The price for Windows 4870 cards is substantially lower than Apple’s.
The Canada Apple Store currently
lists one for $420,
whereas
Canada Computers has one for $210.
In
this MacRumors forum thread
people are discussing how to do this and what the pitfalls are.
RapidShare.
One person said:
I should note that doing this seems to make the analog output (SVGA) not work. DVI is fine, though one person reported the “top” port as only going up to 1024×768. Be careful out there. Read the thread for info on which cards work, and what possible side effects there are. YMMV. ReidI just tried it on my Sapphire HD4870 (the 1st gen one, based on
I flashed using freedos and the following command line:
ATI’s ref design).
atiflash.exe -p -fs -fp 0 4870.rom
note: -fs and -fp are used to ignore SSID and P/N mismatches And it works! EFI driver is initialized correctly, (I don’t have the leaked MacOSX
drivers for this card, so I can’t tell if this one works too), and
bootcamp stil works (currently writing from GNU/Linux on my 2006 Mac
Pro). Only problem is : only one output is active, no dual-head, it seems
(at least using ATI’s linux driver)