PB G4 1.33 Graphics Upgrade

[The Hamburger]

I have the PB G4 1.33 with the standard ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM.

My Local mac dealer has told me its impossible to upgrade this card.

Please tell me it aint so.

I regularly edit 6mg photo's and it seems to take an age for them to load in compared to a XP machine with a similar(64mg) graphics card.

By the way this is my first mac and I am very pleased with evrything except for this.

Please help.

 

[Sun Baked]

I have the PB G4 1.33 with the standard ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM.

My Local mac dealer has told me its impossible to upgrade this card.

Please tell me it aint so.

Smart local dealer, no card on the logic board.

You'd have better luck trying to get somebody to updage the graphics chip inside your DVD Player and/or Television.

 

[The Hamburger]

Thanks for the answer.

So no way to get my photo's to load in quicker?

Cheers

 

[BrianKonarsMac]

what do u mean load in? transfer from camera? render on screen? open in a program (if so what program)? i dont think an upgrade video card would change your transfer speeds...you're looking for faster throughput i.e. a G5 and it's superior bandwidth, not to mention processor.

 

[vraxtus]

I have the PB G4 1.33 with the standard ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM.

My Local mac dealer has told me its impossible to upgrade this card.

Please tell me it aint so.

I regularly edit 6mg photo's and it seems to take an age for them to load in compared to a XP machine with a similar(64mg) graphics card.

By the way this is my first mac and I am very pleased with evrything except for this.

Please help.

That's not a VRAM issue, it's due to drive paging. The stock drive on PBs is 4200 RPM, so when you're loading larger images, it will take longer since the drive speed is slower than conventional desktop drives.

 

[titaniumducky]

I have the PB G4 1.33 with the standard ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM.

My Local mac dealer has told me its impossible to upgrade this card.

Please tell me it aint so.

I regularly edit 6mg photo's and it seems to take an age for them to load in compared to a XP machine with a similar(64mg) graphics card.

By the way this is my first mac and I am very pleased with evrything except for this.

Please help.

You can't change it, but the video card wouldn't help anyways. What you need is to make sure you have plenty of RAM and a faster hard drive. 512MB of RAM is a minimum - aim for 1 GB if you play with lots of big photos. For the hard drive, you can replace the internal one, have someone do it for you, or get an external 7200RPM drive. I advise the last one. Firewire should be plenty fast to transfer your files from the drive. If you do opt for the internal replacement, 7200RPM drives are expensive and kill battery life; you might just want to go for the 5400s.

Good luck with your new Mac!!!

 

[RiseAgainst]

Titanium is right.

Your video card isnt really doing all that much in this situation. What wou want is as much ram as you can stick in the PB if your gunna be dealing with 6 meg files. I think is can take up to 2 gigs. I usually deal with files around 3 megs and my 1 gig of ram in my PB is fine with it.

 

[The Hamburger]

I am using a program called Nikon View to look at the photo's NEF raw files.

Its the time it takes to load one photo after another when the program is already open. I guess this is on screen rendering.

I have 768mb of ram which I would have expected to be enough.

I was comparing it to similar spec notebooks not desktops ruunning ms xp.

the only big difference in spec's seemed to be my 64mb gc and their 124mb gc.

Thanks for the replies.

Maybe this is just the wrong machine for this use?

 

[Rod Rod]

it's most likely a software problem. Nikon probably rushed that application out the door.

how about trying the appropriate plug-in for your RAW data type in Photoshop? did Nikon give you a Photoshop plug-in?

 

[The Hamburger]

I use PS CS an awful lot.

You can get a raw plugin for it from the adobe site.

The reason I use Nikon Viewer is it loads photo's in for reveiw quicker than
PS.

Thanks

 

[James L]

I must echo what everyone else has said... your problem is not GPU related at all.

Fast HD, Fast CPU, LOTS OF RAM!!!!

 

[jared_kipe]

I would say physical ram and hard drive speed are more important than vram.