Radeon 7000 PCI - is this one mac compatible?

[John8520]

I picked up this PCI Radeon 7000 on ebay this past week for my B&W and so far it's not working in my B&W or QS. https://www.ebay.com/itm/122883099623 

Seller has it listed as G4/G5 compatible.

This is how it shows up in ASP in 9.2.2 on the QS. ASP in OSX shows pretty much the same thing. I don't think this is an extension/driver issue since I can't get into OF or the option boot menu. Reset PRAM, CUDA, all that. Thoughts?

 

[Powerbase]

Most likely they simply never flashed it or flashed it incorrectly.  In either case they didn't seem to have tested it before sending it out the door.

 

[AlpineRaven]

Its 3rd party card, I doubt it hasnt been flashed properly or OSX only?
Have you got a G4 mac to test it?
Cheers

AP

 

[Gorgonops]

Have you got a G4 mac to test it?

Or, to turn it around, do you have a PC with a PCI slot to try it out in and see if it does indeed have the incorrect firmware on it? Looking at the picture in the auction I find it notable that the sticker doesn't say it's a Mac edition; ATI's cards usually do. Also, googling the part number for the card also seems to indicate that it was shipped as a PC edition. Apparently there's something of a cottage industry hacking these cards into Mac cards, but here's a big gotchya: for the cards to really work properly you have to desolder the original flash chip and replace it with a bigger one.

So... yeah, if you have an older PC lying around it seems like it would be worth checking if it goes in that. If it does then you're going to be facing some difficult choices.

 

[Brett B.]

With the "Sapphire" logo on the heatsink, I think you can be 100% sure that it is NOT an original Mac compatible card.  If I remember right, ALL Mac compatible ATI cards made back then were ATI branded, not resold by third parties like Sapphire.  There's nothing wrong with a flashed PC card once it's done correctly (I have a flashed Radeon 9200 in my G3 that works great) but the eBay ad is incredibly misleading.

 

[Gorgonops]

If I remember right, ALL Mac compatible ATI cards made back then were ATI branded, not resold by third parties like Sapphire.

There were also Apple OEM cards that pretty much have no branding on them at all as I recall but can be easily identified as using the same circuit boards as the retail edition cards but missing ports and possibly some stickers. I have a couple of the cards they sold as the "cheap" video option for Xserves, and they're 32MB Radeon 7000s with *only* the VGA port populated. Sort of annoying, actually, given that single-card dual-head was one of the best features of the RV100 chipset.

And yeah, that eBay ad is a joke. Given that it doesn't seem to actually say the card is flashed I kind of wonder if the seller googled a card pulled out of a junk PC and hit one of the pages on a site selling the flashed versions and decided that's what it was.
 

 

[John8520]

Sorry to be so late to responding to this - but I did eventually resolve the issue. Found a 64kB mac ROM, flashed it over, and it works great in OSX. To get it to work in OS9, it really needs 9.2.2 and the 2005 ATI update.

Works great in my B&W and Beige G3. Found another VGA-only Radeon 7000 that I did the same treatment to.