graphic card choices for MDD 1.25 DP

[dekker66]

Hello, I'm new to this forum,and fairly new to Macs as well.
I have a Powermac AGP 400mhz,1G Sdram,120hdd that used a 16mb Rage 128 Pro card. This card stuttered at full screen viewing of some newer programs and won't run others at all. This Powermac model runs Tiger 10.4.11 without a hitch otherwise.
I love this old machine and want to keep it going since it's been problem free from day one.
On a hunch and somewhat desperate I installed the ATI 9000 64mb card from my MDD 1.25 DP into the AGP even though I doubted the slow processor speed of the Powermac AGP would handle this card. Surprisingly it works fine.

So that leaves me with having to upgrade the video card in my MDD 1.25 Dp.

I have a line on a Nvidia 4 Ti 128. This card was offered as an option to the standard ATI 9000 64mb that were installed on most MDD's.
Is it much of an improvement,or do I have even better options for my MDD?
I appreciate any advice and help you can offer. Thank you.

 

[Earl Urly]

You'd be better off getting an ATI Radeon 9700 / 9800, Tiger and especially Leopard make use of the advanced chips. The GeForce 4 Titanium is a good card but it's just one notch below being able to provide GPU acceleration in Core Image.

I think you have it the other way around on the 400 MHz G4, there the CPU is the bottleneck, not the graphics card

 

[AlexMaximus]

Card options...

Hello, I'm new to this forum,and fairly new to Macs as well.
I have a Powermac AGP 400mhz,1G Sdram,120hdd that used a 16mb Rage 128 Pro card. This card stuttered at full screen viewing of some newer programs and won't run others at all. This Powermac model runs Tiger 10.4.11 without a hitch otherwise.
I love this old machine and want to keep it going since it's been problem free from day one.
On a hunch and somewhat desperate I installed the ATI 9000 64mb card from my MDD 1.25 DP into the AGP even though I doubted the slow processor speed of the Powermac AGP would handle this card. Surprisingly it works fine.

So that leaves me with having to upgrade the video card in my MDD 1.25 Dp.

I have a line on a Nvidia 4 Ti 128. This card was offered as an option to the standard ATI 9000 64mb that were installed on most MDD's.
Is it much of an improvement,or do I have even better options for my MDD?
I appreciate any advice and help you can offer. Thank you.

The Nvidia 4 Ti would be a good choice, depending on the price. If you can get it below 100$ you should go for it !! If you choose that option, you need to be aware of two things:
1. The cooling fan was a weak point on that card. Replace it and you would be fine.
2. The Nvidia has the original Apple interface ADC! That means you don't need a converter for the Apple screens. However if you don't have those Apple screen one you may need a converter to DVI.

The Radeon 9800 would be the fastest choice and great for some gaming here and there. However this card is getting extreme hot!!! You most likely run into heat problems in the summer, especially when you have your MDD full of internal drives.
If you don't play with it, go for the Radeon 9600 with 256 MB video ram.
That is one great card and it runs way cooler then the 9800.

The 9700 would be great as well but I doubt that you will find it.
As of all the Radeons, they have all DVI connection and not ADC!

 

[Earl Urly]

Geforce 4 Titanium would be good if you plan on never running anything but OS 9 up to OS X 10.3.9. Tiger and Leopard really need a card that has Core Image compatibility, the Geforce 4 is not Core Image compatible.

You can still find 9700s but you have to flash them to Mac compatibility.

What it boils down to is if you are going to stick with Tiger, get a card that Tiger takes full advantage of. In Tiger your entire GUI is running through the 3D GPU chip.

 

[dekker66]

Thanks Urly and Maximus for your advice.

Yes Urly I realized that the 400mhz CPU AGP Graphics PowerMac would be the main blockage for up-grading to a better graphics card. I know there are CPU upgrades available for this particular Mac but are rather expensive. It was cheaper for me to buy the MDD 1.25DP , pirate the card,and upgrade it since it is a much more potent machine to begin with.
I'm running the ATI 9000 in the AGP right now and it has made a significant improvement. For example it permits me to run two of my favorite, Google Earth and Cooliris. I could not run these before with the Rage pro 128 in part because of the cpu but mostly because of the card.

Maximus, glad you mentioned the heat problem with the 9800 since the airflow in the MDD is relatively poor. The 9600 sounds promising and I hope to track one down. I didn't know that core support(which I don't understand) was so significant for boosting the graphics function in a card.
I have also heard of a Nvidia 6200 card available from a seller "MacGenius" on ebay that is supposedly good and has core support. It sounds like these are flashed PC cards.
Thanks again.