• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Affordable graphics card upgrade options for G4 Cube

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice
If you Google up a review of the actual, official ATI Radeon 7000 Mac Edition you’ll see it has a PCB with an SVideo, DVI, and VGA port filling up the back panel; I remember the PC retail editions looking identical so I guess I’d probably prioritize that one, but alas I have no idea how much the differences matter for flashing. If they worked the low profile Dell OEM cards that used a splitter to break out that weird DVI-ish port you find on those business class machines into two heads might be attractive for a Cube installation? (Compact and it’d make the monitor plugs more accessible.)

I've found a lot of Dell Radeon 7500s but I don't know if they have a ROM large enough to flash Mac firmware onto.
 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
Googling I found this page that lists original and modified ROMs for various Radeon cards. The Mac cards seemed to consistently have 128k flash, the ‘Reduced’ firmwares are 64k. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a ‘reduced’ ROM for the 7500. (7000, yes)


I think Dell did have a low-profile 9000 card too, I wonder if that’s meaningfully better than a 7000 and has any OS 9 support?
 

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice

This is the Dell Radeon 7500 I was talking about, it has VGA and S-video only and 32MB RAM. No idea if it's DDR or SDR, if it's DDR it's probably a decent performer but SDR wouldn't be much better than the stock card.
 

ScutBoy

Well-known member
I'm surprised there are no Apple Radeon 7500 on the 'Bay. They used to be fairly common...
 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
That's not the sub-$100 that OP was looking for but it's not the most exorbitant price for a Cube GF3.

I'm in the middle of messing with a couple R9200s. They're both the low profile variety and I think one may be the SE that they say to avoid but it was like $5 so I bought it anyway. Hopefully one of them works. I still like booting into OS 9 so this seems to be the best option for retaining OS 9 acceleration and also doesn't involve extensive rearranging of the Cube's guts.
 

ru225

Member
Guys will a radeon 7500 ( Mac edition ) work without overheating in a cube ? Or is a fan necessary ?
 

François

Well-known member
It should be fine. That was a popular upgrade back in the day. I had one with the stock heatsink in my Cube for several years, never had a problem.
 

Byrd

Well-known member
Agree if you can put a quiet fan into a relatively hot running vintage computer it’s good insurance. It doesn’t take much airflow to cool things down considerably nearby a hot component.
 
Top