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iSaygoodbye

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 2, 2009
747
0
a boat
i have a powermac g4 sawtooth.it stutters on youtube videos and other videos so i was wandering whats a decent video card thats compatible with it?thanks
 
i have a powermac g4 sawtooth.it stutters on youtube videos and other videos so i was wandering whats a decent video card thats compatible with it?thanks

Assuming you have the stock Rage 128 card...i think its the Radeon 9600 mac edition that will boost you up? I know its a Radeon, not so sure on the #.
 
I flashed and installed a Radeon 9800 in my sawtooth and it does its job very well. I think you will find every information needed doing some search in this forum...
 
BUT remember that many things are CPU limited with the sawtooth. Youtube videos will not play much better if any. The same is true for Quicktime movies. A new video card allows you to apply core image effects on your videos in real time and clearly improves some parts the finder performance. But many many other things are slow because of the almost 10 years old CPU...
 
A faster video card will not help you at all with youtube. Even a single 1.8Ghz G5 has trouble sometimes with lots of flash stuff. Buy a new computer. You can get a mac mini for $500 and it's 20 times faster than what you have.
 
I'll second the recommendation to put the money you would have spent on a new video card into a new computer instead. As mentioned, many things are CPU limited, so a new video card won't solve it, in some cases.
 
a new video card is like 50$. a new mac mini is going to be 600$.this machine is being converted into a apple tv.So does anyone know of a good video card for it?maybe provide a newegg link along with it
 
Only thing Newegg has that would work in a Sawtooth is an Nvidia 6200....abnd that would require flashing on a PC.

A Radeon 9600 will NEVER work in a Sawtooth.

Your best bet is to buy a reference Radeon 9800 from Ebay for around $20 and flash it yourself in the Mac.
 
If you want faster video de-compression, a faster CPU is the only thing that will make a major difference. There's places that sell old CPUs pulled from macs. I've got a dual 800Mhz CPU coming in the next day or 2 that I picked up for £30 to slot in my 2002 Quicksilver. I get large ATA support because of the model I currently have and those 2Mb caches will come in handy.

I get fairly choppy YouTube video playback myself depending on the codec and I keep Perian and all my other Quicktime plug-ins well updated. (but I'm sticking with Flash Player 9 for obvious reasons).

I'd say a CPU upgrade would be a better option for what you want. Add a faster GPU later on if Core Image really does make such a dramatic difference.

looking around online you can get CPU upgrades quite cheaply. Obviously a sawtooth is going to have a dual 500Mhz cpu at most unless you go for a 3rd party upgrade card.

Check out www.xlr8yourmac.com

it's got a lot of info on cpu, gpu and hard drive upgrades etc...
 
You should be able to ebay a flashed FX5200 really cheap. These are the oldest slowest core image supported cards out there, but it still made a huge performance increase on my sawtooth.
 
An ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Mac & PC Edition 128MB is the best card for your system. It ain't $50 though.

Getting even further away from $50, I'd recommend the nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB as my personal G4 favourite (has OS9 support too which the 9800 lacks). It *may* not work in yours though as I've read somewhere that for some reason beyond my understanding it requires a minimum 800MHz CPU, but Mac Elite's compatability chart doesn't give any such pre-conditions and lists it as 'yes' for Sawtooth:

http://themacelite.wikidot.com/compatibility

EDIT: Correction, the 4600 goes for slightly less than the 9800 on ebay.
 
So if flash performance is really, dependent on the CPU, what am I to do in this instance? I've got the DP800 quicksilver with maxed out RAM. Right now, I just tried going to a bunch of flash heavy sites, and they played at a reeeeeally low frame-rate and were super choppy. Even with a much better video card, I'm not likely to see a difference?
 
If it helps, I just downgraded from a flashed Radeon 9800XT (256MB, running at 412/365MHz DDR) to a Radeon 8500 (running at 275/275MHz DDR) so I could play games in OS 9 again.
With the 9800 installed, I could watch video like this http://revision3.com/systm/talk/ in full screen and it was reasonably smooth.
With the 8500, it was almost unwatchable at first, but then I updated to the latest "full" version of Shockwave http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/otherversions/
and repaired permissions, and the playback improved.
It does play at a noticeably lower frame rate with the older card, but the difference is not too much.
 
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