About to buy a Graphics card, need a little assurance

H

Hidden Gekko

3 Years and 100 Posts 0_o
I'm finally about to buy an ATI 9800 Pro, and before I do, I wanna make sure of a few things.

I already chatted about buying one with another member, now I just need to make the purchase - which is a fairly large one.

I have a Mirror Drive G4, the last of the G4 towers. It's the most standard version with a few RAM upgrades and an additional harddrive - which I installed. The 9800 pro is one monster of a graphics card. So...

Will I need any additional cables? My Mac came with the 8500 card.

The card will fit securly in the case, correct? Stupid question, I know it will :rolleyes:

Are Graphics cards easy to install and easy to maintain? I don't want this thing pouring out smoke or meltin' on me...

I know the set will come with installation instructions, but I just wanna know ahead of time.

Lastly and most importantly, I need to know if this is a secure site to purchase from and if anyone else has made a good buy from it. The member I talked to reffered me here.

http://www.shopperwiz.com/shopdisplaydetail.asp?id=96718228

I'm sure it's a good site - and the card is a hundred bucks cheaper than regular, but I've never seen the site before and it doesn't have a real 'professional' look like others do. So hope to hear from someone who has ordered from there before.

Thanks for the little bit of help.
 
Ok, I just got done putting my ATI 9800 pro in my MDD mac this afternoon. :)

First, the card comes the the extra power cable that you will need to hook it up. It plugs into the power cable that feeds your ata/66 drives (the ones under the cd-drives).

The card fits in very securely, infact make sure you push the release tab that holds the back part of the card into the AGP slot when you remove your old one.

I've installed a couple of graphics cards before, and installation is very simple and shouldn't take you long. Just make sure you discharge any possible built up static electricity by grounding yourself (touch something metal like the power supply), before handling any electronic components.

If you haven't bought the card yet, I can save you a little more money. I bought mine from www.buy.com for $293.95. No tax (except maybe in CA), and free shipping.

I ordered mine friday evening, it shipped monday and just got it today.

You should be very happy with this card, it has improved frame rates in all the games I have tried so far, with one exception: Halo, this card for some reason is a lot slower than the GeForce4 Ti that I just replaced. Haven't had any more time to look at this further.

Another problem you may have, the possibility of artifacs in DVD Player under 10.3.3. I did, and followed these directions which solved the problem.

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20040405025640646#DVDPlayerRADEON
 
Thanks for the thorough reply and the even better deal :D

That'll save me about 30 more bucks. Can't wait to play some Unreal 2004 with this baby.

Thanks again.
 
I was about to ask you to wait some weeks with it. The new NVidia 6800 is "out" and outperforms the 9800XT (fastest Radeon) easily and in any test. NVidia announced it will be compatible to macs too..
 
Yes the new nVidia chipset has been announced, and yes they said it supports the OpenGL standard. However it will still be up to Apple to decide if they are going to use these chips in there cards, as no 3rd party manufacturers make nVidia based cards for the mac. :(

I highly doubt that Apple is going to make a card based on the new chip backwards compatible with MDD G4's.

Their current line of cards in the G5, supports the AGP 8x standard, but don't allow for backwards compatibility. There have been articles on the net about modifying the cards to run in a G4, but why go through the hassle especially when you can't buy the cards directly from Apple.

Another thing to keep in mind with the G4's is that the processors themselves become the bottlenecks, not being able to feed enough data to the graphics card, as these new cards become faster.

Besides rumors of an ATI 9800 (XT?) card with 256mb of ram for the mac, I believe that the 9800pro (current model) is the last card we will see for the G4's.
 
It's not just the opengl support that makes the new Nvidia compatible to mac. There is a "Unified Driver Architecture" which allows an easy interagtion to macs and pcs. However, I think such a powerful card will need a G5, as naodx said. I was wondering if the new 6800 is compatible to pci-x.
 
The 9800 pro is fine for me. I know the processor won't get the most out of it - but it's either it or the 9000, which in tests hardly shows any difference between it and the 8500. I may not be able to get the max out of it, but a constant 60 fps or higher is fine with me.
 
Hints:

- Make sure the machine is off AND UNPLUGGED before you put it in, and don't touch the gold connectors on the card.
- I discharge static electricity by touching opening the machine, touching the power supply with the computer pluggged in, and then unplugging the computer.
- Don't move around once you've discharged the static.
- Touch the card by the edges as much as possible.
- If you have a choice, select a slot away from any other cards to avoid possible heat / signal interference issues (however unlikely).
- Rock the card gently but firmly into place. Don't worry too much that it will break, but don't force it. If it's not going in, pull it back out and line it up again.
- You should feel it slide into place.

Have fun!

Doug
 
dktrickey said:
Hints:

- Make sure the machine is off AND UNPLUGGED before you put it in, and don't touch the gold connectors on the card.
- I discharge static electricity by touching opening the machine, touching the power supply with the computer pluggged in, and then unplugging the computer.
- Don't move around once you've discharged the static.
- Touch the card by the edges as much as possible.
- If you have a choice, select a slot away from any other cards to avoid possible heat / signal interference issues (however unlikely).
- Rock the card gently but firmly into place. Don't worry too much that it will break, but don't force it. If it's not going in, pull it back out and line it up again.
- You should feel it slide into place.

Have fun!

Doug
Click to expand...

^ Pretty much just like RAM, I've installed 3 sticks of them ;)
 
Zammy-Sam said:
It's not just the opengl support that makes the new Nvidia compatible to mac. There is a "Unified Driver Architecture" which allows an easy interagtion to macs and pcs. However, I think such a powerful card will need a G5, as naodx said. I was wondering if the new 6800 is compatible to pci-x.
Click to expand...

The Unified Driver Architecture is one driver set for multiple GPUs, not multiple OSes. The driver itself has to be written differently for each OS. Microsoft decided to do things differently from what the ARB group dictates so some OpenGL routines were replaced (glswapbuffers() -> wglswapbuffers(), the one with the "w" is Windows). So generally speaking the OpenGL interface in Windows differs from OSX, Linux, etc. Furthermore the driver is the middleware between the graphics hardware and the OS's display system.

If you've already checked out the GF6 previews/reviews around the web, this beast requires 2 molex power connectors (the ones you'd plug into a hard drive, optical drive) and it consumes 110 watts of power. On a PC, users can (in most cases) swap out the power supply for one with more wattage and ample power connectors, and they have to be independant power cables not from splitters. What worries me is that the idea of Macs being "low power consuming" so Apple would put power supplies with lower wattage into their systems and not really thinking future proof.
 
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