Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Where to get an ADC to DVI adapter in this day and age?

H

hunterjwizzard

macrumors member
Original poster
May 29, 2020
34
7
I've got an old PowerPC dual G4 I've been restoring during quarantine(I'm normally a windows weenie so it's been a fun experience). One of the first steps was to upgrade it with a new graphics card. Well I got that part done fine, but the new card has an ADC port and a DVI port that only actually puts out a VGA signal. Ok, great, ADC can be adapted to DVI right?

Well for whatever reason the adapter is practically impossible to find. In the ~6 months I've been scouring the web for one, the only actual offering I've found is for the "are you freaking kidding me?" price of $200. For reference, the Mac I am playing with can be had for about 90 bucks.

I don't get it. Its passive. This should be maybe a $5 adapter. Maybe $30 since its apple and old. $200? This cannot possibly be some sort of rare collectible.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Well for whatever reason the adapter is practically impossible to find. In the ~6 months I've been scouring the web for one, the only actual offering I've found is for the "are you freaking kidding me?" price of $200. For reference, the Mac I am playing with can be had for about 90 bucks.
Click to expand...

I had a similar experience earlier this year, trying and failing to track down one of these. If they can be obtained and at a reasonable price, please let me know!
 
weckart said:
Probably cheaper to flash a PC card
Click to expand...
It absolutely is. I tried searching high and low for one for my PM G5 and realized just buying a dual dvi card was by far the most economical option. It's kind of funny, like what other circumstance is it cheaper to buy a whole other graphics card rather than getting a simple adapter.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Project Alice and Amethyst1
You can find them readily on eBay But you’ll pay for that.The last couple I bought, I found earlier this year on shopgoodwill.com. IIRC I paid around $15 for a used one & $30 for a NIB one shipped.

Might be a bit more as we creep up on the holidays but they’re not too hard to find & can be an extra value if included in one of the many bundle auctions that show up on SGW. I also picked one up on CL Years ago with a 23” ACD monitor purchase.

Sounds like you don’t have an ADC monitor though, so a new gpu makes the most sense.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Slix
hunterjwizzard said:
I've got an old PowerPC dual G4 I've been restoring during quarantine(I'm normally a windows weenie so it's been a fun experience). One of the first steps was to upgrade it with a new graphics card. Well I got that part done fine, but the new card has an ADC port and a DVI port that only actually puts out a VGA signal. Ok, great, ADC can be adapted to DVI right?

Well for whatever reason the adapter is practically impossible to find. In the ~6 months I've been scouring the web for one, the only actual offering I've found is for the "are you freaking kidding me?" price of $200. For reference, the Mac I am playing with can be had for about 90 bucks.

I don't get it. Its passive. This should be maybe a $5 adapter. Maybe $30 since its apple and old. $200? This cannot possibly be some sort of rare collectible.
Click to expand...
I'm just wondering why you went with a card that has an ADC port and not one of the many available for Mac (stock or flashed) that have two DVI ports or DVI/VGA?

There are a couple of early G5 cards that did have ADC, but for the most part a card with ADC is not an upgrade to me in light of all the other cards available.

If price was the issue, well a Radeon 9200 has DVI and VGA. If you're looking for dual DVI then a FireGL X3 (flashed) can be had for a decent price and there are some NVIDIA dual DVI cards out there that can also be flashed. There's also a G5 version of the 9800 Pro that has dual DVI that can be used (need to tape pins, like with the Fire GL).

I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound critical, I just don't see a point in using an ADC card, much less it being an 'upgrade'.
 
RhianB said:
You can find them readily on eBay But you’ll pay for that.The last couple I bought, I found earlier this year on shopgoodwill.com. IIRC I paid around $15 for a used one & $30 for a NIB one shipped.

Might be a bit more as we creep up on the holidays but they’re not too hard to find & can be an extra value if included in one of the many bundle auctions that show up on SGW. I also picked one up on CL Years ago with a 23” ACD monitor purchase.

Sounds like you don’t have an ADC monitor though, so a new gpu makes the most sense.
Click to expand...

