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Level 2

250 points

which AGP graphics Card to Buy

I have an 8X AGP graphics buss in a dual 1.8 G5. It runs on 5.5 gB of memory. I still have the original 5200 video card. I just bought a 24 inch NEC flat screen. I'm thinking of upgrading my video card to one of the flashed models I see on EBay, like the 7800 GS I've seen recommended other places on the mac discussion group..

I am a sound editor. My work involves a lot of Protools and also Photoshop quite a bit. I have a few concerns about getting a new video card, that I am hoping someone might be able to answer.

1. My 5200 card doesn't have a fan. All these faster cards have a dedicated fan. Noise is an issue when I am recording. Can someone tell me if a video card fan will add any extra noise than the fans that are already installed in my G5? Or should i expect, for example, a doubling of noise when i add a card? I notice that there's two versions of the 7800 GS, one with a copper fan, and one with a smaller aluminum fan. Do they generate the same amount of noise?

2. I don't play computer games. I don't do graphics modeling. I don't watch movies on my computer. However, the Protools screen is constantly refreshing as tracks move horizontally from right to left. Also, Protools takes every bit of computer power it can steal from the mac system. The main reason I would buy a new card is that I would assume it will take some of the graphics processing load off the CPU, with the result that Protools (and everything else) will work better. And look smoother. Is this a fair assumption? Or won't there much noticeable improvement, since i don't play computer games? Thanks for your help

Message was edited by: jim nollman

Message was edited by: jim nollman

Dual 1.8 G5 (Leopard) and 13 inch macbook (SnowL), Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Mar 16, 2010 3:33 PM

52 replies

Aug 15, 2010 9:38 AM in response to japamac

ok the 7800 gtx it is.
but 280$ for videocard of 6 years old is to al lot to much imo

Din't know geforce made of each of his models a mac and pc model?
of is tha a wrong presumption out of the post above.

The link is the only mac 7800's gtx i can find online and will send to belgium.
PC-7800's you find many.

Aug 15, 2010 9:41 AM in response to hackpheut

i thought cards were the same for mac-pc, just different drivers.

Swampus

Level 2

180 points

Aug 15, 2010 11:08 AM in response to hackpheut

It's not just the drivers (most of which are already included in Tiger & Leopard), but the ROM in the card itself. To my knowledge, there is only one card that was capable of being used on both a PC and Mac out of the box. It was a specific version of the Radeon 9600 and was problematic on some machines.

The Nvidia cards tend to be the more difficult ones to "flash" (change the ROM for use in Macs). I've only been 50% successful when flashing cards that are supposedly easy to flash (I'm really bad at this!). But even people who do this regularly have a failure rate and the cost of failed attempts needs to be recovered somehow. When you combine this with the fact that there are not a lot of high-end options available for older Macs, you're left with the traditional "Mac Tax" that we've always had to pay on video cards.

Swampus

Level 2

180 points

Aug 15, 2010 11:40 AM in response to Swampus

Adding...

I don't know if japamac (who is truly an expert on this subject) provided the eBay link as an example of the card or an endorsement of that particular seller (or both), but it might be possible to find a better deal if you check regularly. Just make sure you purchase from someone who has done this for a while and has good feedback.

Also, note that the seller japamac linked to has an OBO option. It never hurts to make an offer.

Aug 15, 2010 12:15 PM in response to Swampus

happy to have learned something about the insides!

Will have to check the cards in secondhand shops more regular.

This is solved for me TY VM.

jim nollman Author

Level 2

250 points

Aug 16, 2010 9:52 AM in response to hackpheut

for all the people (or maybe none) who have been following this thread since the start, I have recently repaired the problem that was making my computer freeze. I thought it might be useful to share the solution, since my own wrong-headed analysis of the actual problem, might color someone else's judgement about buying a flashed video card.

I apologize to anyone who has been promoting this after-market flashed video cards. In my own fervid attempt to solve the problem, i jumped to some conclusions about the cause, based mostly on the fact that my problem started so soon after installing the new video card. As it turns out, the card had nothing to do with the freeze problem.

What solved the freezes, was a methodical, one-at-a-time purging of caches and extensions, plist files, etc, using the utility cleanmymac. At this point, I am almost certain that the problem was caused by a third party program that had made it's way into my startup file. I cleaned out all the files that, either, i wasn't using, or didn't know what they were. I do believe the culprit was one of the three small programs that had made their way into startup to aid file functionality. I haven't had a crash now in almost a week.

Aug 16, 2010 10:02 AM in response to jim nollman

Thanks for the update. Not everyone who finds a solution posts updates, which doesn't help the rest of the community.

That being said, it is probably more common than we think about little "sleepers" creeping into places in cache folders and startup items folders and wreaking havoc on machines. Ferreting those out is not always easy, though Applejack can deal with the cache situation, for instance.

Again, thanks for the update!

which AGP graphics Card to Buy