Can I mine with Apple 5870 on Windows PC?

[dunksandblazers]

I have someone offering me an Apple 5870 for Mac for $200.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC743ZM/A?mco=MTg3MjE1MTM

Apparently it works with PC as well (please confirm)

I want to know if I can use this to mine on a PC with Windows (can I expect ~390 MHs)
The motherboard I am using is a MSI P67A-G43 and I plan on connecting the card to my board using an x1 extender.

[kr105]

Bump, same question here.

[FreeJAC]

Sounds like you might have to flash it according to this.

http://store.apple.com/us/question/answers/product/MC743ZM/A?mco=MTQzMzEwODU&pqid=QUCC4CA9CXUKYX2JTT2XYP2UD97J2K9YC

[ihokamik]

I have a first gen Mac Pro (1,1) and I bought this card before I even heard of Bitcoin.  I have been using it for a while now in both OSX and Windows with no flashing required.   I even overclocked the core, downclocked the mem and reduced the voltage a little using MSI afterburner.

As a mac guy I am not happy saying that but the card even works better in Windows for several reasons.   The apple OpenCL is super slow, it's almost twice as fast in Windows or Linux.   It's supposed to be better in Lion but I haven't tested it.  Also, AFAIK, there is no way to monitor the GPU temp in OSX or to control the fan speed.    This makes mining risky and the card will most likely run way too hot.  In Windows, If I don't apply custom fan speeds the card gets close to 100C and that's no good at all obviously.   I have no way of monitoring the card in OSX but I bet it runs almost as hot even with the poor OpenCL.

As an experiment, I added a unflashed PC 5830 to my Mac.   I don't think those cards even have mac roms available anway.    The PC Sapphire 5830 works well side by side with the Apple 5870 and I got no problem so far.   

For the record, I OCed the 5870 to: 1150 mV, 900 MHz Core, 325 MHz memory.  The 5830 runs at 966 core, 325 memory.    The system is super stable and stays decently cool for mining with these settings but I need to up the 5070 voltage and memory to the default settings for gaming or else the card will crash.

I get about 400 MH/s on the 5870 and 300 MH/s on the 5830.  While gaming, i use -f 240 with my 5870 miner and the card still gives me about 300 MH/s with no significant FPS loss which is not too shabby. 

[drawoc]

Sounds like you might have to flash it according to this.

http://store.apple.com/us/question/answers/product/MC743ZM/A?mco=MTQzMzEwODU&pqid=QUCC4CA9CXUKYX2JTT2XYP2UD97J2K9YC

According to that link, you'd have to flash a windows-only card with a special mac firmware to get it to work in a mac, but you don't have to flash a mac card to get it to work in windows (The mac card has support for EFI and BIOS). So that seems to suggest that, yes it will work, without flashing your card.

[Xenomorph]

Well, I would say it requires a BIOS-supporting flash. I've flashed a lot of Mac/EFI firmwares onto older cards (Radeon 9700 Pro, GeForce 6, etc).

But what someone mentioned in another link about newer Mac hardware also supporting BIOS due to Boot Camp compatibility is interesting. Obviously it supports something BIOS-related as Windows boots up just fine on Macs, but it still may be a special, proprietary BIOS-ROM that doesn't work on "real" PC/BIOS systems.

Then again, through the magic of Hackintosh, x86 Mac OS X can obviously boot and run on a BIOS-only video card.

[italeffect]

I use an Apple 5870 in windows 7 64bit in a MacPro (4,1).

O/C'd via MSI Afterburner to 1010/350 at stock voltage. Runs 58C with fans at 40%

458m/h using GUIMiner and phoenix/phatk kernal (with recent improvements)

Been running 24/7 for about a month now. Great cards.

I just plugged it into my windows box and it works there with no flashing too - got 457m/h.