember correctly, I couldn't get my HDMI to work by itself, but I know for a fact that I couldn't get it working while using the DP or the DVI. How did you get HDMI to work for this card?

 

[lorewap3]

Funny enough it just worked OOB. The two dependable monitors were a DVI and an HDMI, both when plugged in worked great.

Once I plugged in the 3rd into the DP port the DVI monitor wouldn't come on until after the OS loaded (so essentially I was using the HDMI to do BIOS edits)

I just now purchased a MSI 6870 Twin Frozr II. We'll see how that one goes compared to the Gigabyte one I got. Both are 1g, but the Gigabyte did advertise as being OC. Frankly I'm not concerned with OC, I just want stability. A stable OS X and a stable Windows 7 is all I'm asking for, with enough graphic power to do some graphics work when the job calls for it. *crosses fingers*

 

[lorewap3]

Has anyone since my original post encountered this problem?

My specs are listed above, nothing has changed. I haven't upgrade to 1.7.2 because that cause booting issues so that might be the problem but I'm curious what you guys have to say first.

Still, when I boot the monitor in the DP is 'fraggled' and unreadable. It's not my login screen so it's not a big deal. Unplugging and plugging it back in remedies the problem


However, doing so ALWAYS results in one of two scenarios:
1) All wallpapers are reverted back to the default galaxy (All wallpapers CAN be changed)
2) the DP and HDMI wallpapers are correct but the middle monitor (DVI) is grey and CANNOT be changed.

Thanks for any input.