Administrators Hervé Posted December 27, 2013 Administrators Share Posted December 27, 2013 nVidia GeForce 8400GS should be natively supported by the vanilla kexts, so you have nothing to do at all, just boot with GE set to Yes. That card uses the same GPU family (G86) as that used in Quadro NVS 135M/140M or FX 360M (G86M chip - mobile version of G86) found in Latitude D630/D830 or Precision M2300/M4300 laptops to name a few and these enjoy full native graphics support from SL to Mav. nVidia even lists drivers for that card up to 10.8.5... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan_Marshall Posted December 28, 2013 Share Posted December 28, 2013 Hi Justin / Hervé, As Hervé said - the graphics card worked out the box for me (did not even have to set Graphics Enabler to yes as in my Chameleon boot plist file). As with Mavericks - On my machine it was not working properly with the 'Plex' (media server) software, so I had to rivert back to ML 10.8.5. In the Plex forums, Mavericks is not playing too well with the Plex Media Server on some systems (real macs and hackintoshes) and since the Dell 745 is 95% used for this I decided to go back till these are ironed out. The Plex devs are constantly releasing updates so I don't think these bugs will be around for long. For the little time I tried Mavericks on this machine it was running very smooth, 'snappier' even. I'm really looking forward to the full migration over to 10.9 as this gives this 'old' bit of kit another lease of life. Hope this helps, Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tubes_rock Posted December 30, 2013 Share Posted December 30, 2013 Interesting. I have a D630 running 10.8 without any really spacial kexts installed, but to get my Opti 745 running 10.8 I needed to fix the NVDANV50HAL kext to have my device ID, then it worked reasonably well in safe mode, but not any other way. Loading 10.9 using the Extra folder that Dan provided, I could see that NVDANV50HAL loaded and regiusterd my 8400GS, which pleased me. However, as soon as it did that, the screen went black and into standby. It sounded like the machine was still running since I could hear it accessing the hard drive. Any ideas on what's causing that? I'm certainly no noob when it comes to OSX86, having been doing it since the Tiger era with many different methods. I'm a unix programmer by trade, and comfortable at the command line, so if there's any info I can get you, please let me know. I've just never run across a graphics driver that fails so silently and completely. It doesn't give me a hook into seeing what it's doing, so if this is something anyone else has run across, I'm open to suggestions. Thanks! --Justin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted December 30, 2013 Administrators Share Posted December 30, 2013 You probably need a DSDT patch so that the card is recognised properly and with all its characteristics. I would suggest you use IORegistryExplorer to find out the various details for the card (PCI location, nVidia characteristics, etc.) then extract a clean DSDT table so that we try and patch it. If you manage to boot without any DSDT table, you can use Chameleon Wizard or DSDTEditor to extract it and then decompile it to obtain the dsl source code. Don't hesitate to save your IORegistryExplorer output to file and upload it here together with your DSDT table. I would also recommend that you check your default PCI root level using command ioreg -l | grep -15 "AppleACPIPCI\" | grep UID from a Terminal window. Add your lspci -nn output too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tubes_rock Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 Its tough for me to get you the output of commands when I can't get any kind of graphics up. The card does indeed work with Linux, so I know the card itself is okay. I did have some luck using npci=0x3000, but that only worked for one boot-up and then never worked again. I can't for the life of me figure out why that would be so. That stroke of luck was using the -x flag, which is the only way I've had any kind of success with Mavericks or Mountain Lion in this hardware configuration. Like I said, it only worked in Mavericks that once. My 8400GS is a PCI card, not PCIe. I did discover that my PciRoot is indeed 0, so that takes that out of the puzzle. Could my card being standard PCI be the source of my problems? --Justin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tubes_rock Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 Oh, one more bit of info, in the verbose output, I can see these tags: NVDAStartup: Official NVDANV50HAL: Loaded and Registered So, my device/product keys are indeed being recognized, and I can see that the temperature sensor in the 8400GS identifies itself farther up in the verbose output, so it sure looks like the card is talking to the OS, but as soon as it tries to go to graphics mode, the display goes black and into standby. --Justin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted January 6, 2014 Administrators Share Posted January 6, 2014 Not PCIe? Wow, that must be a rare model, I only knew of PCIe x1 version outside of the usual PCIe x16, but it seems there were PCI versions too! So, it's one like this? May be that's not well supported by OS X... Try with the NVEnabler kext in/E/E (followed by myFix (quick) or course) though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tubes_rock Posted January 7, 2014 Share Posted January 7, 2014 Not PCIe? Wow, that must be a rare model, I only knew of PCIe x1 version outside of the usual PCIe x16, but it seems there were PCI versions too! So, it's one like this? GeForce-8400gs_PCI.jpg May be that's not well supported by OS X... Try with the NVEnabler kext in/E/E (followed by myFix (quick) or course) though. Yes, it's exactly like the one pictured. (But a PNY, not a EVGA!) I had it in a box of random computer parts, but I'll try the enabler and see what happens. If I can't get this working, I'll probably just blow $40 and get the PCIe version and be done with it. The problem is that the Dell 745 that I have is a small form factor, so I have to use a half-height card, which I've seen few of in the PCIe variety. I'll just have to look harder. Thanks for the advice! --Justin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tubes_rock Posted January 7, 2014 Share Posted January 7, 2014 The enablers were a bust. I tried NVEnabler64 as well as the 32-bit version, booting the system in i386 mode. None of it worked. (especially booting Mavericks in 32-bit mode. Duh, of course that wasn't going to work!) I'm certain Apple never thought that a PCI card would be used for graphics, so I'm sure there's some problems there. Not to worry a new 8400GS is on its way. Found a PCIe X16 low-profile version for $27 on eBay, shipping included, so I should be good to go. I'll post how it goes from there. --Justin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted January 7, 2014 Administrators Share Posted January 7, 2014 Are you running a myHack installation at all? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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