Radeon 7000 vs. nVidia Geforce 2MX

[jruschme]

A coworker recently gave me an old Dell P4 desktop that he was going to recycle. It came with an nVidia GeForce2 MX AGP card. I'm considering the idea of trying to flash the card with a Mac ROM and install it in my Sawtooth which currently is running with a flashed Radeon 7000 AGP card.

Just wondering though... Is it worth doing the flash and swap? The 2MX definately has more memory (64mb vs. 32mb) and seems to be a little faster in the benchmarks I've seen, but are there any gotchas?

Anybody else done a swap like this?

Thanks...

 

[MacJunky]

They are both crappy lowend cards.

IIRC the 2MX is at low resolution slightly better than or equal to the plain Radeon (later renamed to 7200) and your 7000 is a bit slower than a normal Radeon.. so I guess you miight consider a GF2MX.

Be way better off with a newer card though.

 

[Byrd]

You'll probably find it easier to flash the Radeon 7000, due to a more standard design, and things like TV-out (if it has it!) should work. The Geforce 2MX will be faster, and things will seem a little smoother, especially Expose, from my experience. It is also a hotter running card. Not all GF2MX cards flash over though.

This site is useful:

http://www.cybercoment.com/macgeforce.htm

JB

 

[MacJunky]

and things like TV-out (if it has it!) should work.

S-video.

 

[Gorgonops]

The GeForce 2MX is a substantially faster card for 3d. The RV100 chipset in the Radeon 7000 is *incredibly* stripped down compared to the "real" Radeon R100/R150 among other things missing hardware T&L entirely. The GeForce 2MX is also stripped down, with only half the pixel pipelines of the "real" GeForce2, but it still has twice as many as the RV100 and retains T&L support. However, the 2MX did come in varying RAM bus configurations, and a really bottom-of-the-barrel card with 32-bit wide SDR might just manage be worse than a "decent" RV100.

As has been noted, both are "budget" cards. Sawtooth G4s usually shipped with Rage 128-based cards and a 7000 is barely faster than that (At least the PCI 7000 in my B&W G4 benchmarks only about 20-30% faster than the stock 128 at Quake timedemos) but it does at least minimally support Quartz Extreme. (Basically it's the same card that shipped in the second-gen 600/700Mhz white iBooks.) The 2MX if it's good one should put you in the same ballpark as the Radeon that was an option for DA G4s, or, of course, match the 2MX that was an option for the Cube. It's totally a personal decision whether a video performance upgrade equal to the difference you'd get from buying a January 2001 machine vs. a July 2000 vintage one is worth the effort of flashing it.

 

[jruschme]

I'm thinking I'll probably go ahead and try to flash the 2MX. At this point, I have no investment in it so, even if I brick it, I'm out nothing.

Assuming it works, any gotchas I should be aware of?

 

[jruschme]

Well, the first attempt has been a qualified failure.

I put the card in a PC and flashed it with no issues. I put it in the Sawtooth and booted. Got the Apple logo, got the blue screen (Tiger) but also got something that looked like video hash where the mouse pointer should be. (It reminds me of configuring X11 on a card which didn't support a hardware cursor.)

Got the desktop, still with the messed up pointer. Now the odd part- the display would randomly switch from the desktop to a blank blue screen.

Thoughts?

I figure I'll try a different ROM image as soon as I dig out a PCI video card for the PC. If nothing else, I *think* I can at least flash back to the PC ROM, if need be.

John

 

[Byrd]

Try another ROM for sure - recall a similar issue with some when I flashed over a few of these. Now that it is partially going, I recall there is a utility that lets you flash the card under OS X, without having to plug it back into your PC.

EDIT: that would be Graphicellerator:

http://thomas.perrier.name/graphiccelerator.html

... you can also adjust GPU clocks and RAM clocks, quite a handy tool to have on hand!

JB