Take a dive into the ATI Radeon R9 270X (dual boot/black screen/ATYinjector)

[rickyreall84]

Take a dive into the ATI Radeon R9 270X Yosemite Support Needed

hello everyone. I have noticed more and more people on this site are investing in the new radeon r9 270x cards by radeon. I thought I would start a thread on how I fixed some of the bugs I have been having and how I solved them. I first off want to say I am no expert with hardware. I mostly like to do case mods and do not dive into things that are not completely vanilla with osx. But, I took a chance with this card because it was really affordable and matched my color scheme in my mod. I have the Sapphire R9 270x. I am not really sure if this guide will help anyone with the 270 without the x so i am just warning you ahead of time because the device id on the 270 is different (6811) I think. The device id with my card is 6810

Setup
1.In bios: Make sure you set Graphics to PCI-E

2.I used Graphics enabler=Yes (seems to work)

3.boot: Follow the EFI guide to boot with chimera. The reason why Chimera can not boot R9 series or seven series. The result is a boot error and a bunch of funky writing. http://www.tonymacx86.com/401-install-bootloader-extra-efi-partition.html

4.7xxx Framebuffer. Based on a lot of peoples feedback these cards should work out of box and when you first install them you see the signed (AMD Radeon HD 7xxx 2048 MB). Just to let you guys know I did not mess with any of the Frame Buffer personalities and I am getting full 3d acceleration out of this card. I will post bench marks on the bottom of this page. If you want to see more explanation check this out http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/294315-radeon-r9-270x-framebuffer-issue/

5. ATY injector: From the link above I just used his modified ATY injector kext to get the correct signature in osx. see below. I did modify his a little because his device name he used was (ATI Radeon 200X Series) which i did not like so i modified to say (Radeon R9 270X). I will make a attach a zip file for anyone who wants it. The process is easy just remove your old one in hd/system/extensions and put mine on desktop and use text beast and reboot. The device signature should work.

Behaviors/Experimenting

6. Dual booting: I have a Apple 24" cinema display as my primary display via displayport. My secondary monitor is my sony hd tv that is hooked up via dvi to hdmi.

7. I can't have my hd tv on while booting osx or my primary monitor will freeze at the grey screen. If i unplug the secondary monitor the grey screen will leave and osx will pop up.

8. I can plug in the secondary monitor when im in osx but the secondary screen will just be black which is ok (but no picture) sony tv sees resolution as 1080i weird.

9. issue Fixed: In order to get my Secondary monitor to work I can do two things. I can have both plugged in at the same time if my my sony tv is plugged in and (off) while booting osx. I then have to put my Computer to sleep. Turn on my sony tv and wake my computer and wooohooo it works. If you have had a 6xxx or 7xxx you might be aware of the sleep trick well it works with the secondary monitors as well. The second thing I can do is have my secondary unplugged and wait for my computer to boot onto the desktop and plug my secondary sony tv into the dvi slot and turn it on to a black screen and sleep and wake and it will work like that also. I am a very lazy guy at night so i just keep it plugged in and turn off the tv when im not using it.

I hope this helps
Ricky

 

[michaelcly]

forewarned... if you have a 2560x1440 display, the injector kext may not give you all of your resolution. At least it didn't for me.

I have the same identical card and without this injector I had a luxMark score of 953. I installed it, repaired permissions and it worked. I just couldn't choose the high resolution. I used the installer that came with the download rather than the kext link at the end.

Thanks for putting this info all together in one place!

 

[yonghf]

I did Step 3 but I still get the boot 0 and gibberish.

What else can I look at?

 

[michaelcly]

I did Step 3 but I still get the boot 0 and gibberish.

What else can I look at?

which OS? I could not get this GPU to work well until upgrading to 10.9.1

I struggled a little with this too. Mistakes I made first time was:
1. Make sure your SATA cable is plugged to your mother board's first position. Verify disk 0 in Disk Utility
2. I took the HD out and put it in a USB enclosure and tried to do it with another Mac. No go.
3. I used the F12 key and selected my USB install disk from the bios menu. When chameleon came up I selected the target disk and booted. From there I followed the instructions for EFI solution. Worked after that but was very slow.
4. Upgraded to Mavericks, repeated step three and voila!

