G3 Minitower Graphics Card Upgrade

Hello, King A,

Can you tell us what you plan to do with the Beige G3 that needs an video card?

The on-board ATIRage64 chipset is not a bad OSX performer if you max out your VRAM to 6MB. Run Apple System Profiler in OS9, look at the "Devices and Volumes" page, and see what amount of VRAM is installed. It's listed under the "F1" (phantom) PCI slot. Stock is 2MB; some models shipped with 4 or 6MB. The 4MB VRAM upgrade modules are pretty cheap on auction sites.

There are a lot of folks here happily running OSX for routine tasks with the on-board chipset.

If you have more taxing needs for video horsepower, tell us what they are and we can make some targeted suggestions.

There really is, at present, only one off the shelf card option: ATi 9200 PCI
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/ATI%20Technologies/100436011/

Other options include eBay for a flashed card (PCI) or the R7000 Mac Edition (PCI) or the OLD original "Mac Radeon". I have an old R7000 and it is not much of a card. The 9200 and the original MERadeon are better IMO. If you are totally OLD SCHOOL and run OS9 and don't care about dead end products you could also look at old 3DFX Voodoo 5500s but there is no OSX support and unless you have a specific GLIDE game in mind don't bother. If you want this card you can have mine. IT was a cool card in it's day with dual GPUs... awsome but totally DOA now.

D2.

King A,

For what you will be doing, there is an card older than the Radeon series that can handle those tasks. It the the ATI Rage 128 Orion. It has a 128-bit graphics processing unit (GPU) that is considerably more robust than the 64-bit GPU on your logic board, and has 16MB VRAM. I used one for a long time, including with Jag when one of my Radeons lost a cooling fan, and it is a very good card. Used price is probably in the US$15-35 range.

"Orion" was the name appended to the retail boxed version of that card. More common on the used/pulled market is its twin, the ATI Rage 128 Pro PCI model. It was factory-installed in B&W G3s and early G4s with PCI graphics. Be careful--there is also an AGP version of the Rage 128 Pro, so you have to make sure anything you order or bid for is PCI or you're out of luck.

Dave speaks highly of the original Radeon Mac Edition 32MB card, and I heartily concur. My RME was much more stable than my current 9200. The 9200 can cause OS9 graphics apps to crash, and is overkill for most things a Beige G3 can do. The only app I have that really uses the 9200 is my flight sim, which wants over 100MB VRAM at the settings I run.

This article shows the facts behind Dave's opinion of the Radeon ME 7000 compared to the original Radeon ME. Facts is facts--it is not the card that its older brother was.

Original Radeon Mac Editions are hard to find. It took me several months to score one after the weaknesses of the RME 700 were revealed, and I paid a premium for it.

Suggestion: whatever card you get, try it with the built-in driver sets that come with Jag before installing newer drivers from the ATI web site. I used the new drivers on the 9200's CD and they reduced my 2D performance (scrolling, Dock functions, etc.) by 25 percent according to XBench benchmarks. When I had to reinstall Jag, I tried the 9200 with the OSX bundled drivers and the 2D performance returned to their old levels and the card works fine.

Again--I can't say this enough--remember you are shopping for a PCI card, not AGP. The AGP cards are getting more common on the used market, and some sellers on eBay aren't even showing PCI or AGP in their product descriptions.

Here's the link to a response I posted in December that covers most of the ATI PCI cards:

Monitor Compatibility G3 266mt

Allan

Right now im running Jag with the built in apple ATI extentions and im useing a Radeon 7000. So updating the extentions with the ati supplied ones work worse than the apple supplied ones i take it??? or is that a 9200 problem only or does it apply with the R7K to

I don't know, Frank. I jumped from the original Radeon Mac Edition directly to the 9200, so never had the chance to test the 7000.

There was quite a delay in releasing the 9200. They took it to one of the big trade shows early in the year where it misbehaved as badly as a beta release of the next Windoze operating system; they had to pull it from display amid a cacophony of catcalls. It was many months after the original release date that the cards showed up in stock.

I already had an original Radeon 32MB (pre-7000) when I upgraded to Jag, and did nothing with drivers or ATI updates as long as the card was installed. I simple let Jag handle it. Never a hiccup--absolutely stellar performance.

My problems started when I used the CD drivers that came with the 9200. When I had to do an Archive and install for another reason, I resisted using the CD extensions again, choosing instead to see if Jag's built-in drivers were sufficient. The OSX trouble went away.

The only ATI updates I currently have running are the ROM upgrades that ATI put out. I contacted ATI and got a response from a tech who probably thought "Mac" was a hamburger. Gave up and have been OK with the 9200 as long as I stay in OSX, or tackle only minimal graphics tasks in OS9.

I've found that a visit to the Accelerate your Macintosh news site after any release of a new ATI driver set is a good idea. Any bugs that turn up get reported almost immediately, and some guy named Bruno from ATI often responds to comments. Handy, and a real trouble saver.

AJ

yea i went to there to add a few thing to the driver data base like the pioneer drive i have. but yea i use the ATI driver updates in OS 9 and the stock ones in OS X its runs great. i was hoping that ATI's drivers would make things run a bit better in OS X but it seems i should leave better enuff alone

.... My RME was much
more stable than my current 9200. The 9200 can cause
OS9 graphics apps to crash, and is overkill for most
things a Beige G3 can do...

Hi Allan,

I was just considering getting a Radeon 9200 for my Beige, but am now unsure, (after reading your post), that it would be worth doing(?). I plan on using graphic apps in both OS9 and OSX, and will sometimes need to deal with videos for the web (i.e. relatively small file sizes).

I have 6MB of Video Memory and a ViewSonic P815 CRT monitor that is currently set to 1152x870, with a refresh rate of 75Hz.

What I noticed about the Radeon 9200 is that when set to 1152x870, it has a max refresh rate that is still only 75Mz. Is it the 128Mb DDR that makes a noticeable difference?

Thanks,
~Kathleen