ATI Radeon 7000 - good enough?

[Bob Dobbs]

Seems like all the posts about graphics cards are about Radeon 9000 or 9700 or Nvidia - well I'm looking to upgrade from ATI Rage 128 with 16mb do you all think the ATI 7000 with 32mb will be a large improvment?

This will be in a G4 AGP 400. running os9.2.2 and os X.2.3

I play a few games, edit FCP, and thas about it.

remember i dont need the best (cant afford) only to be a bit better

[Funkatation]

it wont be much faster at all.. and it will be PCI not AGP if I remember correctly. You'd be better off getting a radeon 9000 pro or radeon 8500 (the 8500 is faster despite the lower number) if you have the first Gen G4, you'd be better off with the 8500 since it has a DVI instead of ADC port (you cant use ADC anyway)

or you could look into getting a Geforce 3 or 2 or 4MX on ebay, but doubt they will be very cheap. The 8500 is better than all those cards anyway.

Hope that helps.


I believe you can get them under $200 pretty easily. the 9000 pro is 169 off ATI's website.

[vniow]

Yep, it would be quite a bit faster since it supports Quartz Extreme.

Wait, is this a PCI or an AGP?

If it's a PCI, it doesn't support Quartz nativley, there's a hack for it though.

[crazzyeddie]

DONT buy the 7000... its horrible for any games, i have it, stay away. Its THE slowest Radeon card EVER made, even slower than first generation Radeons.

Go for the 9000 if youre a casual gamer... sure the 8500 is faster, but the 9000 will last longer so you get more bang for your buck.

[Dont Hurt Me]

9000 should be the card you should be looking at. If iam not mistaken they have a trade up program so maybe you can get a few bucks for that old one of yours. 7000 isnt going to do much, also if you have the 9000 sitting in your machine you could still upgrade that cpu one day and you are still in the game. 7000 i think would be a waste of time and money.

[Beigean]

i think he would only consider the 7000 if he doesn't have agp.

so anyway, i got the 7000, replaced the 16meg rage 128 in my B&W G3. 2D and 3D performance is much better than the old card. I use it for some games (though my cpu can't handle warcraft3) and final cut pro. Works fine. sure it's slower than a radeon 9000 but if agp isn't an option, the 7000 is more than good enough.

[Bob Dobbs]

are you getting quartz extreme on your B&W G3 with the 7000?

[kiwi_the_iwik]

I've just been looking into upgrading my Cube from the Rage 128 also - I have a few options:

I want a fanless card, so I can go for either the GeForce2 MX card, or the Radeon 7500 - both have ADC and are AGP cards (and fit inside without modifications!)

Which one would you folks recommend?

:confused: