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Ecodisk

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 8, 2005
64
0
Portland, OR
Ok I'm buying a B&W macintosh and upgradeing it. I noticed that the standard video card is in a special PCI slot. Can I put an upgraded video card in one of the normal PCI slots or do I have to use that special slot that the standard one has? Also can I buy any video card or does it have to be a special mac version?
 
Actually all of the PCI slots are "special" slots. The standard PCI slot looks like the one the video card is in. However that slot runs at 66MHz where as a standard pci slot runs at 33MHz. The other slots are 64bit PCI slots that run at 33MHz. If you plug a normal card into one of the 64bit slots it will act like a normal 32bit slot. If you were to plug a video card into the video card slot it would run at the faster speed which it may not be able to handle. I think the Radeon 7000 PCI Mac Edition can run at either speed, but I am not 100% sure. If it can, definitely put it in the same slot as the current video card as this will increase performance. Hope this helps...

Edit: I looked at a picture and the 66MHz slot is notched differently from a normal PCI slot. If the card has a notch closer to the backplate at the one end then it should work fine (it should also work fine if it has 2 notches). You might want someone else to confirm this though.
 
Thanks for your help. I have one more question now. Where is the best place to find Mac video cards since I have to get a Mac specific one :(
 
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