I think you may be confusing my post with the active DVI-to-ADC adapter. Those are incredibly easy to find(never seen fewer than 8 on ebay) and while they do average about $40, they offer no assistance to me as I don't own an ADC monitor. I need to go FROM the ADC port TO a DVI display.

eyoungren said:
I'm just wondering why you went with a card that has an ADC port and not one of the many available for Mac (stock or flashed) that have two DVI ports or DVI/VGA?

There are a couple of early G5 cards that did have ADC, but for the most part a card with ADC is not an upgrade to me in light of all the other cards available.

If price was the issue, well a Radeon 9200 has DVI and VGA. If you're looking for dual DVI then a FireGL X3 (flashed) can be had for a decent price and there are some NVIDIA dual DVI cards out there that can also be flashed. There's also a G5 version of the 9800 Pro that has dual DVI that can be used (need to tape pins, like with the Fire GL).

I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound critical, I just don't see a point in using an ADC card, much less it being an 'upgrade'.
Click to expand...
Hey, no offense taken.

Breaks down like so:
*I was not comfortable using any sort of flashed/modded/taped card. That sort of thing has traditionally not worked out for me(though I did have a pencil-modded AMD that ran great for YEARS). For this project, whatever I bought had to be stock.

*So, the card I bought had an ADC port and a DVI port - silly me I thought I'd just use the DVI port(I only needed 1 monitor). For whatever reason, its DVI but only outputs a VGA signal. Go figure.
**When I made the decision to buy an ADC/DVI card, I believed the adapter could be located with a reasonable amount of searching and a little patience. I'm dumbfounded at how wrong I was.

*When I installed the current card(Geforce 4) there was some minor damage to to the AGP port, the Mac is old and the plastic in places quite brittle. The fit was also let's call it "snug"; getting the card installed was a very scary process(and that's coming from a guy who takes apart and rebuilds computers for fun). So when I did learn that the DVI port was a bust, I was in a tough way. I didn't want to risk damaging the computer, and I was still back at square one with finding a factory-stock dual DVI card(as far as I could tell, one was never made for the G4).

So anyway, that's the carnival of failures that led me here. I mean, it's not overwhelmingly vital; its not like I havem't got a small collection of VGA screens. But I'd like to have the mac tied in to my KVM setup so I can use it with my usual monitor/keyboard/mouse, and that requires a digital signal. I DO in fact have a VGA-to-DVI Scaler amongst my eclectic collection, but for various reasons too complex to get into that's limited to 1024x768.

So, in conclusion, yes I have kind of painted myself into a corner, but here I am.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Breaks down like so:
*I was not comfortable using any sort of flashed/modded/taped card. That sort of thing has traditionally not worked out for me(though I did have a pencil-modded AMD that ran great for YEARS). For this project, whatever I bought had to be stock.

*So, the card I bought had an ADC port and a DVI port - silly me I thought I'd just use the DVI port(I only needed 1 monitor). For whatever reason, its DVI but only outputs a VGA signal. Go figure.
**When I made the decision to buy an ADC/DVI card, I believed the adapter could be located with a reasonable amount of searching and a little patience. I'm dumbfounded at how wrong I was.

*When I installed the current card(Geforce 4) there was some minor damage to to the AGP port, the Mac is old and the plastic in places quite brittle. The fit was also let's call it "snug"; getting the card installed was a very scary process(and that's coming from a guy who takes apart and rebuilds computers for fun). So when I did learn that the DVI port was a bust, I was in a tough way. I didn't want to risk damaging the computer, and I was still back at square one with finding a factory-stock dual DVI card(as far as I could tell, one was never made for the G4).

So anyway, that's the carnival of failures that led me here. I mean, it's not overwhelmingly vital; its not like I havem't got a small collection of VGA screens. But I'd like to have the mac tied in to my KVM setup so I can use it with my usual monitor/keyboard/mouse, and that requires a digital signal. I DO in fact have a VGA-to-DVI Scaler amongst my eclectic collection, but for various reasons too complex to get into that's limited to 1024x768.

