Help...so close...and yet so far! (GA-77X-UD5H and GTX 660)

[cloudcover]

[Solved] Help...so close...and yet so far! (GA-77X-UD5H and GTX 660)

Hi folks -

I'm almost there but need help with some trouble I'm having getting my monitor(s) working properly.

Some background on my components (at least the ones relevant to this problem):

• Gigabyte GA-77X-UD5H motherboard
• Intel i7 3770k processor
• MSI GTX 660 Twin Frozr video card
• OS X 10.8.3
• Two Dell U2713HM monitors (native resolution of 2560 x 1440)
• Samsung 840 SSD (as primary drive, where OS is installed), another Samsung 840 SSD (not yet formatted, to be used later for Windows), and a Seagate 3TB HDD (also not yet formatted, to be used as my media storage drive).

Here's what I've done so far:

• Installed everything in the system EXCEPT the video card
• Used an older Dell 22" monitor and connected it to the DVI output on the motherboard
• Made the changes to the BIOS suggested here
• Used Unibeast to install OS X 10.8.3 onto the SSD
• When I tried to boot into the OS to run Multibeast, I got the dreaded spinning dashed circle. I rebooted with the -x flag and that did the trick to get me to the OS. I went through the configuration process for Mountain Lion and then it rebooted.
• When I then tried to boot into the OS on my SSD, I had trouble with the screen going blank. After reading some posts on this site, I tried unplugging and re-plugging my DVI connection, and that finally solved the issue.
• SO, as of that point, I had a fairly functional install.
• Next, though, I needed to connect my two Dell 27" monitors. Using the suggestions from Mr Eddy's Photo Station, I used Multibeast to set GraphicsEnabler to No and then tried to install the NVIDIA drivers shown at his link but got a message saying something like the system already had the necessary drivers installed. (I'm guessing that maybe it's because the ones linked from his description are for 10.8.2 and I'd installed 10.8.3). Since people seemed to be having some trouble with NVIDIA's beta 10.8.3 drivers and since it seemed to be telling me that the ones for 10.8.2 were already incorporated in my system, I shut down the system, installed my MSI card, connected the older 22" monitor to a DVI output on the MSI card, restarted the system, entered the BIOS and set InitDisplay to PEG, and let it restart.
• That still booted through to the OS just fine and things looked okay.
• So, I disconnected the 22" monitor and connected one of the 27" monitors to that same DVI connection on the MSI card.
• Here's where the problem starts. I got a very noisy and static-y/flicker-y image on the 27" monitor. (I tried my other 27" monitor and a different DVI cable to make sure those weren't the problem...no luck).
• I tried restarting the system, entering the BIOS setup, changed the InitDisplay to INTGFX (or whatever), connected the older 22" monitor to the Gigabyte DVI output, and restarted. Again, worked just fine. So I tried connecting one of the new 27" monitors to the Gigabyte DVI output. The noise and static/flicker is gone and the image seems relatively clean, but the resolution is set to something like 1280 x 760 and I can't change it.

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but would really appreciate some help. Do I need to install the NVIDIA 10.8.3 drivers? And if so, are there any special modifications/changes I need to make to have them work? (Also, should I remove the graphics card from my system first before doing any of that?)

So frustrating to be so close yet so far! Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[cloudcover]

A couple more pieces of info:

1. When I boot using the BIOS set to INTGFX and my 27" monitor connected to the Gigabyte's DVI connector, under "About this Mac..." it doesn't show that it recognizes the MSI GTX 660 and it instead shows 64Mb shared memory display (with resolution 1024 x 768 that can't be changed).

2. I tried switching the BIOS to Auto and used the GraphicsEnabler=No flag again, with the monitor connected to the DVI connector on the MSI card. Got the same super-noisy image again. But, under "About this Mac..." it shows the graphics card as the MSI GTX 660 with 2048Mb memory. When I go to display preferences, if i choose "Scaled Display" then 1920 x 1080 resolution, everything looks super clean and like it should. In fact, as long as the horizontal resolution is less than 1200, it looks fine. But it's when I choose anything with a horizontal resolution of 1440 (the display's native resolution) that I get the super noisy issue.

Is there any reason this wouldn't work with DVI but would work if I bought and used a DisplayPort cable instead?

 

[didii]

Hi Cloudcover, are you using the DVI cable from the 27" dell monitor? Because AFAIK, your 27" monitor needs a dual link DVI cable (in contrast to single link DVI), which supposed to be included with your monitor. Im not very sure about this though, but maybe worth the try

Oh, and when using the MSI card, try choosing PEG in your BIOS, instead of auto.

 

[Mak1702]

Choose PEG setting in your bios and use graphicsenabler=no......
also try connecting with hdmi.

 

[cloudcover]

Hi Cloudcover, are you using the DVI cable from the 27" dell monitor? Because AFAIK, your 27" monitor needs a dual link DVI cable (in contrast to single link DVI), which supposed to be included with your monitor. Im not very sure about this though, but maybe worth the try

Thanks for the advice! Indeed, it seems like the monitor uses a DualLink DVI connector but the cable they sent me is a SingleLink DVI cable. So I'm hopeful that's the problem (and it makes sense that the higher resolution would require greater bandwidth). They're sending replacement cables, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that's the issue.

Also, I installed Windows 7 on a separate drive and even after updating to the latest Nvidia drivers, I'm having the same issue on my Windows 7 install; so that leads me to believe it's unrelated to my OS X configuration.

Thanks again...wouldn't have thought of that on my own.

 

[cloudcover]

[SOLVED] Help...so close...and yet so far! (GA-77X-UD5H and GTX 660)

Just received the cables from Dell (boy, that was fast!) and can confirm that was indeed the problem. Both monitors are now working at their native 2560x1440 resolution. Big big thanks again to didii for identifying the cause of the issue! Otherwise, after seeing that the monitors weren't working with Windows 7, I probably would have assumed the problem was with the video card or the motherboard and would then have gone down a long, fruitless, and painful road.

Am now the happy owner of a pretty well functioning dual boot build. But before installing any software on it, I'm going to duplicate the OS X and Windows 7 boot drives (using a hardware HDD duplicator) to have those clean and functional versions in case something goes awry. Never hurts to be a bit extra careful.