Upgrading a Graphics card for PowerBook G4?

Question

Upgrading a Graphics card for PowerBook G4?

I have a Dual 1GHz Power PC G4, with I am assuming an ATY, RV250 VRAM 64MB Graphics Card. Is there a better or more powerful card on the market today to upgrade what I have? Are there web sites that will help me understand the differences in graphics cards and their specs? Thanks for any info.

PowerB G4

Posted on May 9, 2009 11:23 AM

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Answer 1

May 9, 2009 11:27 AM in response to Scott Winterle1

Sorry, My laptop keeps doing weird things and the Return button was accessed before I could revise the information in my questions above...

What I really have is a 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 VRAM 128 MB graphics card. And I am wondering if there are other cards out there that are better or more powerful. My laptop currently processes video encoding at an alarmingly slow rate. I feel that it should be much better than what I am getting. Any thoughts are much appreciated.

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Answer 2

eww

Level 9

53,052 points

May 9, 2009 3:20 PM in response to Scott Winterle1

Hi, Scott. There is no way to upgrade the internal graphics capabilities of any Apple notebook computer. The graphics processor is always soldered to the main logic board. I believe the same is true of all or most other notebook computers as well.

Others who, unlike me, use their Powerbooks for video encoding may be able to tell you whether your machine's performance is up to par if you'll post information about how long some representative tasks are taking.

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Answer 3

May 9, 2009 4:19 PM in response to eww

Thanks for your response,

The most recent project I had involved Motion. I had a 2 minute video with applied effects. I Exported it to a Self-Contained QT movie and then Imported that into FCP (of which I use version 5.1.4). From there I encoded the QT movie in Compressor and it took about 90 minutes. Could this be because of the QT file? Or possibly because of the type of effects used? I had some fire and smoke effects in the video.

I also recently encoded a Photo Montage video I had created. The video is only about 5 minutes and I think it took somewhere between 2-3 hours to Encode.

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Answer 4

BGreg

Level 6

17,558 points

May 9, 2009 8:17 PM in response to Scott Winterle1

I have FCP 5.1.4 also, and I find it's gated not by the video card, rather, by the speed of the system, and to a lesser degree, amount of memory. When I encode, I turn off FCP displaying what it's doing, so that everything can go into the encoding.

To maximize it's encoding speed, ensure you have lots of empty disk space, have maxed out the memory, and of course nothing else running while it's encoding. I tilt the back up 3/4" or so, to get the maximum amount of airflow for cooling. Continguous disk space can be a good thing for video usage, and this Apple note talks to it: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375?viewlocale=en_US . Too bad they stopped making 7200 parallel ATA hard drives, as that could help encoding speed a bit too.

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