Upgrading to Mavericks on a Mac Pro 3,1

[Essence_of_War]

I'm having trouble upgrading from Mtn Lion (10.8.5) to Mavericks on an 8-core Mac Pro 3,1 w/ 8GB (4x2GB) RAM.

The installer seems to run fine, but then when it reboots, it kernel panics, and then keeps rebooting and kernel panic'ing until I boot w/ recovery, point it at the original hard drive where Mtn Lion was installed, and have it boot from that. At which point it boots into Mtn Lion as though nothing happened, and doesn't appear to have left any kernel panic logs in /Library/Logs/.

The one thing I can think of is that I'm currently using two video cards, one of which is very old (Radeon HD 2600 XT) and one of which is rather new (a non-EFI Sapphire 7950). I use the 7950 to drive all of my monitors, but I've left the 2600 in another PCI slot just because it's occasionally useful to swap to it if I need a boot screen...like to find out your OS is kernel panic'ing on boot

I think my next step is to try doing the install with only the original graphics card in the case. If that doesn't work, would a good next step be to try to do upgrade install from a bootable Mavericks Installer? Like if I burn a bootable USB? Could I also try to do an upgrade install via internet recovery?

 

[TheStu]

Definitely try removing the non-EFI GPU first, that is almost certainly the issue.

 

[Essence_of_War]

It was, predictably, the non-EFI GPU, upgrade went swimmingly with the 2600 XT.

 

[TheStu]

It was, predictably, the non-EFI GPU, upgrade went swimmingly with the 2600 XT.

Does the GPU still work post upgrade?

 

[Essence_of_War]

I'm testing that now, actually.

I haven't been able to get it to work yet, verbose boot gets to something like "AMD Tahiti Graphics Accelerator in Slot 1/4" (the 2600 XT and the 7950) then re-boots itself.

Edit: This actually surprised me. The GPU upgrade was plug-and-play in Mtn Lion.

Edit2: Some people on another forum are telling me that the problem is that I'm using an incorrect power cable. I'm using one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/PCIe-Power-Cable-nVidia-Video/dp/B0051PWFCU
and they're saying that this will not provide sufficient/correct power to the 7950...I'm a bit confused because it sounds like other people are calling this a "y-cable" but it's actually a 6pin-mini to 2x6pin regular converter/adapter.

 

[Essence_of_War]

I replaced the power cable on the 7950 with 2x mini 6pin to pci 6pin cables, one attached to each motherboard header, and have tried several attempts at booting again.

Anytime I have the 7950 in it kernel panics at boot. Anytime I have the 2600 XT in alone, it loads into Mavericks just fine, although it has the issue with stuttering HD video playback that had initially inspired me to get the new video card in the first place.

Is it possible that I damaged the card or the motherboard traces to those mini 6pin power slots by running it off of the cable I specified earlier? It seems unlikely since it was working perfectly well in Mtn Lion just last week and it only sprouted problems since I tried to do the upgrade.

 

[ViRGE]

Is it possible that I damaged the card or the motherboard traces to those mini 6pin power slots by running it off of the cable I specified earlier? It seems unlikely since it was working perfectly well in Mtn Lion just last week and it only sprouted problems since I tried to do the upgrade.

It's possible, but unlikely. The problem is almost certainly EFI/software related. You'll probably need to go the Hack route and get a driver that can handle a non-Mac video card.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Alternatively, if it's unlikely that the logic board is damaged, maybe I could just bite the bullet, sell or re-purpose this 7950, and pick up an actual EFI vid card?

Any of the Nvidia 8800 mac editions would be a step up from the 2600 XT, right?

 

[ViRGE]

Alternatively, if it's unlikely that the logic board is damaged, maybe I could just bite the bullet, sell or re-purpose this 7950, and pick up an actual EFI vid card?

Any of the Nvidia 8800 mac editions would be a step up from the 2600 XT, right?

Yes, they would be. Though the strictest replacement for your 7950 would be the Sapphire 7950 Mac Edition (and honestly, I'm surprised there's not a way to convert a 7950 to one of those).

 

[Essence_of_War]

Yeah, the original impetus behind this 7950 was because I knew os x had drivers for it, and I didn't need to pay extra for the boot screen since I was keeping the 2600 xt.

It's pretty pricey for the mac edition, but still quite a bit cheaper than a new mac pro

 

[Essence_of_War]

So I ended up selling the non-EFI 7950 and I'm looking for an EFI GPU that is compatible with FCPX (specs here)

OWC is having a pretty decent sale right now, and I was looking at:

5770 for ~$230
5870 for ~$400
7950 for ~$450

The card is going to be used mostly for ~100% FCP rendering of HD (but not 4k) video, driving two (possibly 3 displays) and ~0% for gaming. Granted the 5870 and 7950 outperform the 5770, but do they outperform the 5770 enough to justify the +$180 and +$220 respectively?

Where would the GTX 285, the GeForce 8800 GT/GS or the Quadro FX 4800 fit into this hierarchy? I've found a few trustworthy ebay folks reselling mac editions of those also.

 

[Essence_of_War]

I ended up picking up the Sapphire 7950 from OWC, but I'm still running into problems

I boot just fine with the new card, but no signal is ever sent to either of the displays (one via MDP, one via DVI). I can tell because if I leave the 2600 XT in, I'll happily get to a boot screen on the display attached to the 2600 XT, but the display attached to the 7950 will never show anything.

I've tried:
1) Checking the power cables, I get an audible click both at the logic board connector and at the GPU connector, so that should be OK.
2) I've reseated the GPU several times, and it's firmly in place.
3) I tried installing drivers before adding the new GPU but OSX told me that it already had all drivers for my device included.
4) Booting w/o the 2600 XT results in no image to either display.

I'm pretty confused

Edit:

On a lark, I tried something else and fixed it. Apparently one of the displays was having a fit about having two inputs connected to it, even though one of the inputs was not connected to any graphics card. I removed it, and suddenly both displays were totally normal. This seems doubly weird since I had tried to manually cycle the inputs before, but everything seems to be working now. Yay!