From The Mail and Value Village

[benjgvps]

Today I got the ATi Radeon 7000 that I ordered, the thing is WONDERFUL! I had to take out the PCI Wifi card (Spent $60 on it ) and had to replace it with the USB Wifi stick a friend gave me that I was using with my iMac G3, so no VOIP and internet at the same time anymore. Now for the few things I got at Value Village: USB floppy drive (For the iMac), computer microphone (For PC) and a white and clear USB mouse for my iMac.

Yay!

 

[Quadraman]

I made the switch from nVidia when the 9500/9700 was released and haven't looked back. Those cards romped all over the nVidia FX. I have a X1600 in my fastest PC and a 9500 with the extra pipes unlocked in my second fastest. My laptop has Mobility 9600 graphics and I have a flashed 9700 in my G4. In a PCI Mac a Radeon 7000 gives good performance where nobody would even consider using one in a PC anymore.

 

[TylerEss]

In a PCI Mac a Radeon 7000 gives good performance where nobody would even consider using one in a PC anymore.

And it's a darn shame, too. We only call it "good" performance because it's all relative and we don't have any good cards for PCI PowerMacs. At least they're really cheap to flash. :-D

 

[macintoshman]

Seems you are short on PCI slots.

Back in 04/05, I upgraded a PI 233 to the max. All slots full!

 

[Temetka]

In a PCI Mac a Radeon 7000 gives good performance where nobody would even consider using one in a PC anymore.

And it's a darn shame, too. We only call it "good" performance because it's all relative and we don't have any good cards for PCI PowerMacs. At least they're really cheap to flash. :-D

Half those old PCI Macs couldn't flood a modern GPU on a PCI bus. A GeForce6800 Ultra or ATI X1600Pro would be gasping for data on one of those machines. A Radeon 7000 offers excellent performance, a 'modern' GPU for running most tasks and is a good value. I wouldn't spend over $50 for a graphics card for any PCI Mac that I own.

What I would kill for is an AGP 8X Radeon X1300, 1350, 1600 card for my G5.

 

[Unknown_K]

A Radeon 7000 was a poor 3d card for the PC, so I don't think it would be that great for a mac either. I have a couple Rage 128 cards and for 2D work on B&W machines they are just fine.

 

[Quadraman]

A Radeon 7000 was a poor 3d card for the PC, so I don't think it would be that great for a mac either. I have a couple Rage 128 cards and for 2D work on B&W machines they are just fine.

What sort of heavy duty 3d games or apps do you think will run on a beige PCI Mac that will need more power than a Radeon 7000 has? Don't forget, those Windows PC's are saddled with a bloated OS that eats up a lot of computing power. Look at the Mac configurations on LEM sometime. Macs have always sold with video cards that were below par compared with what you could buy for a PC and managed to get along fine in everything you needed them to do.

 

[Temetka]

A Radeon 7000 was a poor 3d card for the PC, so I don't think it would be that great for a mac either. I have a couple Rage 128 cards and for 2D work on B&W machines they are just fine.

The Rage128 is good, yes.

The Radeon is far superior in texture fill rates, memory bandwidth, GPU speed and so on.

 

[Dan 7.1]

the Radeon 7000 was the crippled re-release version of the original Radeon when the 7500 came out. it was also labeled "Value Edition" and actually performed worse in benchmarks almost universally.

its not a very good card, but it is better than the Rage 128 series so i suppose relative to what else is available, its alright. the best PCI card available for macs is the 9200, which you can get here

 

[Temetka]

I remember seeing the VE Edition, but I also remember seeing the straight 7000 series. Both in retail ATI packaging at Fry's back in the day.

At least we agree: Radeon (any) is better than Rage.

 

[Quadraman]

In a PCI Mac a Radeon 7000 gives good performance where nobody would even consider using one in a PC anymore.

And it's a darn shame, too. We only call it "good" performance because it's all relative and we don't have any good cards for PCI PowerMacs. At least they're really cheap to flash. :-D

I think best you can do is find a PCI nVidia 6200 with 256mb and flash it. ATi's X1300 and X1550 PCI cards don't have a Mac ROM available yet the last I checked in with the flashing community so you can't use those. A 6200 would have to at least be equal to a Radeon 9800 I would guess.

