Forums | MacLife

Cool.  Thanks for the link.  I've been looking at a whole bunch of G4 cards from different manufacturers, so I appreciate the tip regarding price/performance.
You say that there's weirdness without AGP.  Does this apply to the Radeon Mac Edition PCI as well?

The Nexus is just a rebadged Rage 128 Pro with an extra 16 MBs fo VRAM. It's a good card, though.

The PCI issue is with Quartz Extreme - it automatically looks for AGP cards but not PCI cards, because 'supported' macs (ones that shipped with cards capable of running Quartz Extreme) shouldn't have PCI video cards...

(unless they're running multiple monitors, but if you're doing that, you're probably not using an ADC, not contributing to Apple's bottom line, and you therefore deserve to suffer, apparently.)

Anyway, I read about a small hack you can do - changing three or four letters in a configuration file - that fixes the 'problem' (more like an intentrional oversight, imo) on xlr8yourmac.com. If you hunt a bit, you'll find it. Then, you can use PCI video cards to your heart's content.

I think there is some improvement, but the bottleneck goes from being the card to being the computer.

The other cool thing is that the Radeon ME has a DVI port and S-Video out, which the Rage 128 cards generally don't, so you can use that flatscreen if you want.

Well whatever you go with, tell me, i need to do something with my powercenter pro

PS!

my friend was thinkin bout upgradin his old powermac but then found out that for a couple hundred more  (than getting new g3 or g4, vid card so on so forth) he could get a g4.

they do have plenty of G4s around 800 or less maybe on ebay.






PS



...MY Avatar!

As I mentioned elsewhere, the name of that Quartz Extreme hack is PCI Extreme, and you can find it at versiontracker.com. Do a search for it, and versiontracker will take you to the download site. I just picked up an 800mhz Sonnet G4 with L2 and L3 cache for $359, which is $40 cheaper than retail. I've seen them go as low as $345, but I took the Buy It Now option, 'cause I didn't feel like competing over it. I figure, if I'm going to upgrade, I may as well get the fastest available. The 700 G4 model retails for $329, so it's not that far less than an 800 on Ebay, and I've yet to see a 700 up for auction. EDO RAM for these machines is pretty cheap there, as well. By the way, the total cost for my setup, which includes a Sonnet Firwire / USB card, Formac TV / FM Stereo Tuner card, and Radeon 7000 PCI, SCSI DVD RAM and, of course, the Umax S900 and keyboard and mouse, comes to around $605. The G4s on Ebay that sell at around the same price are all 400mhz, with 1mb of L2 cache. I think an upgraded 800mhz or even 700mhz G4 will stomp that pretty well, so you've put forward a pretty strong point about keeping cost low. Without the TV tuner card, my expense would be less than $550. Not that I didn't consider one of those G4s, I just came to the same conclusion as you.

-Antonio

Powerlogix has software that allows you to adjust bus speed, nased on what the processor can handle. While it is made for their own upgrade, I have found that much of their software will work with most processors, including oem Apple processors. I used their cache software to upclock the speed of the L2 cache on my Pismo PowerBook, with the stock G3 processor. I'll let you know if the bus clocking software works with the Sonnet upgrade.

-Antonio