brykin

Hey Guys, been reading up here after one of your members posted at MR.

There are a couple of steps in this guide which could be made MUCH SIMPLER and I thought I would lend a hand.

First and foremost, a little understood thing is that the Nvidia Web Drivers are only needed if your card is newer than the Apple OS X drivers support.

Right now that means Maxwell cards in shipping Yosemite. May also mean 780Ti and Titan Black.

But for cards like GTX780 and regular Titan, you don't absolutely have to have them. And if you aren't using anything that requires CUDA, it does you no good to have them.

Now, for the FUN secret, the Nvidia Web Drivers are actually designed for....Hackintoshes !!! So, the System Check for Mac Pro 3,1 and 4,1 and 5,1 is really only there to weed out other Macs with built in Nvidia cards.

In fact, if you dig down in the code, it does a check for EFI. If EFI ISN'T present, it skips the system check.

By definition, any card in a TB enclosure doesn't have EFI. Why is this handy? Well, if you put some small older Nvidia card in your enclosure BEFORE the GTX980 you're shooting for you can use the stock OS X drivers.

This is where it gets fun, while your 9500GT or GT120 or 8800GT is in the enclosure, try running the driver installer...and BINGO it will fire right up, no package flattening, fiddle faddling needed. So install the drivers, then re-mod the NVSTartup file and overwrite the one just installed by new drivers, run a "repair permissions" and allow installer to run a reboot.

BTW, has anyone ever seen a boot screen from a TB card?

That's great info -- thanks MVC! So for a Kepler card (for example), it's just surgery as usual on the standard-issue OS X .kexts? Have you seen stability improve using Apple drivers?

BK

Hi all, can I ask for help troubleshooting KP's for an eGPU install?

After a month or so of reading, I brought together an eGPU for my Macbook Pro 8,2 (Early 2011, 15"), running 10.10. The eGPU was recognized, but there are some kernel panics.

-- I used an Akitio Thunder2 and ASUS GeForce GT 630 v2 1GB DDR3 (Kepler).

-- The GT 630 to meet the Thunder2 25W slot limit, since max draw is spec'd at 25W and I didn't want to hack a PSU.

-- Driving twin Dell U2412M from the HDMI and DVI ports, respectively.

-- Installed NVIDIA Web Drivers are 343.01.01f01 -- current, not beta.

-- Kexts are updated kexts per current instructions.

-- Current boot-args are set to: "kext-dev-mode=1 nvda_drv=1"

-- Automatic Graphics Switching is enabled.

Kernel panics occur:

-- reliably during sleep, or wake-from-sleep

-- infrequently, but appear closely related to heavy Quartz rendering

-- KP's noted in iPhoto use (e.g. quick scrolling)

Other errors noted:

-- Flash plugins usually crash prior to rendering

-- Safari shows rendering errors; images show tearing/offsets.

-- No such issues in Chrome, Firefox

After reading the forum, these are my questions:

-- Does anyone have insight into KPs following wake/sleep, at least?

-- Has anyone had a similar GT 630 experience?

-- Any suggestions for reducing KP frequency?

Thanks!