Now I'm just trying to get it faster. I'm only getting a 530 GPU score with Nova Bench. It should do better. I read in the injector link from OP that it only addresses multiple monitors and not speed. Makes me wonder if it's a different problem than the GPU. I mean this card is great, but it's a heap faster in Windows 7. OP gets 1546 from LuxMark. I only get 930.

 

[yonghf]

I'm on 10.9.1, it is definitely disk0. Mine performs well - Luxmark score 15xx. Only issue is I have to boot from the UniBeast USB drive to get into Bootloader.

I followed the steps listed to copy the bootloader to EFI partition. Not sure if i made a mistake but I'm fairly competent with Terminal.

 

[michaelcly]

Sorry I can't help you more. Did you see the the evidence of the files moving from your MB disk to the EFI partition? It says something like (2 files) read, (2 files) written?

I'm envious of the speed. I'm going to check my pstates and maybe clean install. My nova Bench looks good otherwise:

8192 MB System RAM (Score: 177)
- RAM Speed: 8210 MB/s

CPU Tests (Score: 758)
- Floating Point Operations/Second: 307362048
- Integer Operations/Second: 591290112
- MD5 Hashes Calculated/Second: 1156190

Graphics Tests (Score: 454)
- 3D Frames Per Second: 2059

Hardware Tests (Score: 58)
- Primary Partition Capacity: 111 GB
- Drive Write Speed: 279 MB/s

 

[yonghf]

No worries; it's not a hassle to boot via USB since it's a desktop but quite annoyed it's not working correctly ;D

If I add another HD and install Windows on it and set it as the primary boot device; would it give me an option to boot to my Mac partition?

 

[michaelcly]

The only way I know of to boot to Mac OS is through one of the boot loaders on this site.

Did you download EFI Mounter.app? If so, you should see your Extra folder in your EFI partition. If you show hidden files you should also see your boot loader. If so, it seems what's missing is the command to boot to it first. Also, if you run MB after EFI boot fix, You have to manually move or edit or replace org.chameleon.Boot.plist on the EFI partition. FakeSMC.kext must be in your S/L/E as well.

Curious: do you normally boot into Chameleon?

One more thought: One time, my Extra folder was deleted from the EFI partition when I repaired permissions and rebuilt caches. I had to mount EFI and drag a copy of Extra onto the EFI folder. It happened when I Installed the injector (I think). The injector installation created a new SMBios.plist in a new Extra folder on my HD. I had to move that to the EFI partition as well.

I tried the injector again and now getting 1596 in LuxMark, 2430 in Nova Bench. Problem is I still can't get 2560x1440 on my display...only 1920x1200. Wish I knew which kext to edit.


EDIT: I used the installer from this link rickyreall84 provided on top
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/top...ebuffer-issue/

I used these choices from the installer but not the ATY Injector Kext. It installed edited kexts


OSX 10.9
ACPI SMC Platform Plugin
SMBios
MacPro 3,1

It installed edited kexts for AMDRadeonX4000.kext, AMD7000Controller.kext, IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext, and a SMBios.plist. Got all the speed and full resolution. 1596 Luxmark v2

 

[rickyreall84]

forewarned... if you have a 2560x1440 display, the injector kext may not give you all of your resolution. At least it didn't for me.

I have the same identical card and without this injector I had a luxMark score of 953. I installed it, repaired permissions and it worked. I just couldn't choose the high resolution. I used the installer that came with the download rather than the kext link at the end.

Thanks for putting this info all together in one place!

Thanks Michael for your input on this tread. Do you have to use the sleep trick to get the secondary monitor working. One more thing it would be awesome if you could post a step by step guide on how you got you card working to help others who check this thread? I didn't use his other Kext because I was getting random freezes and my card not recognized at all.

 

[rickyreall84]

For anyone who is having a hard time with installing Chimera on the EFI partition you should post on the thread above. You will get your questions answered a lot quicker. If you follow the guide 100% it should work. Make sure you follow every step because if you miss one step it will mess everything up.

Thanks
Ricky