SOLVED — ASRock Radeon 5700XT booting to black screen in Catalina

[Coaster]

I am creating this thread to share the solution to the issue I had with my new Radeon 5700XT booting to a black screen after hardware upgrade. None of the common solutions to this issue worked for me.

My machine is an Aorus Master X570 w/ a Ryzen 3700X running Catalina. This machine was originally configured in 2020 and had a Gigabyte X570 for GPU. Everything has worked well for years. I wanted to upgrade the video card for better gaming performance, so I selected an ASRock 5700XT given the listed support for Catalina in the Dortania guide. I expected a drop-in upgrade; that did not happen. Apparently, this is a fairly common problem with this model of GPU.

With the 5700XT installed and connected to the display, OpenCore boot would get past Filevault, verbose boot worked fine up until the point where it hands off to the GUI for the final stages of the boot to the Finder, then the screen would go black (no signal). Again, this has been a perfectly functional system for years and this was just a GPU swap in the same slot on the motherboard. Swapping the X570 card back in restored the system to normal/complete functionality.

Other solutions posted elsewhere that did not work:

• Upgrading OC from 0.6.x => 0.8.8 => 0.9.9
• Upgrading WhateverGreen, Lilu, etc, to the latest versions as of April 2024
• Changing SMBIOS from iMacPro 1,1 to MacPro 7,1
• Trying agdpmod=pikera, agdpmod=ignore, etc
• Waiting hours to see if the display would respond to input / unplugging & reattaching video cables
• Trying the HDMI port rather than DP
• Resetting NVRAM
• "Disabling the serial port in BIOS" — there is no "serial port" in this motherboard's BIOS to disable
• Upgrading the motherboard firmware to F38 (latest)

tl;dr: Machine had to boot once with the 5700XT installed in slot 1 and the old card moved to slot 2 (ie. both cards installed). After that, I removed the old card and everything continued to work with the 5700XT installed alone. EDIT: ASRock GPUs don't seem to be reliable; see later post.

 

[Edhawk]

Well that is messed up! But at least you found a way to fix the issue.

I have an Asus TUF Gaming B550M Plus/Ryzen 7 5700G/RX 5700 XT system running Ventura and Sonoma, and all I needed to do when upgrading the system from an RX 580 to a PowerColor RX 5700 XT was add the agdpmod=pikera boot argument and it worked without any issues.

 

[Coaster]

Right. If memory serves, that agdpmod=pikera option was the first thing I tried. It's currently set (and may be necessary from what I have read), but it did not fix the issue. FWIW, the Radeon X570 worked fine with that boot argument too even though it did not need it.

This has been very frustrating — after spending a day or two fighting with this in Feb 2023, I shelved the 5700XT and only bothered trying again this past weekend. Back then I even started dabbling with separate Big Sur/Monterey boot disks to see if that would allow it to work, but no.

 

[Coaster]

I recommend against ASRock GPUs.

The aforementioned ASRock 5700 XT was never reliably able to boot on Catalina. It basically required me to keep the Gigabyte Radeon X570 in an adjacent PCIe port to ensure the machine would reliably boot to something other than a black screen at login. When the ASRock 5700XT was installed by itself and did boot to a visible desktop (around 15-20% of the time) it was apparently stable, as in the machine didn't lose video, crash, KP, etc... but it required multiple power cycles/boots for the luck of the draw to work. However, the machine would boot to a visible desktop 100% of the time if the Gigabyte card were in the adjacent PCIe port, even with all displays connected to the ASRock card and nothing connected to the Gigabyte card.

I thought perhaps the ASRock card was bad or had a firmware bug. I found a good deal on an ASRock RX 6900 XT and it exhibited the exact same issue on a clean install of Sonoma 14.6.1; I am returning it. FWIW, I swapped in the ASRock 5700 XT on the clean Sonoma install and it did the same thing. I can't "buddy boot" with two GPUs anymore, because I need that PCIe slot for something else.

Swapped back in the Gigabyte X570 into slot 1 and everything is fine and stable on Sonoma, just like it was on Catalina. I will try upgrading the GPU to a more powerful version from a manufacturer I trust, like Gigabyte or ASUS.

 

[Moozuki]

My Asrock card has always worked without any issues.