PowerMac G4 Sawtooth no video

I don't know what screenshare is, but I assume it means you somehow get to see the desktop without using your video card?

Sounds like it's fried. Not a big deal, just order a new video card.. you have several options.

One, ebay another old Rage 128. I wouldn't really advise that. Two, ebay a Radeon 7000 or 9200 PCI. Not an awful idea, that way you get Quartz Extreme if you use PCI Extreme. Though, you lose the bandwidth of your AGP 2x.

You could also try ebaying a Radeon 7500 or 8500 AGP, or 9600.

Or, you could buy a 7000 for the PC for cheap and flash it, though it would still be PCI. Or flash a 9600 AGP. Don't know if you have a PC with PCI/AGP slot(s) to do that. If not, forget it.

Lastly, you could buy, from OWC, a Radeon 9200 PCI (about $130), Radeon 9600 AGP (about $180) or Radeon 9800 ($210). For only $30 more, the 9800 is a much better deal (though they're both priced obscenely high for five year old graphics cards).

Anyway, bottom line is

Ebay Mac PCI/AGP
Ebay PC and flash PCI/AGP
Buy PCI/AGP from OWC

You'll notice a real improvement in minimize effects like the genie effect and even dragging windows if you get a new card, especially an AGP card. While you're at it, you'll have from four to 16 times the VRAM you started with.

Hope that helps =]

TheReef said:

Out of curiosity I took the card out, and the computer booted with no graphics card…there you go.

Anyway, when I have tried both my rage 128 and radeon 9000 PRO I noticed that there is no APG menu in Apple System Profiler! …should there be one even if no card is inserted?

PCI shows up even if I have no cards connected.

Click to expand...

It should be under the Graphics/Displays section...

Hmm. It could be you needed to reseat the AGP card. That can do it. I suppose you might also have some missing pins in your monitor cable. . . I'd say check, but maybe you don't want to test it

If it's artifacting, that could be due to memory being clocked to high, so downloading ATIcelerator II could help you there if that's the case (though I think green might actually indicate a failing monitor, or possibly even one of the DAC's color channels not firing if it's the whole screen).

http://thomas.perrier.name/index.html (ATIcelerator II page)

That's odd. I don't know of any cards that would be "smart" enough to know to disable "bad" RAM, which I don't think is very common anyway.

Perhaps it's just being misidentified. You could try a few different applications to check whether or not it's actually only 32 MB.