So, in conclusion, yes I have kind of painted myself into a corner, but here I am.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, I do believe your only course of action is to either bite the bullet in paying the exorbitant price for the adaptor, or to replace the video card. You shouldn't have to dive into the wild world of card flashing, though, as later G5 models didn't even have ADC ports. It seems they killed it off quite quickly, and honestly I'm not surprised.

As far as I know, the Radeon 9600 in my PMG5 is a stock part, and it's dual DVI, so that should be a possible alternative to an overpriced adaptor. I actually see one on ebay right now. It's not exactly cheap, but it's under $100, slightly.

Yeah, buying a cheaper card and flashing it will save you a lot more, but if you're not up for that, there are other options.
 
I had exactly the same problem when I bought my G5 - it has a Radeon 9600 with DVI and ADC. The DVI part works fine, but for the life of me I couldn't find any ADC-DVI adapters so I could plug a second DVI monitor into it.

As you point out there are lots of DVI-ADC adapters on eBay, for the dwindling number of people who have an ADC LCD and want to use it with a DVI port. On the one hand ADC-DVI should be a lot simpler (it doesn't have to power the monitor) but on the other it must have been a niche market.

In the end I bought a second-hand ADC monitor, a 17-inch studio display just for the sheer magnificence of all that transparent plastic. A GPU with dual DVI ports would be easier to fit through the post.
 
Last edited:
hunterjwizzard said:
I think you may be confusing my post with the active DVI-to-ADC adapter. Those are incredibly easy to find(never seen fewer than 8 on ebay) and while they do average about $40, they offer no assistance to me as I don't own an ADC monitor. I need to go FROM the ADC port TO a DVI display.


Hey, no offense taken.

Breaks down like so:
*I was not comfortable using any sort of flashed/modded/taped card. That sort of thing has traditionally not worked out for me(though I did have a pencil-modded AMD that ran great for YEARS). For this project, whatever I bought had to be stock.

*So, the card I bought had an ADC port and a DVI port - silly me I thought I'd just use the DVI port(I only needed 1 monitor). For whatever reason, its DVI but only outputs a VGA signal. Go figure.
**When I made the decision to buy an ADC/DVI card, I believed the adapter could be located with a reasonable amount of searching and a little patience. I'm dumbfounded at how wrong I was.

*When I installed the current card(Geforce 4) there was some minor damage to to the AGP port, the Mac is old and the plastic in places quite brittle. The fit was also let's call it "snug"; getting the card installed was a very scary process(and that's coming from a guy who takes apart and rebuilds computers for fun). So when I did learn that the DVI port was a bust, I was in a tough way. I didn't want to risk damaging the computer, and I was still back at square one with finding a factory-stock dual DVI card(as far as I could tell, one was never made for the G4).

So anyway, that's the carnival of failures that led me here. I mean, it's not overwhelmingly vital; its not like I havem't got a small collection of VGA screens. But I'd like to have the mac tied in to my KVM setup so I can use it with my usual monitor/keyboard/mouse, and that requires a digital signal. I DO in fact have a VGA-to-DVI Scaler amongst my eclectic collection, but for various reasons too complex to get into that's limited to 1024x768.

So, in conclusion, yes I have kind of painted myself into a corner, but here I am.
Click to expand...
Yeah, unfortunately there isn't much you can do here. The early G5's came with the adapter in the box. I had one at one point, but when I took the G5 I was using it with back to work it stayed. I guess they became rare because it was only for those early models.

For whatever it may be worth, here's the model number for the Belkin version of the adapter: f2e9142

I tried to find the Apple part number for this (makes it easier to search on eBay), but couldn't find it.

It sounds like your only option here is to get a new card that has DVI. Of course, that probably won't be 'stock' but some of the cards that have been mentioned in this thread were made for Mac (no flashing involved). Of course you may have to tape pins, but at this point I think you have to pick your poison.
 
