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PowerMac G4 Sawtooth (AGP) Graphics card

G

GLaDOS

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 7, 2008
8
0
Well I just got my first mac, a G4 sawtooth. It has the standard 16MB rage pro in, and I wanted to upgrade that. I had a spare nVidia TNT2M64 (32MB) lying around, and I put it in. When I started the mac up, nothing came on the screen even thought the fan worked on the card. I also tried a 4MB Matrox from my ancient 'puter. neither of these worked. Why is this, and will a standard PCI GFX card work, or do i need mac specalised cards?


Thanks
 
You need a Mac specific card. Basically the hardware is the same, but before it's shipped it has a Mac driver put on it to be recognized. People have taken PC cards and put the Mac driver on themselves (called flashing) but I have no experience with that and is only recommended by experienced ones.

That machine has a 133mhz 2xAGP slot and three 33mhz PCI slots. Although your choices are slim, you can get a fairly cheep card in there. But don't expect to do any modern 3D stuff.

Congrats on your first Mac. Panther or Tiger would be the optimal OS's for that machine.

n8
 
so a standard PCI GFX card would not work then?

I am running Tiger.
 
G4 Options

GLaDOS said:
so a standard PCI GFX card would not work then?

I am running Tiger.
Click to expand...

I have a Powermac G4, but I have the MDD version of it.

Since you have an AGP card you can use only AGP graphic cards for your machine. That is actually great because you have many choices.
Some of the Apple / Mac cards you can use are:

ATI 9000 card, ATI 9600, ATI 9700, ATI 9800, and maybe the G-Force 4 Ti.

Since you work with Tiger, your best option would be the ATI 9600, the ATI 9700 and the ATI 9800, because they support Quarz Extreme and Core. You can find them on E-bay.

I am not sure if your model supports that, but ATI's 9600 card has two DVI ports which support two monitors. On older G4 models I have heard that you can put in a second PCI graphic card in order to use two monitors, - one on every card.
I have seen the ATI 9200 PCI card from time to time on E-bay, and I think that is the one used for the second monitor on older G4 models.

Good luck !
 
Usually you need another GPU in a PCI slot (if you're flashing an AGP card) or vice-versa if you're flashing a PCI card, but if you google you can find a lot of how-tos.
 
I don't have the links saved anymore but you can flash the AGP cards blindly by letting the software run at startup. I've done it with ATI cards but I never flashed an Nvidia card before so I don't know if it's the same process or not. I also used Chincken of the VNC to flash the card using another Mac to see the screen and run the program.

Just google for it and you'll find plenty of guides and the Mac Roms too to flash it with.
 
got myself a 9200 128mb PC for a tenner.

I'll google.

ah. I don't have a PCI gfx card, and the cheapest i can find is £30. so i can't do it.
 
you can also do the procedure running a VNC server on your mac and control it remotely with another computer. I did so when I flashed an ATI 9800 for my G4. You can see everything even whitout a GFX card installed.

You should find some useful information at http://www.strangedogs.com/
 
And, if you have a sawtooth, you have not to tape any AGP pins of the graphics card,this isn't mentioned clearly but it's not needed to do that with sawtooth G4s.

good luck and happy flashing
 
Coupla Corrections

9600 are a No-Go with Sawtooth and Giga E....wrong AGP standard.

And the correct link to Strangedogs is:

http://strangedogs.proboards40.com/

The STrangedogs.com domain was taken over by the Official Site Troll who hijacked it for his nefarious purposes...it is a dead end of nonsense now.

The ROM are at TheMacelite Wiki FWIW.

Also, the 9200 is a tricky one. Only certain cards work and you need to be sure whther the dev id is 5960 or 5961 and choose the appropriate ROM.

Better off with a 9800 that looks like the ref board...NEEDS TO BE IDENTICAL...gives you Core Image which frees up the CPU.
 
so the 9200 doesn't do core image?

and it can be done without booting into DOS?
 
9200 uses the "value" version of the 8500 GPU

Is of 2001 era

Does NOT do Core Image, no pixel shaders in OpenGl (water will be solid blue in Halo)

IF it is a compatable card, it will be flashable in Mac....UNLESS it has a non-compatble ROM chip. (ie, even if 64K issue isn't an issue, sometimes the chip itself isn't one that existed when Mac flasher utility was written and is an unknown chip)

There is much 9200 flashing info buried at Cubeowner.com. Until Strangedogs work allowed 5200/6200 flashing, 9200 was best Cube card. As both 5200 and 6200 do have Core Image, they took over for Cubes.
 
sorry for no reply, been extremely busy :rolleyes:

well i'll try sand find that in £££, and if I do, I'll report on my findings.


Thanks everyone!
 
Oh ok. I have a PCI gfx card now, but it's from a PC. Would that need flashing also?
 
GLaDOS said:
Oh ok. I have a PCI gfx card now, but it's from a PC. Would that need flashing also?
Click to expand...

Don't take this the wrong way, but you aren't absorbing what you are being told. No PC video cards will work in your Mac without flashing. Period.

Many if not most will not work even with flashing. To find compatible cards, try Googling "G4 flash video card" or some variant and read up.
 
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