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Power Mac G4 MDD upgrades

Today i bought a used power mac g4 with the following info:

Power Mac G4 1,25GHz (dual)

RAM: 768MB

HDD: 60GB

CD-RW Asus CRW-5232A3

Graphics: nVidia GeForce 4mx 32MB AGP

Mac Os Tiger

what upgrades can i do? i want it especially for games. I want to upgrade the ram to 2gb, put a hard drive with bigger size, maybe a dvd and of course the video card. Can i put a card with 256 video ram? And can i also install Os 9.2?

Thank you

Dimitris

 
It really depends on if you want to preserve OS 9 compatibility or not. Let's assume that you have a FW400 version that is OS 9 compatible and you want to run OS 9 on it also. If you do, then your big league video card options are the Radeon 9000 or the GeForce 4 Ti. The Ti is faster, but the 9000 can be bought in a 256MB VRAM version; I don't believe the Ti 4600 ever came with more than 128MB. I use a 9000 Pro with 256MB VRAM and it works fine in 9.2.2. No other options are fully compatible with OS 9 or are sufficiently performant.

As far as RAM, you might as well put 2GB in it, because RAM is still pretty cheap. Only OS X will see all 2GB; OS 9 will only see 1.5GB (technically it sees all 2GB but the system makes the other 512MB inaccessible).

OS 9 is not picky about internal DVD burners generally. Anything compatible with OS X should work with OS 9 in that respect.

Finally, the MDD can take an Encore/MDX CPU upgrade. Whether this is worth it to you depends on the work you do. I have dual 1.8GHz Sonnet 7447As in my MDD, and it runs like a bat out of hell in Virtual PC under 9.2.2, but CodeWarrior is mostly disk-bound and benefits little, and losing the L3 cache can hurt in some circumstances. It will not be cheap to find one. The 7447 is not compatible with versions of OS X prior to 10.3.5, but it will work with OS 9 with a firmware update (included).

If you only have the FW800 version, it won't boot OS 9. In that case, you can pick anything that works with Tiger. For that model, you might look at a later GeForce AGP, but my choice would be a Radeon 9800, which although it originally came with the AGP G5 should work with the MDD. Also see http://www.barefeats.com/kwik2.html

 
For 10.4, it should "just work."

For OS 9, Apple had them for download somewhere. One of the mirrors might have it. I only have the ATI drivers, since I only use ATI cards in OS 9.

 
I got the GForce Ti 4600 but it has two ports where the one is for vga. Is this the Pc Version that i have? I checked the internet and i saw that the Mac version has an ADC port and a DVI port. The buyer told me that i can also use it on Mac. How can i do that? I connected the card and when i power on the computer i see only black screen.

 
The seller lied, or was mistaken, or left out some crucial information. You need either the Mac version of that card, or you have to flash it with a Mac ROM - if it is one of the flashable ones.

 
After lot of months i decided to take my powermac mdd out of the basement. I had installed more memory back in February - March 2013. Now it has 1768mb of ram. I had also installed mac os 9.2 and it can boot also from there. I checked the system info and it says that it has 1 processor (i thought then that it was dual). I connected the powermac to my tv philips 22" that i have on my bedroom via a dvi to hdmi cable. I would like two things. One thing is to be able to watch movies (especially for my little daughter that loves Barbie movies), not necessarily HD. Will i manage to do my job with the GForce Ti 4600 or ATI Radeon 9000 with 128 or 256mb of ram? Which program should i use (VLC,Quicktime etc)? Now i have nVidia GeForce 4mx 32MB, i used VLC 0.9.10 and 0.8.6 but most movies that i have in an external hard drive (usually avi and mkv files) weren't running correctly (pauses of sound, picture, black picture etc.). Should i get one of the above video cards? Should i upgrade the cpu and should i install mac os leopard? Now i have mac os tiger and mac os 9.2. What about other upgrades (bigger and faster hard drive, dvd drive, airport card etc.). Please note that i want also to continue to be able to boot from Mac OS 9.2 for classic old games.

 
I swear I have bad luck. My 1.33Ghz DP MDD CPU showed up today and I find out my solid AL heatsink doesn't have clearance for the 3rd coil. Now I have to find a different heatsink to use this CPU (which should be a big improvement from a DP 1Ghz).

 
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