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How good is a mac

benixau

benixau

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Oct 9, 2002
1,307
0
Sydney, Australia
I have just purchased a brand spanking new G4 867 MDD (Combo^SD; 60^80) and was wondering a few things:

Can I run VPC 5 with WinXP happily
Can it work with a cony monitor happily (VGA)
Can I go and buy a pioneer DVD-A05 and add it no probs
What optical drives does Apple sell after purchase
And, Can i drop in a PC graphics card (GF4-Ti) with no probs

Also if anyone owns one (with or without mods) can you please tell me how smoothly it runs and how well it works on a PC-XP/OSX network.


Thanx
 
VPC is ssslllooowww, but it works fine.
Sony (i assume that's what you meant) monitor is no problem. VGA is a standard output.
DVD-A05 is the same model number as the first Superdrive, no? If so, it should be fine.
Apple doesn't sell aftermarket components. So, if you want an optical drive, you have to get it from LaCie, or someone else.
You can only drop a PC graphics card into a Mac if it was released for a Mac (I know, bummer). GForce4-Ti was a Mac release, and should be fine.

And, actually, the most difficult part of setting up a OS X / XP network is XP. When you see how great Rendezvous is, you'll fall over. You literally have to configure nothing on the Mac. Just plug in the cable, and all the computers on the network will magically appear. (although they tend to appear only by IP address instead of name. That could be lack of knowledge on my part, though). I still have yet to completely figure out the arcane networking process on an XP machine. But OS X has native SMB support.

Hoep this helps!
 
WARNING

The last post was wrong, if you put a PC graphics card in the mac, it will not work. You need to buy a card that says it works on a Mac or find someone with a PC and download the Mac bios onto the PC graphics card.

So for example, if you buy a PC Hercules Geforce 4 Ti, you need to search the net for the Geforce Ti Mac bios. Next put the graphics card in a PC and find a 'flashing' utility that will copy the mac bios onto the PC graphics card. Then take the card out of the PC and put if in a Mac. It should then work. But always make sure you back up the original bios on the card in case you need to put the card back to normal. This process should work for any PC graphics card to which there is a Mac verison.

Also about VPC5, the older the Windows version, the faster VPC will run. I use windows 95b since that is the fastest and most programs still work on it.

Also about getting optical drives in Macs. You can just buy a PC version and it should work in your Mac. First make sure the model you buy is the same model Apple uses in its Macs or it says it will work on a Mac. But you may need to update the bios with the Mac version, like with the graphics card example above. So I would only get a optical drive if it says it will work on a Mac if you do not know what you are doing with bios.

If you do not know what a bios is, it is a chip that contains software that tells the device how to work. So in a Mac, the main bios tells the computer how to start up and load Mac OS. The bios on a graphics card will tell the computer how to work with that card and what features that card has. There are less problems envolved with updating a graphics card bios over a optical drive's bios.
 
Um, VPC on a Dual 867 is plenty fast, especially if you have 1GB of ram or more in the powerMac. Use Windows 2000 though as XP is a friggin pig. You can tweak XP down a bit, but it is still slow.
 
beaut

Thanx, now i am glad that i own a pc. Also will i need to put the optical drive in a pc to flash it or will the BSD core of OSX see it as a CD/DVD drive and let me flash it.

Also if it can be done from the mac do you know where i could get a GUI front end to flash it. Last time i remember, mac dont boot into dos to well!!

Thanx
 
Originally posted by hvfsl
WARNING

The last post was wrong, if you put a PC graphics card in the mac, it will not work. You need to buy a card that says it works on a Mac or find someone with a PC and download the Mac bios onto the PC graphics card.

So for example, if you buy a PC Hercules Geforce 4 Ti, you need to search the net for the Geforce Ti Mac bios. Next put the graphics card in a PC and find a 'flashing' utility that will copy the mac bios onto the PC graphics card. Then take the card out of the PC and put if in a Mac. It should then work. But always make sure you back up the original bios on the card in case you need to put the card back to normal. This process should work for any PC graphics card to which there is a Mac verison.

Also about VPC5, the older the Windows version, the faster VPC will run. I use windows 95b since that is the fastest and most programs still work on it.

Also about getting optical drives in Macs. You can just buy a PC version and it should work in your Mac. First make sure the model you buy is the same model Apple uses in its Macs or it says it will work on a Mac. But you may need to update the bios with the Mac version, like with the graphics card example above. So I would only get a optical drive if it says it will work on a Mac if you do not know what you are doing with bios.

If you do not know what a bios is, it is a chip that contains software that tells the device how to work. So in a Mac, the main bios tells the computer how to start up and load Mac OS. The bios on a graphics card will tell the computer how to work with that card and what features that card has. There are less problems envolved with updating a graphics card bios over a optical drive's bios.
Click to expand...

good tip

i didn't know it was that simple to do and i am surprised i didn't hear about this fix since i am a techie

there are a lot of tweaks that can be done and believe me, the gamers catch just about everything...i will tell my mac gamer friends about this
 
VPC running Win98SE on a dual 800 isn't too bad. When I run dxdiag (DirectX diagnostics), it comes up with approximately (~) 533 MHz P2MMX.

The only real issue is that VPC doesn't allow 3D graphics card acceleration.
 
PC cards in a mac

yeah, pc graphics cards can work in the mac as long as you flash the bios over. But when you do that, be sure to save a copy of the PC bios if you ever want to return the card back to it's original state. I ran (and still run) a Voodoo 3 2000 PC card in my old Performa 6400 and never had any problems with it. But I did have the advantage that "unsupported" drivers and bios were supplied directly from the card supplier, so good luck finding the appropriate drivers/ bios.
 
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