[chief1983]

So, I recently inherited a new Mac from work, I went from a lowly G3 400 to a whopping G4 400.  Don't worry though, I don't plan on running Leopard on that.  I think it's feasible to get a 1GHz upgrade card, and a better video card off Ebay.  I'm debating between the Ati 9800 Pro and the Geforce 6200, I'm wondering which one might be more liked by FS and Leopard both.  If anyone has any tips on trying to run Leopard on hardware this low on the spectrum I'd love to hear them, as well as comments on the Ati vs Nvidia thing.  Don't want to end up having to buy both.

[Echelon9]

One factor to consider is that Apple is progressively moving towards a Nvidia exclusive arrangement with their newer models.

I'm happy to see the back of those Ati x1600 graphics card problems, but we've still got a number of SCP users with that hardware seeing varied problems.

[Zacam]

Both of those are good cards for that hardware, I would be hard pressed myself to pick between them.

Do make sure thought that any 6200 you get is not a TurboCache edition card. This shouldn't be a problem since they should have only been made in PCI-E format, but somebody could have gotten creative. And for the 9800, avoid any VIVO or LE models.

Also, nVidia has the following to say about the 6200:

GeForce 6200 models do not include compression technology

By which they are reffering to the Intellisample 3 tech:

High-resolution compression technology (HCT) increases performance at higher resolutions through advances in compression technology

This shouldn't be an issue though for resolutions of up to 1280x1024. DXT and S3TC are fully supported as ar hardware MPG features.

[Admiral LSD]

I have a 9800 Pro in my G4 (a 733MHz) and as nice a card as it is, it's at a distinct disadvantage in a machine this slow. It's fine for the basic Core Image desktop stuff: Expose, Dashboard, etc but anything more than that just chokes it. It's so CPU limited that the GMA950 in my MacBook which is architecturally inferior in all accounts actually benches faster because it has a metric crapton of grunt behind it. I investigated ways to improve this but I've since come to the conclusion that I'd be far better off just putting the money I'd spend improving this toward something more modern (My research into this indicated I'd pretty much need a G5 before I could get anywhere near what I know this card is capable of but for what used G5s typically go for here you're virtually at a brand new iMac which would spank it even with a weaker GPU so there's no real point persisting with an old PPC machine).

As for Leopard, you'll probably have to hack the installer to get it on there even if you upgrade it to meet the minimum requirements (867MHz, 512MB) since Apple have older machines blacklisted by Identifer. With mine Apple used the same system board across 2-and-a-bit generations of Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio which is what mine is, QuickSilver and QuickSilver 2002) so the Model Identifier isn't blacklisted, only the CPU speed. An OpenFirmware hack to fudge the CPU speed and it was all good. I could use a better CPU and definitely need more RAM but Leo runs OK for the most part.

[chief1983]

Well hopefully I'll have have a 1.7GHz G4, 1.25GB of ram and the 9800 Pro (I plan on trying to flash my own 9800 Pro, anyone have a bios by any chance?).  I think it will run it halfway decently.

[Admiral LSD]

I got mine from The Mac Elite:

http://themacelite.wikidot.com/9800-working

The ROM links there won't work though, you need to grab them from the download page:

http://themacelite.wikidot.com/wikidownloads2

Another thing you have to remember when modifying PC cards is that Apple re-tasked some of the pins on the AGP connector that weren't being used for anything at the time to serve their ADC connection for monitors. Later on, a couple of these pins wound up being used to enable AGP 8X. The net result is a non-G5 (Apple redesigned things so they could have both AGP8X and ADC in the G5s) won't power up if pins 3 and 11 on the AGP card aren't disabled somehow:

http://themacelite.wikidot.com/pins-3-and-11

[chief1983]

Thanks, I knew about the pins but the site everyone linked to roms on (TechPowerUp) didn't seem to actually have one for the AGP 9800 Pro Mac version, or at least I couldn't be sure any of them were the mac version.

Edit:  According to that last page, the original G4 (Sawtooth) isn't on the list, and it's the one I have.  Apparently it's not compatible with ADC and I won't have to disable the pins?

[Admiral LSD]

Yeah, it's only the ADC machines that need the pin-mod. Non-ADC machines didn't use the pins for anything so don't need any modifications to the card. You only have AGP 2X in that system but that shouldn't be a problem, the Radeons adapt to all the usual AGP voltages and you probably won't be shuttling enough data into it to really worry 2X.

[chief1983]

This is the only wierd thing I noticed so far.  When I put the 9800 and a PCI card (I think it was a Rage) in, OS X didn't finish loading.  It got to the blue screen with the mouse, and never actually pulled up my login prompt.  I'm hoping it's just something that will be corrected when I flash the card in a PC, but I didn't read anything about that happening in any of the documentation I read on flashing the card while in a Mac.  If not, they seem to have a Geforce 4 Titanium ROM too, and I happen to have a GF4 Ti4200 I might be able to use it on.