Upgrading Rage card to Radeon 7000 worth it?

[arsbanned]

The computer is an early G4 Power Mac tower (Yikes mobo). I'm using the machine for Web browsing, e-mail and iTunes (). Would I see a performance improvement or should I save my money for a G5.
I may add a 7,200 RPM hard drive as well. I'd like to upgrade from CD ROM to burner but that seems problematic with the special ROM requirement and the prohibitive cost of Mac burners.

 

[blue&whiteman]

you will only see a small boost is 2D and a slightly larger boost in 3D. if you use the pci extreme hack to enable quartz extreme you will see a bigger 2D boost. I use the 7000 on my blue and white G3 which is the same computer as yours. the yikes G4 is a blue and white G3 with a gray case and a G4 cpu. everything else is identical.

if you are going to use the hack on it then buy it. things like expose, moving windows around, resizing windows are much faster with the hack.


the one place where the 7000 showed a huge boost was the itunes visualizer. my original rage 128 would get 12-26 fps. the 7000 gets over 60 if its a fast song.

 

[blue&whiteman]

I may add a 7,200 RPM hard drive as well. I'd like to upgrade from CD ROM to burner but that seems problematic with the special ROM requirement and the prohibitive cost of Mac burners.

faster hard drive helps a lot. your thoughts on burners are wrong though. I bought a liteon cdrw at a pc store for 90$, threw it in and have never had a problem in the 7 or 8 months I have had it. fully supported by itunes and the apple disk burner. never had one coaster even with the cheap cheap blanks.

 

[arsbanned]

Thanks for the quick replies. Good advice. On the CD Burner, can you boot it as well? My understanding is that it must have a Mac ROM to boot.
Regarding the video card, I would apply the Quartz Extreme PCI hack, so based on your input I will order the Radeon 7000.
When I got this machine I didn't think I'd be upgrading it at all but what the hell, it performs very nicelyl so why not.

 

[Horrortaxi]

When I got this machine I didn't think I'd be upgrading it at all but what the hell, it performs very nicelyl so why not.

Because if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

It will give you zero performance increase in email, web, etc. It will probably increase frame rate in the iTunes visualizer, and you'd notice an improvement in fps type games (that your computer probably won't play anyway).

If it will allow you to use Exposé or something useful then it might be worth it if you can get the card cheap enough.

I'd skip the Radeon and use the money for a bigger/faster hard drive and the CD burner. You'll actually benefit from having them.

 

[crazzyeddie]

Thanks for the quick replies. Good advice. On the CD Burner, can you boot it as well? My understanding is that it must have a Mac ROM to boot.

I can boot 10.3 off of a non-Apple CD-RW drive on my Beige G3 (with Xpostfacto, however, I dont know if that makes a difference or not).

 

[blue&whiteman]

Thanks for the quick replies. Good advice. On the CD Burner, can you boot it as well? My understanding is that it must have a Mac ROM to boot.
Regarding the video card, I would apply the Quartz Extreme PCI hack, so based on your input I will order the Radeon 7000.
When I got this machine I didn't think I'd be upgrading it at all but what the hell, it performs very nicelyl so why not.

the cdrw I have is built for pc even though it does work on my mac. I cannot boot from it though. I have a second hd I use to boot from and run tools on my main boot drive so the only time I ever need to swap out the cdrw for the original rom is to install an os. make sure you hang on to the original rom.

 

[yippy]

for the cd burner, you would be surprised how many are sercretly mac compatible. Go to www.xlr8yourmac.com and look in there drive compatibility database. It is a great tool to find a drive that will work and cheap. It is a bunch of reviews from people who have bought drives to put in there macs, many of them from best buy or circut city, and tells how they realy work, despite what the box may say. Check it out, they also have info and stats on hard drive and video card performance.

 

[arsbanned]

Yeah, I think at this point I will limit my upgrades to the burner (which I have on hand) and possibly a larger hard drive (have that on hand too). The video seems fine for what I am using the machine for.
OT, I installed the remote desktop client and can access my Windows machine via the LAN. Kinda cool, but almost pointless since I use a KVM switch.