I'm happy to report that the cards arrived today.
After buying them, I was second guessing myself since I've read mixed reports about whether or not they would work in Quicksilvers(apparently some folks reported on the internet that some cards would work and some wouldn't). There were no issues with MDDs-just the Quicksilver.
So, on that note, I unboxed one of them and put it in my Digital Audio(close enough to a Quicksilver for most of this sort of testing). It immediately booted to a grey screen and a flashing question mark folder...I then remembered that I had disconnected the hard drive a couple of days ago for some other testing with a couple of hard drives, and had forgotten to reconnect it
In any case, I hooked the hard drive back up, and booted the computer back up to a blank screen. I stuck a PCI Rage 128 in the computer(I keep one by it because of the nature and amount of experimenting that I do with it) and booted it. Much like eyeyougren and I have been finding with the Fire Gl3, the card didn't even register in the AGP slot. Since it had worked briefly, though, I knew there was some hope.
One of the suggestions I'd found was to clean the contacts on the card thoroughly, so I grabbed a pencil eraser and went to town. After that, I wiped them down with denatured alcohol. I inserted and removed the card 10 times(another common suggestion) and held my breath while I hit the power button on the computer.
I immediately got a gray screen, and the computer booted right into Tiger. Unfortunately, however, it was not in color. The screen was
very hard to read, but I managed to navigate into the display pane in system preferences and was not able to get any color settings.
I went ahead and ran the driver CD that came with the card(even though I would have expected 10.4.11 to have 9600 drivers). Upon reboot, I had full resolution with millions of colors.
Most reports indicate that this card is actually inferior to the 9600XT that I've been using in my Quicksilver for a month or so now. Apparently when ATI adopted the "Pro" designation and doubled the VRAM, they did so at the cost of some other aspects of performance. Back in the day, when both cards were available side by side, the XT was actually more expensive.
Most of the benchmarks I've seen, however, look at them in an 8x AGP system. I'm going to install the card in my Quicksilver this weekend and run some benchmarks on both this and the XT.
On another note, a gun that I bought(new) back in November needs to go back to the factory for some service work. Ruger(the manufacturer) sent me a prepaid overnight Fed-Ex shipping label, and instructed me to package the gun securely in a plain, brown, unmarked box and drop it off at a hub. As it so happened, the box that the two video cards came in was the perfect size pack up the gun, and had no markings on it. That was perfect timing(I wish I could say the same about the gun
), and I'm set to return my gun tomorrow.