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G4 Power Mac Graphics Card Upgrade? Possible??

nomar383

nomar383

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 29, 2008
1,310
0
Rexburg, ID
I'm looking on cragslist right now for an older powermac to use as a media hub and I think I found one. It appears to be an AGP G4 PowerMac (500Mhz-ish). I have a 256MB graphics card I was using with my PC, I was wondering if I could plop it in and it would work? I know it's probably a pipe dream, but it doesn't hurt to ask :)
 
I have a 128MB ATI Radeon 9200 AGP in my (formerly 500MHz, currently 1.4GHz) G4. It's a PC card that was flashed with Mac rom, I bought it that way so I'm not sure how it works. ATI only made the 9200 as a PCI version for Mac, to use AGP I needed the PC version. Works great powering two displays.
 
chakosticks said:
I have a 128MB ATI Radeon 9200 AGP in my (formerly 500MHz, currently 1.4GHz) G4. It's a PC card that was flashed with Mac rom, I bought it that way so I'm not sure how it works. ATI only made the 9200 as a PCI version for Mac, to use AGP I needed the PC version. Works great powering two displays.
Click to expand...

Hey, no kidding! I totally thought that the drivers for AGP/PCI would be different somehow, so putting an AGP card in a mac that had only ever been PCI in the mac wouldn't work, and visa versa. That's really interesting to know. Hmm.

Edit: Oh. On second thought, it could be because the Radeon 9000 for the mac was an AGP card, identical to the 9200 in every respect, save a new name. I wonder if that's why it worked. What do you think?

By the way, it depends on what card you have. Some PC cards simply don't have Mac-equivalent drivers, but many do, and if so, you can flash it on the PC side and then put it in your Mac no problem =)
 
Can anyone point me in the direction of more information on flashing the ROM. BTW it's an ATI Radeon X1050 and I think it is AGP.
 
nomar383 said:
Can anyone point me in the direction of more information on flashing the ROM. BTW it's an ATI Radeon X1050 and I think it is AGP.
Click to expand...

I don't know if that specific card will work but here you can check out Mac Elite. There are numerous factors that will determine if it will work beyond the basic GPU model there is the type of memory the manufacturer used, the size of the ROM chip and other minor components used.
 
You're not SOL, because you don't have to buy the X1050 (never even heard of that... it sounds more like an integrated graphics card than a Radeon; I thought they started at X1300).

You can flash something like a Radeon 9600 Pro, 256 MB if you wish. It's a decent card, and a lot faster than what you've got in there right now. They're cheap, too.
 
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