Asking for advice for GPU for PowerMac G5 11,2

[cmblanch1]

Hi All,

I recently acquired a Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED. I have been running it off an emulated version of 10.4 tiger on my M1 MBP with the OEM installed. It's somewhat of a pain in the ass to do since it seems like I have to watch the software run otherwise it crashes. I would like to setup the G5 2ghz dual core I have lying around as a dedicated scanning rig. Currently it has the default Nvidia 6600, like 2gb of ram, and no hard drive in it. I plan on beefing it up but I wasn't sure how much is too much for that machine. I may slap photoshop on there as well but I plan on doing most of my edits on my MBP. If anyone has gone down this rabbit hole before or has any advice please let me know your thoughts.

 

[eyoungren]

The two most powerful cards that will work in your model G5 are the Radeon X1900 XT and the NVIDIA Quadro FX4500. I've used both and the Radeon seems more problematic.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

X1900 XT

Not GT?

 

[eyoungren]

Not GT?

I don't know I guess is my answer. I am aware of the existence of the GT, but my card was the XT. And at the time I was hunting for both cards that was what I'd been told to look for.

 

[jktwice]

I don't think you will need anything more for your purposes. It sounds trivial to upgrade the GPU, because it is PCIe and GPUs of that era are quite cheap, but really it is a royal pain in the ass to get anything that isn't a 6600.

If you GPU is failing, consider upgrading or just replacing the 6600. Whatever is cheaper. Unless you're doing CAD work or gaming or doing photo editing, you don't need the extra GPU power.

If you're running Linux only that's a different story because one can go up to ATI's Northern Island family of GPUs (Radeon HD 6000 series or ATI FirePro cards from around 2010-2011. Basically Terascale 2 and a couple Terascale 3 GPUs). The Power Mac G5 can power these cards fine through the 6-pin power out next to the speaker/fan combo. The most powerful single slot GPU is the FirePro V7900 and the most powerful two slot GPU is probably the HD 6990. IDK if CrossFire works in big endian Linux, I assume it doesn't. If that's the case, the HD 6970 is the fastest and much more available and not stupidly huge. Evergreen family GPUs are also a good option (HD 5000 series).

 

[ToniCH]

The two most powerful cards that will work in your model G5 are the Radeon X1900 XT and the NVIDIA Quadro FX4500. I've used both and the Radeon seems more problematic.

The Radeon is much faster in normal use (Photoshop, games etc). The Quadro is the king in CAD applications but not that special in other use.

I do have both, the Radeon X1900 GT and the Quadro FX4500.

 

[jktwice]

The Radeon is much faster in normal use (Photoshop, games etc). The Quadro is the king in CAD applications but not that special in other use.

I do have both, the Radeon X1900 GT and the Quadro FX4500.

This really shouldn’t be the case. The Quadro FX4500 is basically a 7800 GTX but with different drivers… or so I thought.

Turns out the Quadro cards of yesterday were truly less performant in exchange for much higher floating point precision performance. These days they may as well be more or less identical, but the gap in performance is definitely notable in this instance. The G70 die on the Quadro is downclocked and so is the memory. I can only assume this is for stability reasons.

Meanwhile the Radeon card features more texture mapping units, higher clock frequency, and less shader units… I guess I was the crazy one all along and assumed that the 7800 GTX = Quadro FX 4500.