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Frustrated.. 3 Different video cards and Mavericks...

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Jan 30, 2013
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Motherboard
Gigabyte Z390 Designare (F9H BIOS)
CPU
i7-9700k
Graphics
RX 5700
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Classic Mac
  1. iMac
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
(This is long... And I'm not a noob)

I know, the title is a little confusing, but here's my problem; I have a rock solid system based off Snow Leopard that I built in 2010 or so. I upgraded to Mavs shortly after it came out, and had zero problems. Fast forward to earlier this year, 2015: I did a major overhaul to my system, which included all new hardware (i7-4790K, 24 gigs RAM, Asus Z97-A mobo w/ThunderboltEX 2 card for use with my Apollo 16 MK2 interface, an nVidia 740 GPU, 240 gig SSD for storage along side two 1TB HDD's, CoolerMaster water cooling and HAF-XB-EVO case)... The whole works, right?

The HDD's are setup as a dual boot system, with one holding Mavs (music production/media) and the other Win10 (gaming). The SSD is purely for audio project storage (I'm a songwriter/musician). I use PT10 HD and upgrading to Yosemite is just out of the question for now. For a while things were great. I could boot, hit F8, choose whatever HDD I wanted, and I was off. Then my gamer side started to itch; "Boy, I'd really like a new video card, and they're on sale at Micro Center during the holiday season". And that's where my stupidity stepped in.

Before even getting into my vehicle to make the 45 minute trek to my nearest MC, I failed to do my normal research on compatible next-gen hardware/cards for Mavs. I ended up getting an EVGA nVidia GTX 970. There-in lies the problem. We've all heard the horror stories by now. It isn't compatible with Mavs and I frown upon the fact that a driver hasn't been made for it, but I understand why. (It blows shiz out of the water in Win10 though... DANG). Upon my haste to turn the machine on after assembling everything, I found it wouldn't boot into Mavs. And so my long road of researching began.

Forum after forum I searched for solutions, whether they be alternatives or not, but no luck. (This is where the "3" video cards comes into play). The only solution I found was to do a little tweaking within the "Extra" files (things like GE=No, IGP and such), apply nv_disable=1 at each boot, and enable my integrated graphics controller (HD4600) for use in Mavs, which honestly sucks, no matter how much I try to optimize it. Things crash and get screwy at times, and PT10 has become very unstable due to it, where I had zero issues before just using my 740.

The only issue with that is that now I have to go into BIOS at each boot depending on which OS I want to use, and select whether I want CPU Graphics or PCI, then continue on with 'nv_dis' at boot... Pain in the a$$. So, after all of this, I have a question... Is it possible, at all, to plug my 740 into the second PCI Graphics slot, and set that particular one as default in OS X, while still leaving the 970 in the main slot, disabled in OS X to only to be used in Win10..? If not, I guess I could always just leave the 970 unscrewed and swap out my GPU's for w/e system I wanna use (the case has extreme ease of access from the top). I just can't settle on using the Intel graphics. Or, would an external video card work? Thanks for your patience, and your help, brethren.
 
You could always boot up with nv_disable=1 (this can be added to your boot.plist), but this will also disable your GT 740 card, so you'll be stuck with your HD 4600 graphics (which usually shouldn't be bad for simple office usage... ).

Maybe it would ne possible to disable your GTX 970 trough a DSDT or something like that, but I don't know how.

Personally I'd either return the GTX 970 and get a supported card (Nvidia Kepler or AMD GCN 1.0 cards are maximum for Mavericks) or upgrade the system to at least Yosemite.
 
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