DVI PCI Card/s for G3 Minitower

Hi & welcome! 🙂

Actually, VGA will give you more resolution(s) than DVI.

Radeon 7000

The 32MB of on-board DDR (Double Data Rate) RAM will also help, enabling your computer to display very high resolutions, up to 2048x1536 at 60Hz if your analog monitor supports it. Resolutions up to 1600 x 1200 are supported using digital flat-panel display, depending on the individual capabilities of your LCD monitor.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1004789/radeon7000.html

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/Graphics/radeon_7000_feedback.html

There were even better faster cards, but rarer, fastest I had were Formac cards, may have a couple somewhere around here.

Keep in mind that a Radeon 7000 must be one that was originally marketed/designed for use in Macs, not PCs. Certain PC versions of the card will work if their EEPROM chip has been flashed with Mac ROM code. Also, I found that you really need to be running OS 9.2.2 to support the Radeon driver package needed for smooth 2-D acceleration with these cards. As I recall, OS 8.6 and 9.1 didn't support that ATI driver package. The Radeon 9200 Mac Edition (128 MBs of DDR memory) was ATI's last PCI graphics card marketed for use in Macs.

Typically, you do not have to use the factory video port, unless you are using the factory video capture personality card, an optional feature on some of the Beige G3s that includes the RCA/stereo audio in/out ports. For video capture to work on the personality card, you have to have the video capture window displayed on a monitor connected to the built-in video port. If you are not doing video capture with that personality card, then you can operate just fine with PCI video cards and the built-in video not connected to anything.

Jeff writes:

The Radeon 9200 Mac Edition (128 MBs of DDR memory) was ATI's last PCI graphics card marketed for use in Macs.

I have a 9200 in a Beige G3 upgraded to a 500mHz processor. It does pretty well in OSX but the pre-OSX support is, IMHO, poor. ATI delayed the 9200's release as it coincided with the release of OSX and they apparently had to tweak things to make it workable in X. As a result a lot of OS 9 support was lost. Eventually they did release a driver package that made the card tolerable in OS9 but failed to tell anyone until much later that the only way the new drivers could work in OS9 was to delete EVERY ATI extension--including those installed by the OS--and then installing the new drivers.

In OSX, the 9200 did not support Quartz Extreme so 2D actions (scrolling, window dragging, some Dock functions were choppy. There was a hack to enable QE on for a PCI vidcard but I had other cards installed that could have been negatively affected by the hack, so never tried it.

The absolute best card I ever had in that Beige G3 was the original Radeon Mac Edition PCI 32MB. Worked well in both OS9 and OSX. You can tell the original from the less effective 7000 easily--the original had a cooling fan on the GPU.

The performance tests between the original Radeon and the 7000 are still posted here, 12 years later:

http://barefeats.com/gr7000.html

Remember to check the header of each chart for whether "better" is shown with a short or long bar. It varies.

Much to the damage to my ego,I have to admit that the other responders here have far nore knowledge than I on this, but in the meantime...

My guess is that the OS and/or Video drivers do not support 2 PCI video cards at the same time.

PS. Wonder what they think about trying a hack, like maybe running 2 instances of the Video Driver??? 😊

When you disconnected the monitor from the built-in port, did you also remove the VGA adapter from the port?

When the on-board video is first not being used, you might try to zap PRAM to force any cached display settings to update.

Hold down cmd-opt-P-R keys until you hear another startup chime.

I had used a single PCI ATI 9200 Mac Edition video card that supported dual independent extended displays on my G3 Desktop: one VGA and one DVI without the on-board video port used at all. I have never tried running two PCI video cards, but I think that should work. That is kind of the point of having PCI expansion slots, so you can expand the capability of the machine, I know of no reason why two video cards should not work at the same time.

Thanks Glen… I should've held off on my reply. 😊

I recall the Beige having a total PCI bus energy budget of 45W. Most vid cards of the era were 25W. A pair of vidcards could exceed what power is available in that model. There was some odd additive effect too; I remember seeing several references that if you have a 25W video card in the first slot (proper places) then you could add a 10W card and a 5W, but not two 10W. Even thought 25+10+10W matched the energy budget, apparently the machine would, in actual use, would not support it, forcing what effectively was a 40W limit--25+10+5W.

Reminds me of the great scene from "Apollo 13" where the engineers were trying to find every last bit of power to restart the command module without a buzzer going off!

I believe using the on-board video port for one monitor and another monitor attached to a PCI vidcard did not suffer this problem. I briefly tested this and it worked OK for a short period, but I lacked sufficient desk space to set this up long-term. That means had someone slammed a door anywhere in the house, the second monitor would have abandoned its precarious perch with extreme prejudice!

Good point about the power draw of the PCI cards, that could be an issue.

I have bought video cards from this eBay seller in the past, the overseas shipping does take a while, but otherwise service is good. They often have hard to find Mac video cards. Here are a couple G3 compatible cards that either one of them should work with dual-monitor in extended desktop mode all by itself, without using the on-board port at all.

http://stores.ebay.com/LOCAL338-ONLINE-STORE/Mac-Video-Card-/_i.html?_nkw=G3&sub mit=Search&_fsub=20773727&_sid=192203547

Great find Glen, not bad prices either! 🙂

And to Allan (and all, actually), how about a one dual-VGA card. Would that pull less watts than two separate cards? Also, does a dual card lock you into "mirror" mode? I certainly don't want that. I could also check the specs on the cards I have, and see what the wattage draw is.

Yes, one dual-head card should do the extra monitor without breaking the PCI power budget.

Not sure about the latter question but I believe that is a function of the card hardware/model, not the OS. It could also be coverd by driver updates--hopefully ones that run under OS8!

This is like old times--just wish now I'd not killed of so many brain cells by aging and drinking microbrew! The Beige was so wonderfully amenable to letting us "get under the hood" that, back in the day, the Beige G3 forums were full of great modding and upgrade discussions. I still have two "Beige Beast" towers that work, both modified--one heavily.