mac v pc okay so pc video cards cost about $20. and the equivalent one for the mac costs about $2k. seems like it'd be worthwhile to figure out how to use a pc video card in a mac. the issue is the rom. macs use efi. pcs don't. i have an original mac pro 1,1. i boot win7/64 via boot camp. i have a spare ati 5770 for pc. and a spare pair of 8800 gt's also for the pc. my 8800 gt for mac died. the 7300 for mac is dying. i want to find a new video card option before the 7300 keels over. i have three monitors. my first plan would be to use the 5770 to drive them all. might have to buy a widget to convert the mini display port to dvi. i can live with that. my second plan would be to put in both of the 8800's and connect them with a sli cable. yeah i know apple doesn't support that. but it might work on the pc. so what the heck. anywho. the basic idea is to flash the roms on the pc cards so they work in the mac. sounds simple. hardly. here are the tricks. first, format an internal drive for fat32. put it in your mac. download nvflash and atiflash from the internet. you will also need to find the mac equivalent rom image for the pc video card you want to use in your mac. i'm not sure about the legality of downloading them from the internet. you are on your own. you have been warned. put all the files on the fat32 drive. step two, boot dos on your mac. download an iso from the internet. i used ultimate boot cd. burn the iso to a brand new dvd. i used the standard win7 burner. discs burned with other burners failed to boot due to a checksum error. also, make sure your nvflash isn't a self extracting archive. if so either figure out how to extract it. or download one that isn't. reboot. hold down the option key. c might work too. boot the dos dvd labeled "windows". heh. that just makes me snigger. anywho, get to a dos prompt. i chose the option that said something about freedos. cd c:. cd to your exes and rom images. run the flash tool. save the current rom image. make sure you save the correct adapter if you have more than one card installed. flash your rom. atiflash was obvious. the nvflash command is nvflash -4 -5 -6 --index=1 newbits.rom. the -4 -5 -6 options mean ignore any incompatibilities. like type, sub-type, board id, etc. you know what you're doing. you made a backup of the original rom, right? reboot into windows to make sure everything is still working there. it did. i have three monitors for gaming again. yay! reboot into osx to make sure everything is now working there. and voila! you're done. except i wasn't. i think the problem is it's an original mac pro with pci 1. and the pc cards are pci 2. pci 2 cards are supposed to degrade themselves to pci 1 automatically. but that seems to fail in os x on the original mac pro. sigh.  ¶ 8:00 AM