Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
I just bought a PowerMac G4 from the Ohio Thrift Store in Columbus for $20.20, and it didn't come with a video card. So will the above mentioned card work?
PowerMac
Hello, I doubt it, seems it's a Windows PC card, & no idea if it can be flashed with Mac ROMs needed to run it on a Mac.
Mac Video cards are not plentiful.
See japamacs page here on the best AGP cards for G4s & G5s...
http://www.jcsenterprises.com/Japamacs_Page/Blog/4B4B7BA2-7ABB-47F1-87AC-B03D379 42BEE.html
Rated slowest on top, fastest on bottom, hopefully japamac will drop in shortly.
It's the darker one. I may have been mistaken, it was probably 350MHz or above, it's been a while since I've touched it, so I guessed from memory.
OK.
That helps a lot.
This PM G4 can take 2 GBs of RAM
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/133SD512328/
While you have an AGP card that works, these early AGP model G4s used a 2X AGP slot and video card.
4X and 8X AGP card won't work in these Macs. As you discovered, 2X AGP cards for this PM ( called the G4 Sawttoth) are hard and very rare to come by and may have very slow VRAM.
The original AGP 2X card only had 16 MBs of VRAM.
The video card maybe one of the components that maybe slowing some of your PM G4 performance.
It is, probably, better, to consider the the much faster PCI graphics cards I linked as these will work in the PM's PCI slots ( which by the way are 100 MHz PCI slots in the early G4 models). Especially, the 128 MB VRAM video card I linked.
All of the other iLife and iWorks versions are the ones you need to run under OS X 10.4 Tiger.
Okay. I found mine on ebay, but I didnt know they were that rare.
The Sawtooth model G4s were the only ones that were designed with the 2X AGP video slot.
All other PowerMac G4 and G5 models came standard with either 4X and 8X AGP video slots. Later many Mac video cards were designed to be dual cards that could work in Macs that had either 4X or 8X AGP slots.
Dual cards, as in you needed a crossfire bridge? (I beleive it's called that.)
No,
The cards were just designed to work as a 4X speed AGP card if the card and OS X detected the card was inserted into an 4X AGP slot. If the card was inserted into an 8X AGP slot Mac,the card's hardware and OS X would detect that the card was inserted into an 8X AGP slot and would operate at the faster 8X AGP speeds.
No special hardware was needed.
Hmm. Interesting.
Here is a helpful Mac website and I've linked info about the ATI Radeon 9200 PCI 128 MB VRAM card I linked previously.
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/Graphics/mac_radeon_9200pci_tests.html#storytop
Will an ELSA TNT2 16G AGP video card run on my PowerMac G4?
