which AGP graphics Card to Buy

Many thanks for the helpful guidance, Japamac. It sounds like my best bet is the 7800 GS, both for fan efficiency and outright graphics speed.

I had originally thought of using the 24 inch, in tandem with my older NEC 19 inch. But after a few days, I have decided that 24 inches is about all my eyes can focus on while working.

Too bad you bought 7800. I didn't have a good feeling about it for my older system. I finally decided it was way more card than I (or anyone with an old G5) probably needs or can even handle. But info is scarce, and no one else can tell you much about noise in your own room. I finally used my gut and bought the "second best" which is the 6800. I just installed it this morning.

It cost me $110 with free shipping on EBay. I don't see any 7800s for less than $190 if you include shipping. That's a huge difference in price. I think the 7800 is about 25% faster at best.

I mostly figured the 6800 had all the same upgraded features and extra memory as the 7800. I also realized I have an old power supply, and i don't want to stress it with that larger (and almost certainly noisier) 7800 fan. Plus I do plan to get a new desktop mac in about 18 months. Plus I never play computer games which is where the market for the 7800 seems to be.

The 6800 seems almost silent once the computer's been on for 5 minutes. I can already tell the screen upgrades faster and sharper. I haven't yet put it through its paces in Protools, which is where it will really show if it improves my graphics experience.

For anyone else trying to decide to make this upgrade, I'd say go for it. But unless you absolutely need the whizziest thing possible, get the 6800 and save yourself a hundred bucks and know you just got a huge speed upgrade. i wish I'd been able to read my own post a month ago.

Attaching the molex splitter cable is no big deal. Actually, the hardest part of the install, was trying to feed that tiny tiny screw back into the slot that hold the card in place. If you don't feel comfortable dinking around inside your box, then take it to the local computer guy and give him a $20 bill. It takes 10 minutes.

One more thing. The most immediate difference between the new 6800 card and my G5s original video card, is the experience of simply scrolling down a screen. With my new large 24 inch monitor, scrolling had turned into a choppy kind of motion. Now it is smooth as silk. I find this to be a big deal, since almost everything on the screen involves scrolling.

I want to revisit this old thread, because i have some news that might influence others in my same position.

The first 6800 card i bought on EBay had been a hassle for me to connect, because of the need to power its onboard fan, which demanded a splitter cable that would connect from my DVD burner. I can easily imagine that a pro computer guy would say it's an easy connect. But I'm not a pro computer guy, and I can tell you for sure it took me an hour to get into those spaces to make the connections secure.

The card died after a week. I immediately wrote the seller. He told me to throw away the dead one, and he'd send me another one that was "even faster". His casual reply suggested that dead cards was part of his biz, because the testing on his part was less than rigorous.

The new card arrived yesterday. This one has two power connectors, so he included a second splitter to connect to the one i had used originally. Yesterday afternoon I spent an hour trying to get it to work. Eery time I hooked it up an alarm on the card went off. I wrote the seller. He said the alarm was telling me it wasn't connected properly.

This morning I tried again. This time I noticed that one of the wires (the red one) on the original splitter was burnt to a crisp. That probably explains why the first card died. It certainly explained why the second card kept setting off an alarm.

So once again, I re-installed my original G5 video card just to be able to do my work. By comparison, the original card demands no extra cabling. It took me 5 minutes to seat it and get it to work properly.

So now I have 2 choices. I can go find myself another splitter cable and try either or both of the whizzy 6800 cards. But i will always be concerned that it is generating way more heat than my G5 is able to deal with properly. Or i can stick with my original card, and experience some sluggishness when i have 4 tabs open in safari and other such examples that push the limits of video. Mostly, i may choose the latter, but only because i don't want to have to go deep into my machine again and spend an hour trying to unplug the burnt splitter and replace it with a new splitter.

Hope this helps anyone else in this position.

I see no possible reason to tell you his name. I will tell you that he was an ethical person to work with. He sent me another 6800 card quite quickly. The new one was an "ultra", and it needed a second Y cable, because this card had two power inputs. The new card came with way more heat sink, and a much bigger fan, which actually took up two spaces in the rack. When i questioned him about the logic of using 2 Y-connectors in series, he told me if I didn't want to go there, he'd refund all my money. After some thought, i felt the new card was much built way better for handling the heat buildup. So I installed it.

That was a week ago. I also installed a utility program that let's me keep track of the temperature and fans throughout the G5 box. One day, when i had 6 tabs open in Safari, the GPU got up to 135 degrees. That seems OK to me. However, I also need to say, that if I had tried 6 tabs using my original G5 card and my new 24 inch monitor, the whole system would have slowed to a crawl.

I wrote the guy yesterday. I told him the new card was working great. And i thanked him for standing by me.

yes i see your point. I meant no offense to Japamac. I was mostly nonplussed to get asked for his name in such an impersonal place as Mac Discussions.

His EBay name is Lvlinux. I would definitely buy from him again. You hear so many bad stories about people getting duped by EBay marketers. This guy stayed with me, letting me know that he was quite aware that I didn't have the technical savvy to make the best decision about such an obscure thing as an aftermarket video card. The best thing he did, in my opinion, was not ask me to send back the first (dead) card, before he'd send out a replacement.

I'd like to revisit this issue of using third party "flashed" video cards on a G5, for an important reason.

I have used the 6800 card i bought on EBay for a few months now. It seems to work fine, although the fan can sometimes be a tiny bit annoying. Honestly, i don't notice much of a difference in "speed", although that is very likely just that i am not paying attention.

Soon after I installed the new card, something troubling started occurring every time I booted up in the morning. My computer freezes every single day as the white apple first shows onscreen, and the pinwheel starts turning. So I use the start button to turn it off, then immediately start it up again. EVERY second time, it starts up fine, and I have no problems throughout the day. But the next day, the same thing happens again.

I have been trying to solve that problem for several weeks now, with no luck. Now I suspect that this flashed video card MAY BE to blame. I'd like another opinion.

Many people have recommended that I run "hardware test". For some unknown reason, I can't get it to work. This is probably a result of the fact that my G5 came bundled with Tiger, and the Leopard upgrade I bought much later, has no hardware test on the disc. Yes, I am following all the directions from the Tiger readme file, but i probably need a copy of G5 based Leopard to get it to work. I have even tried a friend's Leopard-based hardware test, but that doesn't work either, almost certainly because his copy came bundled with an imac.

This morning i did a thorough reading of everything in my system via system profiler. I found something that may be relevant to this freeze problem. SP lists the product number of both my video card and my monitor. But at the bottom of that same page it also informs me that no monitor is connected to the G5. That is obviously untrue, since I use it every day. So now I'm wondering if the culprit to my daily freezes may have something to do with the flash ROM in the video card, giving a false reading to the system. Truly, I am out on a limb here, but I am considering EVERY possibility to solve this issue of my daily morning freezes. One thing of note, the freezes did start occurring soon after I installed that 6800 card i bought on EBay. But not immediately after.

I can't locate the guy who sold the card to me, and who did the flash. VLinux is his name, and I suspect he has changed his working EBay name for some reason, hopefully not because a lot of other people started complaining about problems just like mine.

Any guidance is much appreciated.