Recommend me a Video Card, Please!!
 

I have a Power Mac G5 with Dual 1.8ghz procs. It is the 8 RAM slot version which I believe is PCI-X slots and an AGP for video.

Not looking for anything major just looking for some thing at least 128mb.

Right now I have the stock 64mb and it's OK but not great.

Thx in advance.

Oh and it has to be DVI.

Not a whole lot out there for us early G5 owners. I have a Radeon 9600 Pro/256 MB Ram that is a little better than the Nvidia card it came with. Wish I would have got the Radeon X800 XT when it was easier to find.

i have a extra 9800 pro/256 two DVI ports on it.
interested ??

How much you asking?

First of all, the amount of VRAM (64MB vs. 128MB vs. 256MB vs. 512MB, etc.) is a trivial statistic, and has no relationship to how fast or how "good" a video card is.

The real test of a good video card is what chipset it uses. A Radeon 9800 Pro with 256 MB is not better in any significant way from a Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 MB of VRAM, for example. The extra VRAM does allow you to have more textures in memory at one time, which helps a little bit with the speed when playing games with lots of textures. But this difference is trivial.

Another item that has a significant effect on the speed of a video card is how it is plugged in to your computer. AGP will be faster than PCI. PCIe (or PCI-express) will be faster than AGP, but that is a newer technology, used in the last era of Power Mac G5 and the Mac Pros.

Second, you have a lot of choices of video cards for your AGP-equipped Power Mac G5.

I'll try to remember all of the video cards that will work fine in your computer, but I'm sure that I've forgotten several. I'll also eliminate the old ones that are unlikely to have a DVI output, but you'll have to verify DVI output before purchasing.

ATI (all cards are "Mac Edition", some have "Pro", "XT" or other suffixes on the ends of their model names):
Radeon 7500
Radeon 8500
Radeon 9000
Radeon 9200 (usually PCI, although there may be a few AGP)
Radeon 9600
Radeon 9650
Radeon 9700
Radeon 9800
Radeon x800
Radeon x850

nvidia (all are Apple OEM cards):
Geforce 4Ti
Geforce FX5200 Ultra (probably the slow card that you have now)
Geforce FX6800 Ultra

Trevor

Which one would you say is better for video editing? Thanks a bunch for the info Trevor.

IMO I would go with the X800 XT but the only problem is finding one new. Of all the ones listed above you'll be lucky to find one or two that are NIB. Most of them are used and with a very questionable lifespan.

Hmmm. The ones that I would recommend for video editing are: Radeon 9700, Radeon 9800, Radeon x800, Radeon x850, nvidia Geforce FX6800.

Trevor

Do you know which ones off hand are 8x AGP?

Isn't the Radeon x850 for PCI-Express?, and not AGP?
All the others would support AGP 8x

If it supports 8x, does it run at 8x or 4x?

Yes, 4x or 8x, but not necessarily. Your question is one of those with an 'it depends', or 'maybe' answer. Here's a little more info that will confuse you (I mean, enlighten you to the confusion, lol!) http://www.neoseeker.com/Hardware/faqs/kb/10,63.html

The question REALLY is - does your AGP slot support 8x? And, the answer is: all PowerMac G5s have 8x AGP slots, except the most recent PowerMacs, which have PCI-E slots.

Be certain that your card, whatever you get, has Mac support ROMs on the board, in other words, sold originally as a Mac video card. You can find many cheap PC vid cards that have been flashed to a Mac ROM, and may work. But, may prove to be unreliable/unstable in the Mac.
As trevor posted, all those listed cards will be OK, and will give you good performance for you use with video editing.
I think it's obvious that you want the 'best' vid card for your money, and that's reasonable. Get any from that list that you can find. The 'finding' will be more of a challenge than your uneasiness about compatibility.
If you are unsure about one that you find, then CALL the tech support for the company that offers the card. A good web retailer will be able to answer your questions, such as Other World Computing (www.macsales.com). They will know what you want.

No, the Radeon X850 is a slight clock-upgrade on the Radeon X800, and works with AGP. It was available as a Configure To Order option for the last of the AGP Power Mac G5s from Apple.
http://www.barefeats.com/radx850.html
http://www.welovemacs.com/6613594r.html
http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.ph...wer_mac_option

The first Mac Edition ATI Radeon for PCI-express was the Radeon x1900, which is also an excellent card. One that won't work for iMovieStar, though.

Trevor

What's a good gpu speed? I have the stock AGP card but for some reason it's not as good as the one that was in my mac mini which could easily do 720p, on my g5 it staggers when playing the video a little and yes I have the 5200.

Also, this forum rocks. Every other Apple forum is tumbleweeds.

I just bought the 9800 Pro since it was only $99. I'll let you know how it runs.

So as some of you probably thought, yes, it turns out it was a converted PC card. So far so good though. My Nvidia 5200 is on standby in case this one acts up.

From what I have read the reason why converted ones crash is due to only the 64KiB being accessed instead of the 128KiB that is supposed to be accessed for the mac. The 2 apparent workarounds were to use a multiflasher that doesn't limit it to 64 OR set the resistors to the mac setting to read the 128.

Crossing my fingers it stays good.

Anything I can DL to test the card out?

Similar video card questions for g4 tower...
 

Hope its ok to continue this thread on g4 video cards...

Just bought a used g4 tower. It is a dual 1.25GHz quicksilver with 2GRAM and it has those dual cd doors. Nice machine, but I also just bought a spanking new 30" apple cinema for it and g4 can't even get close to that resolution.