Belkin also made an adapter which means it had to have been mass-produced on some level. I would also have thought that people wanting to use ADC cards with DVI monitors would be worlds more common than people with ancient studio displays, but no. For some reason there's still enough of a market to keep a steady supply of DVI-to-ADC adapters available, but none whatsoever for the other way around. So weird.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Belkin also made an adapter which means it had to have been mass-produced on some level. I would also have thought that people wanting to use ADC cards with DVI monitors would be worlds more common than people with ancient studio displays, but no. For some reason there's still enough of a market to keep a steady supply of DVI-to-ADC adapters available, but none whatsoever for the other way around. So weird.
Click to expand...
The acrylic Cinema Displays and Studio Displays (of which I have one and two respectively) were (and are) highly sought after. These were Apple's Pro displays and they are still good quality. Good enough in fact that my displays are still in use for my job, connected to a 2009 Mac Pro. Apple only changed to DVI once the aluminum displays came out and that was only when they launched the G5.

Since the acrylic displays were also sold with G4 purchases as part of the entire system, most people buying a G4 got one of these displays. I think that's probably why they turned out to be more prevalent than DVI displays. You could get a G4 cheaper of course, through a third party. But the cheaper offerings for complete systems at the time usually meant a flat screen CRT.

I don't think it helped either that DVI displays from 2002 to around 2005 (when Apple stopped selling Macs with ADC ports) were expensive. A flat-screen CRT was more reasonable. During that time period, gamers and high-end designers mainly had LCD DVI screens and they paid for them. Only once HDMI started to become popular did the prices on LCD DVI displays start to drop. Today you can pick one up at the Goodwill for less than $10, but back then they weren't cheap.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Amethyst1
A bit of Googling reveals that a company called Dr Bott released the DVI Extractor II, which also adapted DVI monitors to ADC connectors:

Dr. Bott offering DVI Extractor II

www.macworld.com www.macworld.com

It seems to have been specifically aimed at G4 Cube and Power Mac G4 owners, which makes sense given that the G5s were released right at the tail end of the ADC era.

Amazon even has a picture of it, although the only one on sale is £40:
www.amazon.co.uk

Dr. Bott DVI Extractor II Adapter for PC with DVI Display

Dr. Bott DVI Extractor II Adapter for PC with DVI Display
www.amazon.co.uk

There's a handful of things that I should have bought in 2004, but didn't, and now in 2020 they've vanished from the face of the Earth. Batteries for the Kodak DCS 14n, that's one thing, and ADC-DVI converters is the other. Luckily I kept hold of my MadCatz Game Boy Camera PC serial cable.
 
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
  • Like
Reactions: dextructor
The thing is, as it's a simple passive adapter you can build one yourself; sourcing a male ADC connector's the problem though.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1042686
Amethyst1 said:
The thing is, as it's a simple passive adapter you can build one yourself; sourcing a male ADC connector's the problem though.
Click to expand...
You might as well solder a DVI connector onto the graphics card. It sounds like a fiddly job either way.
 
Johnny365 said:
How is this different? https://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-DVI-...349944&hash=item2af5702fbd:g:5ocAAOSw42Nfl10F

Isn't this adapter converting a ADC connection on the graphics card to output to a DVI monitor?
Click to expand...

That adapter does the opposite - to allow to connect an old-school ADC monitor to a (potentially more modern) DVI input.

What the OP was after is in the reverse, and theoretically much simpler because ADC is really just DVI+power+USB, so the adapter just needs to be a passive one that excludes the pins for power and USB. But in reality perhaps it was quite a niche need so not many adapters were produced.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Amethyst1 and TheShortTimer
r6mile said:
Just by way of update, I agreed to sell my unused Formac ADC-DVI passive adapter to the OP - it's on its way through the post!
Click to expand...
Said adapter arrived today, plugged in and worked instantly. One I had the adapter the Max saw my modern display on first boot(this is no small feat - it goes through a KVM then a signal booster and THEN a second video switcher before reaching the actual monitor). Having a lot of fun getting it to "talk" to my modern windows network but after I got some cable problems sorted it at least saw my NAS without issue.

Time to start gleafully downloading ancient software. Anyone know any really classic RPGs that never got a PC release?
 
  • Like
Reactions: r6mile
They used to be so common. They were all over the place on Amazon and eBay. However they seem to have completely dried up over the last few years. I also need one, and I'm tempted to build my own by 3D printing the ADC connector and adding the necessary metal pins, then soldering it up to an HDMI port.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back