I’m running a Power Mac G4 MMD (mirrored-drive doors), a 7-year-old computer. I’m proud to say that I also squeezed all the juice out of my previous Mac, a Power Mac 7600, and used it for just as long. That’s what I like about Macs: even old ones are still functional.
But why did ATI discontinue the Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition? Mine is less than three years old, but it’s giving me problems. ATI won’t repair the card because the parts it needs are no longer available, and stores that claim to sell it still want a whopping $250 for what is supposed to be an “old” card.
Without this card, any motion graphics apps like After Effects can’t run, and even basic essentials like QuickTime and iMovie cause my G4 to hang and eventually freeze. Other than searching Google and Craigslist on a regular basis for postings, what other choices do I have on resurrecting my G4 in order to use these video applications?
First of all, good on you for wanting to squeeze extra life out of your hardware instead of just replacing it. But three years is a long time in the world of graphics cards, and we can’t do much but commiserate on the scarcity of that discontinued ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition. Our pals at Other World Computing (eshop.macsales.com) still recommend (and sell) it as an upgrade to your G4, but as you’ve said, it costs $229.99.
I wish we had one to just send you, but eBay can keep an eye on the Buy It Now listings for your Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition.
One piece of advice we can offer is to grab RSS feeds of your Craigslist searches so you don’t have to go to Craigslist to search for updates—this might help you notice new listings a little faster. After you perform a search, look at the bottom-right part of the page for the orange RSS link. Click that to get an RSS feed of the search results, which you can add to your RSS reader of choice. You can also set up a Google Alert (www.google.com/alerts) as an RSS feed; try entering radeon 9800 pro mac site:craigslist.org to search all of Craigslist, or just radeon 9800 pro mac to search the entire Web. And don’t forget eBay, which can email you new listings that match your search—just click Save This Search on the search-results page and tell it how often you want to be notified. Good luck in your hunt, but in all our searching we couldn’t find a retail outlet beating OWC’s $230 price, although eBay’s Buy It Now listings offered it for closer to $150.
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November 10, 2009 at 7:40pm
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CaptainV45
August 07, 2009 at 8:40am
I used one from applemacanix on my old G4 and my brother (who is the Sawtooths current owner) has twin monitors still hooked up to it and says that it works great still. Applemacanix is on my favorite sellers list on eBay.
AlexTheSeal
August 06, 2009 at 11:48am
I have a Radeon 9800 Pro from eBay seller "applemacanix" in my Sawtooth (AGP Graphics) G4, for exactly the same reason (trying to squeeze everything I can out of this oldy-but-goody machine). This is a PC card that has been reflashed with Mac-compatible ROMs. Works perfectly. I have it driving a DoubleSight 23" LCD at 1920x1200 through the DVI port which my previous video card (Radeon 8500 Mac Edition, itself an upgrade from the original Rage 128 in the G4) could not do. Supports Quartz Extreme, of course, and I have had no problems with any other graphics-intensive apps (although I'm not a gamer). The best part is it was only $100.
