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Fastest NuBus Video Card for 68k Macs?

Huxley

Well-known member
Now that I've got a Wicked Fast IIfx, I'm curious - what is/are the fastest NuBus video cards for a 68k Mac? I did a little poking around on Google, but most of the info I saw seemed to relate much more to the early PPC machines...

Just wondering,

Huxley

 

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
However, if you want to go the all-Apple route, the Apple 24*AC card was the best NuBus video card Apple made.

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
The supermac Thunder II, Radius Thunder IV cards are decent. It all depends on what you are going to use the IIfx for. Video cards with DSPs onboard mostly just speed up photoshop, so if you are not a heavy photoshop user a cheap Thunder/24 would be great (and easy to find).

Some Rasterops cards were decent as well.

Apple 24*AC cards are a bit hard to find, and have limitations on what OS they work on.

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
Not sure, since the base card should have quickdraw acceleration anyway I think. Also I don't think the DSPs can do photoshop and quickdraw at the same time (guess that does not matter since the App pretty much locks the system when you are doing DSP work).

I you look at the Thunder II Supermac line the differences between the 3 top models is DSP card addon , RAM onboard, and for the high end one a different monitor connector.

 

TylerEss

Well-known member
Oooh! Use the Apple 8/24 GC, complete with "wicked fast" RISC chip that's faster than the CPU in the IIfx.

If you're whomping System 6 on a IIfx, you might as well go all the way and build the time-realistic top-end config. Whomp Whomp Whomp!

 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
Apple 8/24 GC, complete with "wicked fast" RISC chip
I think the "'wicked fast' RISC chip" those cards use is an AMD 29000 processor... I've got one or two, but one of them has one of those Sun monitor connectors, so I can't really use it.

 

TylerEss

Well-known member
That is probably the only card Apple made that is worth getting. I hear it runs a bit hot.
And it's the card that everyone hated, because it had so many compatibility issues with newer system software releases. I love it because the architecture is so workstation-like: the card actually boots into it's own OS that receives QuickDraw calls from the Mac.

 

SiliconValleyPirate

Well-known member
The Radius Thunder-IV drivers include a QuickDraw accelerator extension that speeds up Quickdraw noticeably. There is a hot-key you can hold down to turn it off and on again. I did it on a IIci with a 040/50 in and it made one HECK of a difference to the speed of screen redraws on the desktop. It made 7.x very usable at 1280x1024 [:D] ]'>

In all my travels around NuBus video cards (I've got a few ya know [;)] ]'>) I've found that a properly setup Thunder IV is hard to beat, especially for Photoshop work.

Actually, although scrticly OT, the video on the 840av is blooming stonkingly quick too, so much so that despite the restricted resolutions (if you want to keep the video overlay working at 24-bit) it was preferable to the Thunder IV (hence why I dropped it in the IIci [:)] ]'> )

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
I have a few Thunder/24 in use, generally a nice card. Not sure if the Spectrum/24 is the same minus the GWORLD SIMM slots.

 
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