A Few Months ago I rescued a AGP Sawtooth G4 from the side of the road near where I live. Found it with a 1.5Ghz CPU Upgrade Card and 1GB of Ram. Unfortunately the GPU is the original rage 128 that it came with from the factory. I’m wanting to do a GPU upgrade on it but am not willing to pay the prices that are being charged for them. My friend has a Diamond Viper X800XL that he’s willing to give me. My question is does anyone know if it possible to mac flash this card for EFI support?
Radeon X800XL in PowerMac G4 Sawtooth AGP
- Thread starter EmeraldXB
- Start date
Looks like you might be out of luck with a Sawtooth re: X800s in general (not sure about the Viper X800XL specifically): http://themacelite.wikidot.com/compatibility
Yeah It Seems that isn’t gonna work. He also has a 9600 SE but that ain’t gonna work either. Guess I’m gonna have to keep an eye out for a 9800 as that seems to be my best bet.
If you look up Diamond Viper Radeon x800XL AGP you will see what it looks like though from my research it seems the 9800 is gonna be the best I can run.
I think that the bus speed (100MHz) & 1 GB RAM are going to be your bottlenecks if you want to run Mac OS X 10.4.
I'm even sure if this G4 supports Mac OS 10.5 tbh.
This will make gameplay disagreeable even if you have one of the best Mac OS X AGP cards.
And the Radeon X800XL won't support 3D games in Mac OS X 9.
I'd keep that card for an unloved 1.8 or 2.0Ghz DP PCIX G5. Then it'll be allowed to roar.
Why not look for a Radeon 9000 Pro AGP card and turn the G4 Sawtooth into an excellent Mac OS X 9 machine?
I'd second this. For a Sawtooth it's probably all the performance you can really use (plus they're not too hard to find or crazily priced), with better compatibility than the ostensibly faster cards.
(Although now I think about it I'm not sure I've tried that combo... I'm assuming the 9000 Pro plays nicely with the Sawtooth.
I hope someone here knows for sure?)
I'm not sure whether the X800XL could be flashed. As far as I know, the only official Mac AGP X800/X850 cards are native AGP (R420 core). The X800XL uses a different core (R430) without AGP support, with a PCIe-to-AGP bridge chip.
I've been buying and flashing AGP video cards for G4s for a while. I have a larger pile of good working cards sitting around at this point than I probably should. I could sell you a 9800 Pro or something else if you like; send me a PM.
I've been buying and flashing AGP video cards for G4s for a while. I have a larger pile of good working cards sitting around at this point than I probably should. I could sell you a 9800 Pro or something else if you like; send me a PM.