 

[Temetka]

Again, why?

No PCI Mac (minus a heavily upgraded one) could take advantage of everything that card can do.

The only machine I might run that in would be a PCI G4 Tower. Even then I would have to upgrade the CPU, RAM, HD Controller and so on. I still doubt that I'd be able to flood the card. No PCI machine is going to run modern games at any decent FP.

In any PCI Mac I would top at a Radeon 7000 or 8500/9200.

That and nVidia is crap. I went through 2 7800GS's and 3 6800 Ultras. Everytime they died they took my PSU with it. Sure I could get an RMA on the card, but both BFG and PNY refused to do anything about the PSU. 600W Silverstone should be more than enough for that card. Die nVidia, DIE!!!!!

 

[Quadraman]

"Again, why?"

Core Image compatibility if you want to run OS X.

 

[Temetka]

Ehh.

I call bunk on getting decent Core Image support / speed out of a PCI Mac. They are great machines and all, but come on. We are dealing with machines ranging from 33MHz to 66MHz in system bus speeds, most of them hover around 50MH or so (8500's come to mind). Trying to cram PCI Extreme, Core Image, USB / Firewire, SATA or ATA/133 (via add in card, same with USB and Firewire) and run all that through a bus that also has to deal with talking to the CPU, RAM, optical drives, external devices, plus run the OS and Apps is not going to result in decent performance.

On higher end PCI macs such as the 8600/9600, G3's and early (Yikes!) G4's such performance might be possible. I doubt even a super upgraded 7600 could keep pace.

Now I am not saying that over-upgrading machines is a bad thing. I do it all the time, and so do a lot of users here. It's just that from a dollars to performance ratio and factoring in tinker box vs. work box, I wouldn't spend the money on card capable of Core Image over say a Radeon 7000 or even 8500. I would rather spend that money in areas that will have a greater impact on overall system performance such as CPU, RAM, Storage Controller (SATA or ATA/133/100/66), better HD's and so on. In the event that the box was destined to become a dual monitor box, I would buy a card that had 2 outputs. Whether they are VGA or DVI makes no difference as they are easily adapted.

It would seem to me that for an OS X box, trying to round out overall performance should provide a better user experience than focusing on only 1 or 2 areas in this case (CPU, GPU). Having good finder speed or the ability to draw something quickly disappears when waiting for the HD to finish thrashing, or finding out that the slow CPU can't feed the GPU fast enough, thus incurring more bottlenecks.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

The big limiting factor in all this is that unless you're upgrading a B&W G3 or PCI G4, all PCI cards *SHARE* 133 MB/s of bandwidth. 133 MB/s isn't even fast enough for Core Image to run reasonably, much less sharing that with a network card, USB/FireWire card, or ATA-133 or Serial ATA card.

At least the B&W G3 and PCI G4 have a dedicated 66 MHz (266 MB/s) video slot in addition to their 64-bit (shared 266 MB/s between them) slots. In one of those, having a PCI Radeon 9000 plus a Gigabit Ethernet, Serial ATA, and a USB 2.0/FireWire card might be worthwhile. (Especially if you can find a 64-bit PCI Serial ATA or Gigabit Ethernet card.)

BUT, no flashed PC video card is 66 MHz, so you lose half your potential bandwidth by putting a flashed PC video card into a B&W G3 or PCI G4.

I can also attest that the PCI bus itself is a major bottleneck for newer chips. The Radeon X1550 is no screamer, but while it benchmarks decently for the PCI Express or AGP versions, running a PCI version sucks. The onboard GMA 900 video on the computer I have one in is faster for almost everything than the PCI-based X1550. The only reason I even have it in there is to get Aero in Vista. The plus side is that I can turn on 'eye candy' that is purely video memory limited, not video bus bandwidth limited. (Like anti aliasing. PCI bus doesn't make a lick of difference there.)

 

[benjgvps]

I also have to say that ATi support is the best, Its one of the few companies that have actually responded to my questions and gave me something useful.