Currently its 1280x800 and cinema is more than double that. (I have another year old 30" cinema on my G5 quad...with that Nvidia 5200 card which gives full res.)

G4 cinema works fine, just lower res.

What video card would you recommend to replace current g4 one?

Thanks for assist,

eValuone

You have a difficult situation with that old of a computer plus that new and large of a display. The Radeon X800 or X850 will both drive that display, as will the GeForce 6800 GT or GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL, but all those cards require at least a Power Mac G5. (There may be some hacks to get those cards to work on your older Power Mac G4, though, perhaps do a search.)

Some models of the Radeon 9800 will work fine on your Power Mac G4--and those are good cards, too. But you can't use a Radeon 9800 to drive a dual-link DVI display at native resolution, which is what you want. I thought that maybe it could drive the 30" display if you used VGA (an analog video type), but according to ATI, it can't quite do that either. Max analog resolution on the Radeon 9800 Mac Edition is 2048 x 1536, whereas the 30" Cinema Display has a native resolution of 2560 x 1600.

So, that leaves you with either a possible and unsupported hack of one of the GeForce 6800 models or the Radeon X800/x850 to allow it to work on your older Power Mac G4, or else you will need to buy a newer computer. If you do decide to buy a newer computer, this gets much much easier.

Trevor

The ultimate Mac AGP card is.....
 

Hi,

I have tested all the cards mentioned in this thread, and the card I use in my own personal G5 dual 2.0Ghz is the Nvidia GeForce 7800GS AGP 256Mb as it is demonstratively the fastest of the lot under load, even when attached to a 30" Apple display. And it can be made to work in a 4x AGP G4.

Full info on how to do this can be found here:

http://themacelite.wikidot.com/nvidia-geforce-7800

Hope this is of interest.

Regards,

Nick

Fellas,

Thanks for your input.

I found a used AGP 7800 with correct bios on eBay.

It just arrived, and I am going to dry run it in a G5 quad. If that works, all I should have to do is mask two pins and move it to that old G4 dual 1.25 MDD.

Just a status to let you know all is proceeding well, so far. More when 'the do' is done...

Thank you again,

eValuone.

Hi,

I thought G5 quads were all PCI express - no AGP slot to fit the card in !

Don't forget to flash the ROM on the 7800 - you need access to a PC with an AGP slot and a PCI graphics card to drive the monitor so that you can see what you are doing. Full detail are in the above link, and they work well - I have done 3 of them so far.

If installing in a G5, details on how to get a Molex power feed to the card are here:

http://themacelite.wikidot.com/navsubcat

Easy to do in a G4.

Regards,

Nick

Nick,

Thank you!

At MAC Elite their directions implied this would work in a G5. No, I did not know G5quad was all PCI! Wow, guess I better be more careful.

I have a five year old PC tower, and if I recall it has an AGP card in it already. I also recall that I have a new PCI card for that in a box somewhere.

I'll try putting that PCI card in it and get it to work with an old 15" LCD monitor. If that works OK then I'll pull the current AGP and substitute this 7800 one, then follow those directions.

I'll try to get that working first.

Thanks again,

eValuone.

You don't use ADC monitors do you? If so you will have to buy converters or special apple only video cards.

I am glad apple did away with that technology.

tLarkin,

No, we do not and as I recall haven't used ADC monitors.

G5quad was our first apple tower since about 2000. We used all laptops prior.

Thanks,

eValuone.

A couple of things I feel like I should probably clarify about that paragraph, just so everybody is on the same page.

There were five generations of Power Mac G5s (give or take, depending on how you count a generation). The first four generations of Power Mac G5 had one AGP slot (precisely, an 8x AGP Pro slot) for video cards, and three additional slots. These additional slots were either PCI-X (on the high-end machines in any generation), or PCI (on the low-end machines in any generation).

The last generation of Power Mac G5s, in which they introduced dual-core G5 processors, including the first "quad" machine with two dual-core processors for a total of four cores, used four PCI express slots (also known as PCIe slots, but completely different than PCI). The video card, of course, was PCIe as well. The last generation of Power Mac G5s did not have any AGP slot at all.

So, the first clarification is that those directions will work in a Power Mac G5, just not in any of the dual-core (including the "quad") Power Mac G5s.

The second clarification is that the last (dual-core) generation of Power Mac G5 machines did not use PCI, they used PCIe, or PCI express.

If putting "that PCI card in it" means putting a PCI card into the Power Mac G5 "quad", then that won't work. PCI does not equal PCIe. And a video card with Windows firmware will not work in Power Mac G5 until you reflash it with the appropriate new firmware. If putting "that PCI card in it" means putting a PCI card into a Windows box with PCI slots, then that's probably the best way for you to do this.

Trevor

Trevor, Nick, tLarkin, et al.,

Trevor thanks for that rundown. It helped me, so likely it will help others.

No I did not mean I was going to try plugging a PCI card into a PCIe slot.

Nick (macsolver) is helping me use a PC tower environment to 'flash' ROM in a 7800s graphic 4x AGP card which can be made compatible for use in a G4 dual 1.25 MDD with 2GRAM.

I just successfully installed a second (new) e-g-force4 mx 440se card in a PC tower. Its current display card is a more powerful g-force AGP card. According to Nick I need to have a second display to use since I will pull PC's current AGP card and plug in that 7800s card which needs its ROM flashed. Then I can use second, just installed display, to do actual flash programming scripts.

That's my next step. I'll post soon (within next day or so) when I have some results from that.

Sorry for any confusion on my part.

Thanks so much, Nick, Trevor, and tLarkin, for this superb assistance,

eValuone.