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No picture from G4 MDD??

C

cave12man

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 26, 2007
96
0
avalon, nj
Came home today and found that i have no video coming from my monitor. The light comes on on it but no video. Popped open the case and my video card fan isnt spinning so not sure if thats the problem. Have a GeForce4 Ti card if that helps. Anyone else ever have this problem or heard of it? Want to post on here before having to shell out the dough for a new card since they are running about $200 right now and its about a 6 year old mac.

Any help or suggestions would be great.
 
Does the machine chime when you turn it on? If so it would suggest that the rest of it's working fine; the easiest thing to do - if you don't have access to another card right now - is pick up the cheapest video card from eBay and try that out. The GeForce is an old card so wouldn't be a great surprise if it's gone.

Once you get it going, it might make sense to enable remote desktop so that you can VNC to it in future.

Good luck!
 
thanks for the reply man.

it does chime when i turn it on. the light on the monitor even turns on but no pic. i guess ill have to get one and see if it works.

with VNC, i can access it from another computer? havent had any experience with it yet.
 
If the monitor light's on and the computer chimes up, my guess would be that the graphics card's gone unfortunately. If it's an ADC monitor (i.e. the Apple one with no power cord) there are a few other ADC cards you could try which are slower than the GeForce but should at least get you going - the old ATI RagePro from the earlier Gigabit Ethernet G4 springs to mind; I picked up a spare just to have in the drawer and it cost me about $10 US.

I thoroughly recomment VNC for remote desktop into your Mac. You can enable access through Sharing / Remote Desktop; there's an option in there called something like Enable VNC Access. If you have another Mac, the somewhat bizarrely named Chicken Of The VNC is a solid (and free) client - not sure what the Windows options are but I think there are plenty of free ones out there.
 
You said the fan is no longer working? The card probably overheated because of it and fried it. You can find much better cards and they don't even cost $200. You can purchase certain PC graphic cards and flash them with a Mac rom.

Unless you need the ADC port, you can pick up a 64mb ATI 9000 with DVI/ADC ports for around $25. Those came stock in the latter dual MDDs.
 
thanks guys for the replies and info. looking for another GeForce on ebay right now and they're running around $130 which isnt great. my other option would be the 9800 so i guess we'll see. id like to have the GeForce back but money will decide unfortunately. I dont have a PC to do the flashing with so thats out but something i already considered.

ill be checking out that remore desktop too.....thanks again this really helped!
 
You can blind-flash on a Mac or set up screen sharing and use another Mac/PC to control your MDD to do the flashing.

What Geforce card do you have? Only ones that I can think of are the 6800 that are above $100?
 
The card i have now is a GeForce 4 4600 Ti.

Found a couple more on ebay so ill keep watching and see what happens. Hopefully i can grab another one for relatively cheap.

Any ideas on what are my best options for cards? My thoughts right now in order of how good they are:

Radeon 9800 PRO
4600 Ti
Radeon 9000
 
Same happened to my MDD. The Ti 4600 card just reached the end of its lifespan after years of heavy use. The fan gave out and the card overheated.

I tried both a 9600 and a 9800 after that. I can't remember now why I wasn't impressed by the 9600 and decided to upgrade the 9800, but the 9800 gave artifacts around the cursor and elsewhere. So I've got a Ti 4600 back in it now and it's running perfectly again.

I went for a card off ebay which was a straight pull from a still working machine, not a refurbished card.
 
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