Cinema Display and Gigabyte Z68 UEFI Bios

[mgoh99]

Hey guys - just wanted post a heads up

after flashing my z68ma-d2h-b3 with the Gigabyte UEFI bios, my Cinema display no longer works (connect through a Gigabyte) 6870. I got a solid blue scree after the successful flash and needed to hook it up to another monitor to configure the bios settings.
Now when I boot, I don't see a post screen on the cinema display (appears on other monitor). The screen first activates just before I reach the Chimera boot. After that, I have no problem using OSX 10.8. I have also an issue getting any keyboard to respond until I'm at the OSX login screen (no response in Chimera) unless I'm hooked up to a different monitor

I've tried this with two motherboards now and can reproduce the effects. I wanted to let people know and also wanted to see if anyone else had similar issues

Thanks

 

[jmpa]

Same here! I flashed my z68ma (hd6870/cinema display/i3 2105) with uefi bios and it was successful. But when I boot appear a blue screen and i can't do nothing. I tried a lot of things with no sucess. I thought I damaged my motherboard, I am happy it is just a problem with the display. What can I do? I don't have another display and I like apple display so I don't want buy a new one.

 

[alans17]

Perhaps the new BIOS has different default settings in terms of video output. It's just a hunch, but try looking through the BIOS to find out where it's attempting to output the video. For instance, maybe it's trying to pump video to the iGPU by default and you need to manually specify your discrete video. Again, this is just a hunch since I'm not there to check it out.

Regardless... You're going to have better luck answering this question if you move it to the proper forum.

 

[mgoh99]

I've tried changing the primary VGA settings to no avail. Also, I can hook up another monitor via display port on the 6780 and its fine so i've pretty much isolated the cinema display.

 

[DrAndre]

I have the XFX 6870 2GB version. My display is an Apple Cinema Display 27' connected directly through the minidisplay port. After a cold boot, the image takes a long time to show up. Sometimes a minute or two. I can even hear the sound coming out of the display speakers.
Strange that, after reboot (not a cold boot) I am able to see Bios startup screen and post messages.
I think this has begun happening at the time I moved to UEFI (my board is a Z68X-UD3H-B3 rev. 1.3). But I'm not sure.
I even sent this monitor to Apple repair. They replaced the logic board. The monitor is now back and the problem persists.
I was suspicious about UEFI and decided to go back to the F12 regular bios. No luck... Played with frame buffers and no luck. Installed Lion ATI kexts on 10.8.1 and nothing.
I think that maybe I should flash my 6870 with an EFI rom, as Mac Pro owners do...

Any ideas?

PS: Other monitors work fine through minidisplay port and (upper) DVI.

 

[alans17]

Maybe it's some sort of resolution issue if it's working with another DP monitor. I wouldn't know how to go about diagnosing or testing that theory, though.

 

[todesto]

Thank you mgoh99!
I had Z77-DS3H (UEFI bios) and had trouble my Apple Cinema Display 24" with mDP displaying blue screen only.
So I bought another board Z68AP-D3 and got into bios screen.

I was just about to flash to UEFI but thank god, I found this post.

I am sticking to FD for now.

 

[mgoh99]

So I ended up hooking it up the 6870 to another monitor and completing the bios setup with that monitor. I verified i was able to boot into OSX. I turned off the computer, plugged in the cinema display and I can boot into OSX. But I don't see any of the BIOS or post, just a flashing line. It's a bit of a pain but i can live with it for now. thinking of switching to an ASUS board.

 

[djdrah]

Hey guys - just wanted post a heads up

after flashing my z68ma-d2h-b3 with the Gigabyte UEFI bios, my Cinema display no longer works (connect through a Gigabyte) 6870. I got a solid blue scree after the successful flash and needed to hook it up to another monitor to configure the bios settings.
Now when I boot, I don't see a post screen on the cinema display (appears on other monitor). The screen first activates just before I reach the Chimera boot. After that, I have no problem using OSX 10.8. I have also an issue getting any keyboard to respond until I'm at the OSX login screen (no response in Chimera) unless I'm hooked up to a different monitor

I've tried this with two motherboards now and can reproduce the effects. I wanted to let people know and also wanted to see if anyone else had similar issues

Thanks

Sorry about this being an old post, hopefully you guys figured out what happened; but for anyone else finding this and having the blue screen at boot issue, this is what happened to me:

I had this same issue, and thought I bricked my MB after doing UEFI bios (beta) update. So I ordered a replacement board while my main one would be out for repair. Turns out the new UEFI bios had issues handshaking with my Cinema display being on the secondary port and a viewsonic monitor on the primary port. The thing I discovered about this setup was my Viewsonic display was also serving double duty with a security system utilizing the HDMI port. This viewsonic display was always defaulting to HDMI and providing no handshake on the primary DVI port, so the motherboard defaulted to HDMI (which nothing was connected to). As soon as I discovered my "new" replacement board did the same damn thing, I tried the HDMI port temporarily and boom, it worked. That means there is probably nothing wrong with my original Z68 board! Great, now I get to re do the cooler/thermal paste again to test... Guess what? It was totally fine, no issue. Turns out the PEG (PCI Express) graphics card was looking first at HDMI, then going to DVI, finding nothing to handshake with and reverting back to HDMI and giving me a solid blue screen on both my DVI screens once that process finished. So I connected my cinema (23") to primary port, and viewsonic to secondary port, and voila, no more blue screen at boot. My bios was defaulting to setup screen at boot, and not able to go past since it was a fresh flash to UEFI. It was awaiting it's initial settings, and was simply waiting for them to be saved and continue on to booting the OS.

Another option for those with screens capable, is to set the display to not auto switch inputs. Keeping it dedicated to a single port until you choose otherwise...

Lessons learned.